[Tue Nov 19 15:27:35 CST 2019]

I have spent more time than I should trying to figure out how to remove a blank screen on an Android phone. So much for a user-friendly interface, huh? {link to this entry}

[Tue Nov 5 14:15:53 CST 2019]

I recently started a project to install Gentoo Linux on a QEMU virtual machine just as a way to learn something new and, shortly after starting the process, I ran into a minor obstacle. For whatever reason, when installing the base system, I kept seeing a "no space left on device" error that prevented me from continuing with the install. Yet, the root partition had plenty of available space. In the end, I found the solution in this forum (check the comment added by user i92guboj with timestamp Mon Aug 27, 2007 3:56 am). As it turned out, I had misread a previous page of the handbook where it recommended running the following command to create the root file system:

# mkfs.ext4 -T small /dev/sda4

Now, to be fair, I'm still convinced that the handbook sort of writes about it as if the -T small is optional, but the fact is that I ran into issue for non using it. The option just creates the file system with far many more inodes, which are needed by the large amount of files used in Gentoo's portage system. {link to this entry}

[Fri Nov 1 11:08:21 CDT 2019]

Just a quick note about the QEMU open source emulator that I wasn't aware of. By default, when one tries to ping any host, it won't work. As I learned here, QEMU disables the ICMP protocol when running user-mode networking. However, commands such as curl or wget will work anyways. In other words, the network will work. Also, related to QEMU, here is a good (and short) document comparing gcow2 and raw image format and, finally, another one on converting from raw image format to qcow2. {link to this entry}