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I found that Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and undoubtedly other browsers weren’t making the background gradient (the cool white-to-gray pattern) look correct from the style I was trying. For whatever reason, they made the square around the pen image more obvious; I tried playing with the background-* settings, and changing gradient.gif to gradient.jpg (expecting issues around GIF patents), but no change. So now we’re trying Jaws pattern from the same style contest. Early morning silliness.

Nope, konqueror hadn’t shaken off its headache when I looked this morning, so I get to try to recreate the story from (my) memory later.

Three time now in the last two days, I’ve written a story for my blog and because of some random kestroke the KDE browser Konqueror goes running happily into an infinite loop, never to return. This most recent loss was sharing a great time I had with our 2 year-old son before dinner. Time to either download and build the latest KDE to see if it’s improved, or just stick with Mozilla Firefox and stop trying to settle with the default. It’s too frustrating to find myself trying to type a Euro symbol (Compose + ‘=’ + ‘e’) or hit Compose & another letter, only to find the browser oblivious and unretrievable.

I suppose I could make the KDE window manager no longer understand the Compose key, but that would force me to revert to doing a Copy & Paste to type a Euro symbol, a character I actually need every few days. Bleah. Fine, I’ll let Konqueror spend the night with its own interests and see if what I was writing is miraculously still there in the morning. Nighty night.

I’m giving the artistic efforts of others a try. Today, it’s a slightly tweaked copy of Hadley Wickham’s great entry entiltled Rubric in Alex King’s style contest.

Now that I got the hardware working, I had to install the systems with a properly configured operating system. The problem is this system has neither floppy or CDROM drive. It does, however, have PXE network cards. I boot the system onto a Debian Sarge nfs root partition. Here is a summary af what I did after that:

1. Load the ide-detect module to find the ATA drives. Partition the drives, don’t forget swap.
2. Use mkswap to prepare your swap partition, and mkfs to make the file systems.
3. Mount all the partitions someplace like they will be mounted, I used /mnt. Mounting /proc files system can be useful too.
4. Use Debian’s debootstrap command to install packages where you mounted the partitions.
5. Use the chroot command and change to where you just installed the packages.
6. Edit the /etc/hosts file, /proc/mounts is a good start. Don’t forget swap.
7. Edit and create other files: /etc/apt/sources.list, /etc/hosts, /etc/kernel-img.conf, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/hostname.
8. Use apt-get and install a kernel, I installed resolvconf too and put resolver configuration in the /etc/network/interfaces file.
9. Install GRUB, create the /boot/grub directory. Run the update-grub command.
10. Follow directions in the Installation section of the GRUB manual, to install GRUB on the boot drive.
11. Use passwd to set the root password.
12. Reboot, make sure you are not booting PXE though.

After it comes up, set the time zone. Continue to configure normally.

The SATA cables with the 90° jack on one end came in today. Once again I can close the case on this system. Now to just convince the boss that to do the same to the other eleven systems.

My TX4 saga continued last week. Just a minor addition I put in for completeness sake. Don and I ordered SATA cables with 90° ends. Hopefully the case will be able to be closed with these cables, and hopefully they where approved to be purchased.

Last Friday the cable guy came to downgrade our channel count, and upgrade our resolution. A few years ago, when we first moved into our house, the cable company was AT&T, within a few weeks it changed to Comcast. It made it hell getting cable as nobody at Comcast knew my area was now Comcast,but I was finally forwarded to the correct place. Now the issue arises that my area is still running the old AT&T hardware, and Comcast does not buy parts for this old hardware. So I’m stuck getting all the extended basic channels and the limited basic price. Woe is me.

I have added insight to my TX4 card issues. I plug them into the riser card and they seem to work, but after a few minutes the system freezes up. I plug them directly into the board and all works well, but I then can’t close the 2U case. Don and I tried a different riser card, same problems. I spent hours yesterday looking for a riser card with no electronics, but simply plugs into two 32-bit PCI ports, but none seem to exist. Computers suck.

In my unsuccessful effort to get two Promise SATA150 cards working, I choose to try it with only one card. All works well with one card. No reply from the driver maintainer, must be a busy man, that or he is ignoring me.

My Promise SATA150™ TX4 cards came in yesterday. After getting them both working in a system I started using them with Debian’s kernel, it got an ata8: DMA timeout error and froze. I upgraded to the 2.6.9-rc1 kernel, not it gets ata4: command timeout errors and freezes. I popped off an email to the maintainer, hopefully he will have an idea.