The Lao Monks and Lao people

A Lao Monk putting a string around a Lao girl's wrist for charms and good luck

BARS Students on BARS Family Day at the National Ethnic Village in Yangon (Picture Courtesy of Elizabeth)

Valentine Rose for ???

Hey, Happy Valentine's Day to all of you!!!!!!!! And to somebody out there :-) :-) I stayed home on Valentine since I had no Valentine :-) Take care and God bless! Love u all!

God so loVed the world,
That He gAve
His onLy
BegottEn
SoN
That whosever
Believeth In Him
Should Not perish,
But have Everlasting life.'

John 3:16

I tried to visit www.bagan.net.mm yesterday and couldn't visit the web site. The web site seems to have some ASP script errors. It has been like that for almost 2 months since I got out of Burma. I took the screen-shot with GIMP 2.0.4 using Gentoo 2004.3 complied with Kernel 2.4.28-gentoo-r5.

I just found out that BaganNet (www.bagan.net.mm) was accessible from within Burma. Here is a screen-shot sent from Burma. It's just not accessible from outside Burma. I guess it's the programming error partly caused by the firewall rules when trying to access the database in /acclog.asp file :-) Too bad :-) Those of us trying to access the website from outside of Burma just have a bad luck.

Gentoo Linux Experiences

I downloaded Gentoo 2004.3 from http://www.gentoo.org. I chose the Minimal CD image. I installed it on my test machine at work. It was a fun project.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml

Here is what I did if you are curious

// partitioning my hard disk
# fdisk /dev/hda5


//formating and creating file system
# mke2fs /dev/hda5


//mounting the disk
# mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/gentoo


// creating a directory to install Gentoo

# mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot

//downloading stage tarball by going to gentoo mirrors
# cd /mnt/gentoo
# links2 http://www.gentoo.org

//unpacking the stage3 tarball
# tar -xvjpf stage?-*.tar.bz2


//download portage
# links2 http://www.gentoo.org
# tar -xvjf /mnt/gentoo/portage-20041202.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr


//Check make.conf for Mirror info

# nano -w /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

# mirrorselect -a -s4 -o |grep 'GENTOO_MIRRORS=' >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

//copy DNS info for your network
# cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf

//mounting proc file system
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

// changing to new environment
# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

// we will create a new environment using env-update, which essentially creates environment variables
# env-update
 * Caching service dependencies...

// load those variables into memory
# source /etc/profile

// Updating the Portage tree
# emerge --sync

// Viewing available USE flags
# less /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc

# nano /etc/make.conf
USE="gtk gnome qt kde alsa"

// Activate the userlocales USE flag especially for glibc
# mkdir /etc/portage
# echo "sys-libs/glibc userlocales" >> /etc/portage/package.use

# nano /etc/locales.build
en_US/ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8

# ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
(Suppose you want to use GMT)
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime

// Installing a kernel source
# emerge gentoo-sources

// Invoking menuconfig
# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

// compiling Kernel
# make dep && make bzImage modules modules_install

// Installing the kernel
# cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.4.28-gentoo-r5
# cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.28-gentoo-r5

// Backing up your kernel configuration
# cp .config /boot/config-2.4.28-gentoo-r5

# echo tux > /etc/hostname

# echo xxx.xxx.com > /etc/nisdomainname

# rc-update add domainname default

# nano -w /etc/conf.d/net
(For DHCP)
iface_eth0="dhcp"

// Adding net.eth0 to the default runlevel
# rc-update add net.eth0 default

// Installing a system logger
# emerge sysklogd
# rc-update add sysklogd default

// installing dhcpcd
# emerge dhcpcd

# emerge xfsprogs
# emerge reiserfsprogs
# emerge jfsutils

// installing hotplug
# emerge hotplug
# rc-update add hotplug default

// i had to issue modprobe for my NIC because after reboot, it won't detect the network card
# modprobe sis900

I manually added sis900 (module for my NIC) to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4 and i810_audio , too.

 GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org"

 # emerge xfce 
# env-update
# source /etc/profile
# startxfce


// installing Firefox
# emerge mozilla-firefox