Sunday, August 27, 2006

pam-login (is blocking sys-apps/shadow-4.0.15-r2)

After doing an “emerge –puD world” on my Gentoo box, the following error appeared and wouldn’t let me update my system: sys-apps/pam-login (is blocking sys-apps/shadow-4.0.14-r2)

So I searched the internet and tried a few things and found this solution, that seemed to help a lot of people:

emerge –buildpkgonly –nodeps shadow && emerge -C pam-login && emerge –usepkgonly shadow

After executing the above, my system was ready to go again. Hope this one helps a few people.

For more info on the above topic do check out the gentoo forums.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

CPU Naming schemes

Generally people always have a confusion regarding the nomenclature of CPU architectures , hence here I have tried to clear sum of those doubts her in this blog.

The X86 processors started with the Intel 8086 processor way back in 1978. Intel released the Intel 386 (i386) in 1980. That was then followed by he 486 (i486), the Pentium (i586), and the Pentium Pro/2/3/4 (i686). At the same time, rival AMD released their Athlon/Duron/T-bird (also i686). So irrespective of the fact whether you have a P4 machine or an AMD athlon they have the same architecture as i686.

The Pentium Celeron is also an X86 processor. The difference between a Pentium/Celeron and an Athlon/Duron or Athlon/Sempron is that Pentium and Athlon are the top-performing, more expensive models whereas the Celeron/Duron/Sempron are cheaper, less powerful chips. They are not a different architecture however.

Since all these processors were based on the same architecture (basically they read/wrote 1's and 0's in the same way), and their names all contained "86", the whole family was collectively called "X86". All the X86 processors including and after the 386 are 32-bit.

The recent trend has been to move toward 64-bit processors, and several different architectures popped up. DEC's Alpha and Motorola's PPC chips have been 64-bit for a while, but Intel's Itanium and Xeon and AMD's Athlon64 are the new kids on the block.

The difference between the Itanium (IA64) and PowerPC (PPC) versus the Athlon64 is that the Itanium and PPC have completely different architectures (they speak different 1 and 0 languages), whereas the Athlon64 speaks the same language as the 32-bit X86 processors, but adds 64-bit memory registers. Therefore the name of the Athlon64 in generic terms is "X86_64".

Intel, not to be outdone, has since redesigned its 64-bit Xeon processors to use the same kind of architecture as the Athlon64, calling it "Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology" (EM64T). Basically they couldn't say they copied AMD without being laughed at in irony (since AMD got its start by simply copying Intel's chips). Both the AMD64 and the Intel EM64T processors are collectively called "X86_64".

Hope this clears the confusion for most of you . in case you stll lingering with the thoughts of what the hell went on ...then dude just chill out have a coffeee and dump your computer in sea.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Debian 4.0

Great news for all Debian lovers, the Debian project confirms December 2006 as the date for the next release of its distribution which will be named

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch'
. This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture. The distribution will be released synchronously for 11 architectures in total.

At this stage, the upcoming release will ship with Linux 2.6.17 as its default kernel. This kernel will be used across all architectures and on the installer. A later version may be selected during a review in October.

New features of this release include the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler. X.Org will replace XFree86 as implementation of the X Window System X11. Secure APT will add extra security by easily supporting strong cryptography and digital signatures to validate downloaded packages.