* a premiere: this early morning, i’ve made a linux kernel patch for the first time (not counting mixing/editing others’ kernel patches etc. ;) as ingo asked me to fix the minor devfs issues with his exec-shield patch myself. admittely it’s a very tiny one and i probably couldn’t have done it if ingo didn’t tell me it was a matter of changed field names only. nevertheless it was a very cool experience. dealing with the kernel is just magic :) the funky thing is that i’ve done this all on the box which has just served you this page – i bet nobody noticed anything of me compiling kernels in the background :) currently i’m running 2.4.22-ac1 with exec-shield-2.4.22-ac1-nptl-D4. i will merge in new patches as available.. need to get some more kernel books and stuff.
* i’ve just learned that toshiba is selling now an all-in-one wlan hotspot box built on gentoo. brave move. i wonder how they circumvent gentoo’s rare but still existing and sometimes very annoying quality assurance troubles (critical bugs, blockers and such). a year ago, i’ve been thinking about an all-in-one-barebone with pre-installed gentoo too, but for soho use only (file repository, application server, mail server, dbms, router, fw etc.). later i’ve bought my current lex barebone to do some prototyping. all in all i think gentoo would be suitable for such a thing, if there just weren’t these darn qa issues gentoo struggles with. regarding the hw, i probably wouldn’t use a lex barebone. as an advantage it has a small price tag, but the two fatal hard disk failures (two different brands) i’ve experienced so far (within about 9 months) make me conclude that the lex engineers probably didn’t test their product thoroughly (both hdd died of overheating). for me it’s not that much of a problem (living at the bleeding edge i’m almost used to failures), but for shipping it to customers it’s way too risky and costly.