» Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 20

Yes, those are ads.

Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 20, 2006, 7:00 pm

I added a small Google AdWords block to the top-right of the wiki. I did this because 1) the extra money would be nice, and 2) I had an AdWords account sitting idle. It seems to blend in well and should be relatively unintrusive, but if you have any suggestions, let me know. Today's Earnings: $0.32 Woo! I'm almost up to a free stamp!

If you are interested in doing something similar on your MediaWiki site, I wrote a short blurb about how I did it.

(Ironically, most of the ads I've seen so far has been for Knoppix and Xandros.)

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Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 18

Disappearing CDs

Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 18, 2006, 7:53 pm

I have found that Finnix CDs tend to disappear slower at work when they are of the the "300dpi full color" variety, as opposed to the "$.10 CDR with sharpie" variety.

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Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 18

Finnix 86.2 on Linode

Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 18, 2006, 10:06 am

The 86.2 update has been successfully tested on Linode, and I've been told it should be deployed to all hosts this evening. With 86.2, UML/Xen detection is now automatic, and you no longer need the "uml" or "xen" boot parameter (though it doesn't hurt anything if you leave it in).

If you are a UML/Xen provider, and want to offer Finnix as a recovery/sysadmin distribution, see this page, or drop me a line (ryan@finnie.org) and I can help you get it integrated with your platform.

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Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Nov 26

Memory Errors

Posted by Ryan Finnie on November 26, 2005, 2:11 pm

Despite having a mac mini, I'm still doing Finnix development on the graphite G4. It's been very stable, up until last night, when I was compiling the latest and greatest kernel, I got the occasional failure like so:

CC drivers/pci/probe.o
include/asm/processor.h: In function 'pci_scan_child_bus':
include/asm/processor.h:186: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See  for instructions.
For Debian GNU/Linux specific bug reporting instructions,
see .
make[2]: *** [drivers/pci/probe.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [drivers/pci] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

But upon, resuming the compile, the failed object would compile successfully. This happened several times, which suggested bad memory. I slept on it, and this morning, tried again:

CC [M] drivers/usb/misc/idmouse.o
fixdep: inclu`e/asm-generic/local.h: No such file or directory
make[3]: *** [drivers/usb/misc/idmouse.o] Error 2
make[2]: *** [drivers/usb/misc] Error 2
make[1]: *** [drivers/usb] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

"inclu`e"? Yep, that's bad ram. Too bad there's no memtestppc. I'll have to swap it out into a PC to test.