This past weekend, I completed the construction of my new death star. At its heart is a pentium 4 dual core processor, which I am *itching* to take for a spin with “ROOT”:http://root.cern.ch and g++ – in particular, I want to clock a cold build of ROOT. To do anything fun with this machine, I need to have a proper operating system. This beauty is a virtual 64-bit machine, and should tear up the skies once it’s fully operational.
Windows 64-bit is unacceptable, of course. It has a long and pockmarked history. I’d have better luck with Vista, which is due out in 2007. Or has it slipped to 2008 again? I just can’t keep track of that mess.
No, this beauty is powered by LINUX. My usual poison is Fedora Core, the community supported Redhat Linux. I popped that sucker into the DVD drive and got reay to boot the installation disk. WITNESS THE POWER OF THIS COMPLETE AND FULLY OPERATIONAL BATTLE STA . . .
BUG: spinlock recursion on CPU#0
WTF?! WTF?! Spinlock recursion?! To paraphrase a famous blonde acress in a recent HDTV ad: “Spinlock recursion. I don’t know what that means, but I want it.” Well, I don’t want it, because it prevents this beautiful homebuilt machine from purring. Grrr. Instead, I tried Knoppix, which is based on the same kernel series as Fedora Core but uses the Debian package base. That booted fine. In fact, many different releases of Knoppix booted fine. I also tried Ubuntu linux. “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ is a recent addition to the linux scene, built on Debian but super user friendly.
So, I files a bug report with Redhat (“https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=216374”:https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=216374).
I did my civic duty, and now I wait for help. But waiting for help doesn’t mean helpless. I installed Kubuntu, the KDE-flavored Ubuntu linux, and was up and running in under an hour. I installed all the software I needed, and am now blogging from my Ubunutu-powered Intel Pentium D machine. Now witness the power of this fully operational battle sta . . .
Oooh, “amarok”:http://amarok.kde.org/.
