Goal: to use nntp//rss as an RSS aggregator, using either Blackdown JDK/JRE 1.4.1 or Sun SDK/JRE 1.4.2. The main problem here comes in running the actual NNTP server. Normal users do not have access to the ports in use by the app. My initial thought was to create a script that could be executed from /etc/init.d as a daemon via the rc-update command. Alas, this wasn’t as simple as I hoped, and was abandoned. The final solution was to perform a chmod a+s on both nntprss-start.jar and nntprss.jar, and to edit the nntprss-config.xml file to use a port larger than 1024. Something like 1199 instead of 119. The chmod command…

Attempting to install Maple 8 has left me frustrated beyond belief. The GUI installation proceeds smoothly, accepts the Rose-Hulman FLEXlm server, and says it completes successfully. However, there are no files place in the installation directory other than those in the “bin” directory (shell scripts that point to the actual binaries). No binaries are installed, however. The FLEMlm manager isn’t installed, either. None of the bin.IBM_INTEL_LINUX (?) or flexlm or jre directories are even created. So I have no working Maple. Going through the installation manually has led me to believe that either the installer requires positive feedback from the FLEMlm server before compiles/creating the binaries, or the installer binaries…

In setting up the Samba Client, you need to emerge samba. That will install the server, which isn’t needed for just browsing and mounting remote shares, but it will also install the client apps, which are needed. In addition, make sure smbfs is either compiled into your kernel or compiled as a module. After the emerge, I followed the steps in this particular section of the SMB-Howto guide to make sure I could surf the Samba host and knew the paths of the locations I wanted to mount. I then followed the suggestions in this forum posting to create my fstab entries and my credentials file. I personally automount my…

In order to setup XFree 4.3, I made sure to execute the command “VIDEO_CARDS=”radeon” emerge xfree-drm” to install support for the Radeon card in the laptop, then I emerge’d XFree. Then I read a novel. And started another one. In configuring XFree, I used the configuration file at henrik.org when running xf86config. I later had to edit the configuration file to get my USB mouse to work, and the linked configuration file reflects that, but the resolution and monitor setting are what I set in xf86config to enable me to run 1600 x 1200 resolution in XFree.