At my new job I’m itching to start rolling on a Gentoo box… my days on win32 are almost over!  I’ve been working on a shiny new image for the past few days.  Tonight I rolled it into a stage4 tarball and installed it on a new 100g Seagate disk.  Tomorrow morning I’ll finally have a nice Linux box to work with.

Earlier today I was talking to Jaisen who’s adding ethernet throttling support to his gear.  After installing his new kernel, grub kept failing because it didn’t find any data in /etc/mtab.  So he did the usual trick of copying /proc/mounts though oddly it resulted in an empty file?  We decided to just use cat instead which worked fine.  I honestly blew it off until just a bit ago when I chrooted to my shiny new stage4 install only to have the exact same thing happen.  What in the world?  Since when can’t you do:

cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab

Most likely I will upgrade my kernel howto to recommend using:

cat /proc/mounts \> /etc/mtab

I should also note that my new image is running Xfce 4.4.0. Why you ask? Because it’s sweet.