modprobe vboxdrv
FATAL: Module vboxdrv not found.

Although some may see this as a simple resolve after upgrading VirtualBox; for some reason, it wasn’t that obvious to me until I found the problem. If you upgrade your kernel, you need to make sure that your applications that require non-standard kernel modules are updated as well. In this case, I had to re-emerge virtualbox-modules and then I was able to modprobe vboxdrv as the kernel modules were now installed into the new kernel.

I recently tried switching my small business to a new hosting company, Neosurge. I hadn’t read any reviews other than the promotional advertisements that looked to be generated by Neosurge solutions themselves. As there were no negative reviews and the domain had been active under the same owner for a few years, I figured it well worth the try.

So as I mentioned in previous posts, I use Gentoo as the distro on my primary desktop system. Recently, I was having some portage compiling conflicts so I decided to re-emerge most of my package to make sure package dependancies were all in sync and that the USE flags were considered for deep dependancies that needed them. It takes a while to perform this task, so make sure that you have some available downtime to resolve any bugs and issues.

The biggest frustration I had during this process was with libX11 as there was limited documentation on the issue I had experienced. Here was the focus of the error:

cd util && /usr/bin/make
make: Entering directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src/util’
make: Nothing to be done for `all’.
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src/util’
../src/util/makekeys < /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h > ks_tables_h
/bin/sh: line 1: 3530 Floating point exception../src/util/makekeys <
/usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h > ks_tables_h
make Error 136
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/libX11-1.1.5/src’

Well, there are two points that interested me in this error, the “Floating Point Exception” as well as the Error 136. Neither of which provided much assistance in the google searching. I finally found a bug report through following link after link. hopefully this article helps you to find the root of your issue faster: Bug Zilla Error 15111

Ultimately, you need to check the version of xproto that you have installed. By masking 7.0.15 and re-emerging 7.0.14, I was able to resume the emerge without any remaining libX11 errors.

So I recently switched my linux flavor to Gentoo on my laptop. It takes a couple days, but has proven to be well worth it. Although that’s not the topic of this post, it should be understood that the following instructions are based on a Gentroo distro. These instructions can be tweaked to get this working in other distros as well.

There are a couple apps involved: cowsay, and fortune-mod. The fortune-mod app is a simple app that outputs fortunes, there are a number of plugins (I installed them all, but you can choose to emerge particular ones, as desired.

The cowsay app is a simple ascii cow that has a comment bubble allowing you to specify the text the cow should say. It has some customizeable features such as the eyes and the tongue.

The following instructions will get your ascii cow to output a fortune from the fortune-mod library.

First, you need to emerge these packages (the fortune-mod-all package is optional, although you need a fortune list, this pulls them all in:

emerge -av cowsay fortune-mod fortune-mod-all

Now you can output a cowsay fortune:

cowsay `fortune`

I took this a level further and added the preceeding to the last line in my .bashrc file, which has a random fortune popup on every terminal/console session entry.

It’s a lot of fun and a simple install. Have fun!!

So I’ve been using Linux for the past couple of years. By no means am I an expert on the varying flavors nor do I think that there is one that is better than others for all circumstances. I think this is a healthy forum for discussion and I’m always open to input from the community.

First of all, I’ll list the flavors I’ve used. With that in mind, you’ll notice that I haven’t used all of the distros. My experience is from my limited exposure to those I have used. Keep in mind, my goal was to provide the best development environment for my laptop with my level of experience.