My OperaBad sectors
Thursday, February 14, 2008 4:50:00 PM
I have wondered some time why my computer seems to run out of memory. Computer crashed but hard drive was still active, just like when you run out of memory. I should have cheked if my computer had some log about that. I found that there was some sucpicious lines in logs what indicated that my hard drive was failing. Samsungs diagnostic program confirmed that there was some bad sectors in my samsung hard drive. Oh well, that drive is quite old and there is no warranty any more.
I did come to conclusion that maybe the best way to handle this is to install new and fresh operating system and not to try copy the old one to my another drive. I have anyway thought that I could change my ubuntu to more effecient os. Ubuntu uses quite much resourses compared to many other distros and it shows on my computer slightly. I did come to conclusion that my distro is from now on gentoo:)
It's quite hardcore to use compared to most of distros but it has some advances like more optimized code. Of course normal gcc optimization doesn't count much on the speed but with gentoo you can optimize programs to run faster leaving unnecessary supports behind and optimize with -Os flag that optimizes the code smaller.
Installation was not very hard but it was time consuming because the gui did crash on some error. I decided that it takes more time to start repairing that bug than to install without any installer. I have done gentoo installation without gui before in qemu(virtual machine) and it was actually not very hard but it took some time and patience to read the installation manual throught same time with installation. With live cd it was much more enjoyable procedure when I could use internet with more sophisticated browser than links or lynx. I did mess up something with grub but I solved the problem, still somehow devices.map file indicates differently drives than what the grub really wants.
Oh there was problem with running Xorg with live cd. Somehow xorg didn't regonize my very old ati radeon card, but vesa did save me.
Gentoo is not definetly for linux newbies, at least install and maintaining might need a bit more experiensed person. But it does have very good documentation so, maintainer doesn't have to be linux guru. I would recommend this for those who doesn't see problem with learning more about how os is working. newbies would propably get system up and running with those documentations but it could be very frustrating. So basic linux understanding is needed at least and with that I mean that user knows how to use basic shell commands and have done some manual configuration by hand with shell editor.
I did come to conclusion that maybe the best way to handle this is to install new and fresh operating system and not to try copy the old one to my another drive. I have anyway thought that I could change my ubuntu to more effecient os. Ubuntu uses quite much resourses compared to many other distros and it shows on my computer slightly. I did come to conclusion that my distro is from now on gentoo:)
It's quite hardcore to use compared to most of distros but it has some advances like more optimized code. Of course normal gcc optimization doesn't count much on the speed but with gentoo you can optimize programs to run faster leaving unnecessary supports behind and optimize with -Os flag that optimizes the code smaller.
Installation was not very hard but it was time consuming because the gui did crash on some error. I decided that it takes more time to start repairing that bug than to install without any installer. I have done gentoo installation without gui before in qemu(virtual machine) and it was actually not very hard but it took some time and patience to read the installation manual throught same time with installation. With live cd it was much more enjoyable procedure when I could use internet with more sophisticated browser than links or lynx. I did mess up something with grub but I solved the problem, still somehow devices.map file indicates differently drives than what the grub really wants.
Oh there was problem with running Xorg with live cd. Somehow xorg didn't regonize my very old ati radeon card, but vesa did save me.
Gentoo is not definetly for linux newbies, at least install and maintaining might need a bit more experiensed person. But it does have very good documentation so, maintainer doesn't have to be linux guru. I would recommend this for those who doesn't see problem with learning more about how os is working. newbies would propably get system up and running with those documentations but it could be very frustrating. So basic linux understanding is needed at least and with that I mean that user knows how to use basic shell commands and have done some manual configuration by hand with shell editor.
