If you’ve ever run into a dreaded configure problem such as C compiler cannot create executables, and gotten lost in a tangle of glibc/cc/g++ packages, you might find that building source rpms using Mock turns a multi-step process into a breezy single step. Build source rpms using mock which builds inside a chroot. This lets you compile 32-bit on 64-bit without a problem. Check out mock configurations in etc. You may have preconfigured configurations for your Linux distribution.

The problem is staring you right in the face! If you’re trying to build Chromium OS from behind an Internet proxy, you’re going to struggle with make_chroot.sh. You need to set them up within the chroot, and that means setting them in the user’s profile script that gets sourced.

You used to be able to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and assign a variable there, but not anymore. Set the http_proxy environment variable to your proxy and put it in your bashrc to make this setting persistent.

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.

You can do this globally for everyone, or just for yourself. There’s a hidden directory called “.subversion” in your home directory. Edit the servers file. Everything should be self explanatory. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find a global section. The proxy settings in there should cover it…

I found the easiest way to get all the dependencies out of the way was to attempt to install Fedora’s oprofile, oprofile-devel, and oprofile-gui through YUM. But instead of installing them, just find out their dependencies and install those.

You may find that grub is pretty useless when your menu.lst is missing or misconfigured. It’s not easy to figure out how to make grub tell you where the files are that you need. Here’s how to find what you need in order to boot, just using the grub bootloader.