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.

So recently, I was tasked with reinstalling windows on all of our spare PCs in the office. A few were some of our tech guys computers (some of which had linux on them). Most of the processes went as expected with the exception of the linux to windows conversion. After researching, I found there was an error/incompatibility with the Master Boot Record that Windows could not resolve, causing the screen to boot to blank after the “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration” prompt stating the CD was checking the hardware.

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!!