As nice as NetworkManager is, if it doesn't work you might have some fun. This time I had the problem that my hostname was constantly set to localhost.localdomain. As my laptops name is tom, I wanted to have it this way. Adding the parameters to the /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf did not help. The solution to this problem is presented here: Just downgrade dbus from 1.2.3 to 1.2.1, restart dbus, upgrade dbus 1.2.3 again, restart dbus. done. Don't ask me why it works. I didn't have the time to dig into the problem. But this solves the problem. At least it did for me.

One of the things you can try is running emerge --sync and emerge -uDavN world on the train. But i suggest to do this if you either take a long train ride or take the train on a regular basis. In any other case, you will probably never finish your 12mb download at an average speed of 3kb/s. At least if too many people share the gprs in the train. In the morning it works quite nicely with 15-20kb/s download. If case you take regular train rides in to morning, this is a good time to update your system.

I played around with Networkmanager again today. It's doing is job very nice in its everyday task like connecting me to the university network. It doesn't require and unmasking anymore, which is very nice.

Today I decided I want to use the openvpn-plugin for NetworkManager so don't have to get get a root shell every time I want to send a mail. I need to connect to the vpn to reach my smtp port. Using the correct settings allows me to send mails. The only remaining problem is that it always replace my dns-servers, so once I connect to my vpn I have no dns anymore. But i haven't checked why that happens. Maybe I will figure out sooner or later. Or I will just install a dns server on my box.

After some time just trying to figure out what is actually wrong and upgrading and downgrading again is started working again. I just don't know what it was. I also installed knetworkmanager now with proper useflags (cisco, openvpn) so I can connect to the networks easily when required.

As posted before, it caused some trouble updating the system. As I only used wired networking during the last days in Ronneby, I didn't try my wireless network. So I now try to get I running again. I will report how I got it working again here later.

I use NetworkManager under gentoo to manage my connections, which in general really works pretty fine. I can change connection, connect and disconnect from vpn without the need of login in as root, etc. So far so good.

Everything was working fine until i decided to update my system from dhcp 3.0.6 to 3.1.0 which was marked stable. Not a really big change I thought, but somehow it screwed up everything: NetworkManager doesn't like dhcp 3.1.0 yet. Hopefully it will in the future. Instead it fails with some strange messages of dhcp exiting with state 14. Then it will try to use zeroconf to configure your network, which will probably not work again because I think there was not system handing out proper information. It would be nice to see if would work if would be working. But in any case NetworkManager somehow sets a 169... address on your network interface and tells you that you have a configured network. The biggest issue imho is that for normal user its doesn't give any sense.

The only way to fix it is to revert back to 3.0.6. Maybe I have to time to figure what acutally goes wrong. Anyway, this bug is documented on the gentoo-wiki entry about NetworkManager

For those who know me know that I have a weakness for I don't have any special brand, they all taste the same, but before you eat them u have to take them apart, which will result in

once you reach pro level cookie eater.

The only thing you should not do: Put them next to your laptop fan while you compile Gentoo. It will ruin your cookies and you cant take them apart anymore.

And at any time, remember to only temporary accept those cookies. Otherwise you will have to readjust your layout. ;-)

Since debian decided to change some locations of the xorg-libs its not possible to install the nvidia-driver by

running the installer and the current archives don't contain a suitable version of the driver anymore

for my rather old geforce2 go powering my laptop I looked for a new distro. Since I use gentoo on all my other systems, I will

give it a try. Lets see what happens. The best would be to get my external screen working again. I hate booting winxp just for some presentation

I think the p3 900Mhz will surely need some time to compile the system, but since I write my thesis, that doesn't matter. I have no time to play around anyway :-( But the base system is already running.