'Til All Are One

Are you aware of the con­di­tion known as Ser­vice Sup­port Ter­min­a­tion Trauma (SSTT)? View this Nov­ell Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment to find out more.

Gentoo’s sys­tem for main­tain­ing pack­ages, Port­age, has had a sig­ni­fic­ant speed boost with ver­sion 2.1. Syn­chron­ising the tree (the equi­val­ent of Debian’s ‘apt-​​get update’) feels sev­eral times faster. I don’t mind com­pil­ing my own apps (I leave it going overnight), but I do mind if I have to wait for ages before I can start the com­pil­a­tion in the first place. Any­body who has been scared away from Gentoo in the past because of Port­age should give it another go.

Note that this does not affect com­pil­a­tion times. It does, how­ever, hasten the pack­age man­age­ment both before and after compilation.

Linux Aus­tralia was very well rep­res­en­ted at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo (24−25 June) this year. Pia wrote <a href=“http://pipka.org/blog/2006/06/26/linux-in-education-a-model-stand/” target=“_blank” title=“Linux in Edu­ca­tion — a â€œmodel stand

This is one of those fables with the moral “don’t be greedy”.

A couple of weeks ago at col­lege I spied a trol­ley loaded with books with the label “Take me!” The lib­rary was giv­ing away old books to make space for new ones. There were plenty of inter­est­ing titles, ran­ging from basic PC repair to *NIX to pro­gram­ming. I col­lec­ted a massive pile of books (If I could place them all on top of each other I think they would reach my waist).

I travel by pub­lic trans­port (I don’t own a car), so there was no way in hell I could take them all home at once. What’s more, I was work­ing that even­ing and I had to take a bus to get there. I decided to take about half of them and I made arrange­ments with the instruct­ors to leave the rest so I could take them the next day. It was a pain cart­ing those books to work and back (espe­cially since I nor­mally return home around 10:30pm), but I man­aged it. The next day I took the rest dir­ectly home (thank­fully I wasn’t work­ing that day). No dramas.

Then on Monday I saw some­thing else at col­lege: free com­puters! They weren’t very good (AMD K6200 with 32MB RAM), but hey, they were free! There were only five of them and I didn’t want to miss out, so I decided to take two home at once. These were chunky: old-​​style AT desktop cases made from thick steel. Car­ry­ing them home was a night­mare. I had to take fre­quent breaks so that my arms could recover. I also had a heavy backpack.

I man­aged to get home with myself and the com­puters in one (or rather three) piece(s). My arms were almost numb. If I tried to raise my left hand to my face it would invol­un­tar­ily shake. I could not straighten my left arm until two days ago. I can still feel a bit of muscle stretch­ing when I do.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with those com­puters. I don’t have any key­boards with AT con­nect­ors (I only have PS/​2). I’ll have to give it some thought.

It’s funny what some people chuck out. A few months ago my mum found a per­fectly work­ing 63cm tele­vi­sion set. Yes­ter­day I was at my cousin’s house and I saw a com­puter mon­itor sit­ting on the side of the road. It was an old HP Pavil­ion 15in screen, and it was slightly damp since it had rained earlier in the day. I didn’t expect it to work, but I decided to pick it up any­way. Not know­ing the fre­quen­cies of it, I decided to hook it up and boot with the PCLinuxOS Pre­view 8 liveCD and hope that it would be auto­mat­ic­ally be con­figured. Lo and behold, it was! KDE looked great run­ning at 800×600 on it. I’ve been want­ing to set my mum (who is essen­tially computer-​​illiterate) with a com­puter, but I didn’t have a mon­itor. This one will do fine.

I came across this art­icle at csmon​itor​.com. Basic­ally, it’s point­ing out how juven­ile a boy­cott of all words and products of French ori­gin would be, for example renam­ing French fries to free­dom fries. Besides, they are actu­ally from Bel­gium, not France. Maybe we should call them oil fries? It only makes sense

That got me think­ing. If so many Amer­ic­ans are eager to boy­cott everything French, what will they do with the admir­als, com­modores, bri­gadier gen­er­als, col­on­els, com­mand­ers, cap­tains, lieu­ten­ants, war­rant officers, ensigns, ser­geants, cor­por­als, spe­cial­ists and air­men in their armed forces? Surely they wouldn’t want to use those in the war against Iraq? That leaves only sea­men and privates for the assault (gen­er­als and majors are officers). Can they fight a battle without aero­planes (includ­ing jets and their pilots), armour, artil­lery, bombs, rock­ets, gren­ades, bul­lets, rifles or machine guns? Can they attack without magazines or the ammuni­tion stored inside them? And who needs sol­diers, any­way? Maybe they don’t need an army, navy, air force or mar­ines? Heck, per­haps they don’t need a mil­it­ary at all!

Strangely enough, weapons inspector doesn’t seem to be of French origin.

In semi-​​related news, Man­drake Linux 9.1 is out. OSNews has a great review of it, and Tweak­hound has an inform­at­ive inter­view with Man­drake Linux founder Gaël Duval. It looks amaz­ing, par­tic­u­larly com­pared to 9.0, which could have been bet­ter (although I didn’t think 9.0 was nearly as bad as many review­ers did). As a side note, I clicked the “More links HERE” link at the bot­tom of the Gaël Duval inter­view and found PCLinuxOn​line​.com lis­ted under “Other Good Linux Sites”. Yay!!!

I’ve seen com­ments by some Amer­ic­ans advoc­at­ing a boy­cott of Man­drake Linux because Man­drakeSoft is French. To them, I have this to say: Are you really that retarded?! I mean, that’s just idi­otic [see defin­i­tion 2]! Free soft­ware is an inter­na­tional effort. Code and developers come from all over the world. The corol­lary of this is that most of the code in Man­drake Linux isn’t from France at all. It also means that all GNU/​Linux dis­tri­bu­tions have some code that would have ori­gin­ated in France. Maybe you should boy­cott Red Hat, Debian and every­one else as well?

I haven’t pos­ted any art­icles on PCLinuxOn­line over the past three weeks because I b0rked my Gentoo sys­tem. I upgraded from glibc 2.2.5 to 2.3.1 and since then I haven’t been able to run cer­tain apps without wreck­ing everything else. I’ve detailed my prob­lem here and here. If any­one can help I’d much appre­ci­ate it.

At the moment I can run most apps, but things screw up when I load any part of KDE (includ­ing Kon­queror) or Evol­u­tion. GTK+ (1 and 2) apps (apart from Evol­u­tion) work fine.

Update [2003–03-07]: The prob­lem is with my Nvidia drivers:

Hi! I’m the guy who star­ted this thread. I finally man­aged to fix things by turn­ing off Grse­cur­ity in my ker­nel. How­ever, a very sim­ilar (but dif­fer­ent) prob­lem emerged a few months later. It occurred around the time I upgraded glibc to 2.3.1, so I ini­tially thought glibc was to blame. After lots of exper­i­ment­ing with ker­nel con­figs, I dis­covered that I could have a stable sys­tem using Nvidia drivers if I turned high­mem off, sac­ri­fi­cing just over 100MB of RAM (I have 1GB total).

I then came across cigaraficionado’s bug report and updated nvidia-​​kernel ebuild. I com­piled a new ker­nel, this time turn­ing high­mem back on, and installed the new ebuild. The updated ebuild had no effect — using the Nvidia driver made my sys­tem unstable like before.

My hard­ware seems fine. Memtest86 detects no errors in my RAM (2x Cor­sair XMS 512MB DDR333 SDRAM). My GeForce 3 Ti200 card works per­fectly in Win­dows and it worked per­fectly in Gentoo until Decem­ber, around the time I upgraded to glibc 2.3.1. I can’t fig­ure out where the true prob­lem is, but I strongly sus­pect it lies with nvidia-​​kernel.

That’s what you get for rely­ing on binary-​​only ker­nel mod­ules

Yeah, so I ripped the title off Star Wars, so what? 

About three weeks ago (I think… I lose track of dates eas­ily) on a Sat­urday I got a rather frantic call from my old friend Reaper. Here’s the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion (for your read­ing pleasure):

Reaper: “Aaargh! I’ve screwed up my hard drive and my com­puter is now use­less! I have an appoint­ment to have cable Inter­net installed on Tues­day and I need a work­ing sys­tem so that the tech­ni­cian can install everything. Can I bring my com­puter to your house so you can take a look at it? Help me Yama, you’re my only hope.”
Me: “You may, my min­ion. I know all. You may bow and kiss my ring.”
Reaper: “Yes, my Liege! Thank you, Lord!”

*ahem* Well it went some­thing like that, anyway.

About an hour later, Reaper shows up at my house with com­puter in tow. He some­how man­aged to kill his par­ti­tion table, and after much fid­dling I finally man­aged to fix it using gpart and (GNU/​Linux) fdisk. He needed a copy of Win­dows installed for the cable guy, so I chucked on Win2K (which sadly/​humorously is the best MS product since OS/​2). To bal­ance this out, I installed Man­drake 9.0.

Reaper is a Win­dows user, so I tried to make his Win­dows exper­i­ence as non-​​MS (for both secur­ity and eth­ical reas­ons) as pos­sible. Open​Of​fice​.org and Moz­illa are not only very cap­able applic­a­tions (and IMHO are bettter than their MS coun­ter­parts), they also have dir­ect equi­val­ents in GNU/​Linux. So the only thing keep­ing him in Win­dows is Win­dows itself. Reaper is a games player, but I think WineX can fill that void nicely. Of course, KDE is great for Win­dows converts.

I think a Win­dows to GNU/​Linux trans­ition is best achieved in two stages (to sim­plify the pro­cess). In the first stage, the user weans himself/​herself off pro­pri­et­ary (par­tic­u­larly Microsoft) applic­a­tions. In their place, open altern­at­ives like Moz­illa and Open​Of​fice​.org are adop­ted. Once the user has grown accus­tomed to those pro­grammes, they can make a trans­ition to GNU/​Linux (or BSD, Mac OS X, etc.). The apps stay the same, and only the OS changes. The whole pro­cess can take place over a pro­longed period, and the user is free to switch back and forth (dual-​​boot) between oper­at­ing systems.

Reaper, I know you’ll read this sooner or later, so tell us what you think. Am I talk­ing junk or am I talk­ing junk?

Update: Reaper messed up his hard drive when using Par­ti­tion Magic 8. Yet another reason not to trust pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware, I guess.