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Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Tom Syroid and I have co-authored a Linux Book. It was cancelled by $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.
EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.
Updating... and Good morning. Welcome to the first Monday of Fall. Once again, I've had a very busy weekend, including the first two editions of Install-O-Rama, on Saturday, and Sunday of last week. And in an unusual (for me) repeat, to the right here you'll see our new lawn continuing to make great progress - this was taken yesterday, right after it's first haircut.
I'm out of time at the moment, so I'll leave you to your day, and this excerpt from Ward Gerlach's email to me:
... Impatient? Certainly - but easily forgiven, especially given what the other Evil Bastards have done to us. I therefore propose the following four-step program: 1. Indentify them. ?90% certainty will do for military action. 2. Locate them. 95% certainty here - we don't want to waste the lives of own. 3. Hunt them down. 4. Kill them. Numbers 1 and 2 are going to take some time, and must be carefully done. ?3 and 4 shouldn't take long at all, given the force that we can project and the capabilities we have to deliver that force, be it bomb or cruise missile or foot-soldier on the ground and in their face. Regards.....WARD
I left off on Sunday (September 23) after only covering the Progeny and Corel Linux distributions. The weekend had wiped me out. Mondays aren't much better, especially Mondays that involve sitting in a six hour long sales support meeting. Ah, well. Anyway, I'd best get to getting the rest of these workstation installations out to you - there's six more and I figure that a little bit tonight and the balance tomorrow afternoon should put paid to that. So here we go...
Following a rather odd announcement denying the release of this Beta distribution, Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com/) appears to have put together something of a winner. This beta incorporates some of the almost latest and greatest versions of the Linux package smorgasborg, from a 2.4.6 Linux kernel to KDE 2.2pre and XFree 4.1. We needs must remember that in assembling a distribution, a publisher has to freeze the packages at some point and make what's there all work together. Getting closer to the bleeding edge is your responsibility, even with Beta distributions. As with all of the major commercial players, Red Hat features a competent GUI installer that works well with assorted automated hardware detection tools to provide a reasonably painless installation, as compared to years gone by. The steps with Roswell are as follows:
There are only three open TCP ports, with the selections I made - sunrpc, X11 and kdm. With a workstation, I guess I am not surprised - I'd close all of these, and run the sshd server, and we'll go through that in the extensive later look. KDE 2.2 and KOffice 1.1 grace this Beta nicely. All the menus and fancy bits seem to work right out of the box, from text anti-aliasing to the GUI configuration tools that are the hallmark of Red Hat distributions.
The next release of Red Hat is going to get a long hard look in these pages. I'll hold off until at least the RC, if not the final, so as to give you a review of shipping product. However, if the fit and finish of this Beta is any indication, you're going to like what you see, as I do.
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Good morning. Let's start off with a hit from the mailbox...
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 00:26:58 -0500
From: Boss <[email protected]>
Subject: 1994 or 2005?
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4807.1700
"I left off on Sunday (September 25) after only covering..."
A look at my computer's calendar shows that Sept. 25 only fell on a Sunday
in 1994 and will again in 2005, so are you looking towards the future or
glancign towards the past? I assume it is supposed to be 23rd.
Dwight Wallbridge of Geek's World
New Blog now online, http://www.geeksworld.net/GeekMeltdownBlog/
***Finally back online, http://www.geeksworld.net ***
The man wins a Kewpie Doll ! Every once in a while, I make in an egregious mistake of that nature. I choose to regard it as an opportunity to see who's paying attention. Usually I hear from Don Armstrong in a matter of a very short span. However, you beat the pack. Thanks!
Next, there's this email on the topic of the quickly receding freedoms in this country:
http://www.indefenseoffreedom.org/action.html URGENT ACTION ALERT The Administration's proposed Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 is currently scheduled for mark-up by the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. It is critical that consideration of the legislation be delayed until the Committee holds comprehensive public hearings on the serious civil liberties issues the proposal implicates. The Committee is currently planning to proceed to mark-up after testimony only from the Attorney General and a short, informal "briefing" on the issues that raise constitutional concerns. There is an urgent need for concerned organizations and individuals to contact members of the Judiciary Committee and urge them to delay consideration of the bill until its impact on civil liberties can be carefully and fully considered. These contacts need to be made IMMEDIATELY to delay tomorrow morning's scheduled mark-up. Committee members and their contact information follows. It would be particularly useful if constituents of these members express their concern. Please forward this alert to your members, affiliated organizations and appropriate mailing lists. Judiciary Committee List Name, party, state, phone, fax, e-mail: James Sensenbrenner, Chair, R-WI, (202) 225-5101, (202) 225-3190, [email protected] Henry Hyde, R-IL, (202) 225-4561, (202) 225-1166. John Conyers Jr., D-MI, (202) 225-5126, (202) 225-0072, [email protected] George Gekas, R-PA, (202) 225-4315, (202) 225-8440, [email protected] Barney Frank, D-MA, (202) 225-5931, (202) 225-0182 Howard Coble, R-NC, (202) 225-3065, (202) 225-8611, [email protected] Howard Berman, D-CA, (202) 225-4695, (202) 225-3196, [email protected] Lamar Smith, R-TX, (202) 225-4236, (202) 225-8628 Rick Boucher, D-VA, (202) 225-3861, (202) 225-0442, [email protected] Elton Gallegly, R-CA, (202) 225-5811, (202) 225-1100 Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, (202) 225-5635, (202) 225-6923, [email protected] Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, (202) 225-5431, (202) 225-9681, [email protected] Bobby Scott, D-VA, (202) 225-8351, (202) 225-8354 Steve Chabot, R-OH, (202) 225-2216, (202) 225-3012 Mel Watt, D-NC, (202) 225-1510, (202) 225-1512, [email protected] Bob Barr, R-GA, (202) 225-2931, (202) 225-2944, [email protected] Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, (202) 225-3072, (202) 225-3336, [email protected] William Jenkins, R-TN, (202) 225-6356, (202) 225-5714 Sheila Jackson Lee, D-TX, (202) 225-3816, (202) 225-3317, [email protected] Christopher Cannon, R-UT, (202) 225-7751, (202) 225-5629, [email protected] Maxine Waters, D-CA, (202) 225-2201, (202) 225-7854 Lindsey Graham, R-SC, (202) 225-5301, (202) 225-3216 Marty Meehan, D-MA, (202) 225-3411, (202) 226-0771, [email protected] Spencer Bachus, R-AL, (202) 225-4921, (202) 225-2082 William Delahunt, D-MA, (202) 225-3111, (202) 225-5658, [email protected] John Hostettler, R-IN, (202) 225-4636, (202) 225-3284, [email protected] Robert Wexler, D-FL, (202) 225-3001, (202) 225-5974 Mark Green, R-WI, (202) 225-5665, (202) 225-5729, [email protected] Tammy Baldwin, D-W, (202) 225-2906, (202) 225-6942, [email protected] Ric Keller, R-FL, (202) 225-2176, (202) 225-0999 Anthony David Weiner, D-NY, (202) 225-6616, (202) 226-7253 Darrell Issa, R-CA, (202) 225-3906, (202) 225-3303 Adam Schiff, D-CA, (202) 225-4176, (202) 225-5828 Melissa Hart, R-PA, (202) 225-2565, (202) 226-2274, [email protected] Jeff Flake, R-AZ, (202) 225-2635, (202) 226-4386
In other, less disturbing news, I have found myself preparing a heaping plate-full of humble pie and crow. You see, this AT&T@Home connection is blazingly fast, when it's working. Unfortunately, two or three times a week when I am awake and at home, it will be down for 1 to 2 hours at a shot. It's been the case virtually since we got the stinking thing. So here comes the crow part - I've called Speakeasy.
As much as I disliked them charging a $250 early termination fee when they couldn't provide service here at the new house within any reasonable span of time, I can get that money credited back to us on reinstallation here. Since I already have the hardware, and installation is free, we effectively have already paid for the next 4 months of service. And I can bring my servers back in-house. This is also a good thing.
The install should go live next Tuesday, so after about a week of transition, I should be able to cut AT&T off at the knees, at least for our Internet connection. Now I am running late, so must fly. You have a marvelous day and I'll catch you later.
I am going to make a power-run at getting the rest of this material in front of your eyes this evening. It'll be a bit of a challenge, since the stunningly chaotic connection from AT&T was down again for 2.5 hours this afternoon. Did I mention that I am really annoyed and ready to make a change? Heh. OK, from the Install-O-Rama, we have Round One from Saturday, Round II from Sunday, Part Three yesterday. Now here's the rest of it - Part the Fourth!
Caldera (http://www.caldera.com/) opened a real can of worms when they went to a per-seat licensing deal. They've since backed it off a bit, and it's not clear that what they're doing is enforceable in any meaningful sense. It appears their goal is to have license fees paid per seat for sites that have support agreements. That makes business sense - you can't begin to afford to support a whole raft of workers when only one is paying license and support fees...
That said, Tom and I did write this little book that was oriented towards the Caldera distribution. Although I've been disappointed in the lack of upgrades for the distribution in between releases, and their fundamentally closed development process, I am almost impressed by the quality of the finished products. This includes the latest desktop distribution from their foundry - Caldera Workstation 3.1. The installer is an updated version of the Lizard - a solid GUI tool that works. Here are the steps to install...
Caldera Workstation 3.1 boots right into the system from the installation, without a complete reboot. Ten assorted services are visible from the network, and that's too many, but they can be shut off, I suppose. KDE 2.x is the only WM/DE installed, along with KOffice 1.0.x and the Linux 2.4.2 kernel. The CDROM icon on the desktop is borked. Other than that, it seems solid at first pass. I'll be back at this one later, as well.
And I simply must apologize - I don't have the energy for this - I've been fighting with AT&T, and KDE and ... and ... sigh. Sorry, friends. I'll keep after it. There's only four left - Slackware 8.0, Redmond Linux, Mandrake Raklet, and Best Linux. But I feel like I've been on the BAD end of a serious frag run. G'night.
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Good morning. This is making me nuts. A country called Afghanistan has a significant percentage of their population that institutionally appears to hate the United States. This country, Afghanistan, was invaded and made war upon by the USSR back in the bad old days. During that span, the US supplied humanitarian and military aid to the country to stand against the Soviets. Now, after harboring terrorists that have masterminded the killing thousands of Americans on US soil, they're burning our abandoned embassy, ripping the seals off the buildings, burning US flags and so on. In the meantime, "...international aid agencies are warning of a "humanitarian catastrophe" if some 1.5 million Afghans try to flee the country in the face of possible U.S. military strikes." Humanitarian catastrophe???? Try thousands of dead Americans, people!
You know what? We all know who supplies a large majority of the material and money to these international aid agencies. We do! Afghanistan is not a good citizen of the world. As a nation, I look at it as a rabid dog, needing to get put down for the safety of the rest of the world. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of good, nice, kind people who live in Afghanistan, I'm sure there are. However, their leadership, and those who preach and act out with killing and hatred - they need to be worm food. This is crazy.
Bah. I'm getting worked up over a situation that I have no control over. That's not good for me and I need to stop it. So I'll do my best. I do promise that I'll keep slogging away with the Linux stuff - the installs are done already. What you're seeing in these reports are the transcriptions of about a page each of cryptic notes taken during each install. It turns out that with each one of the most recent write-ups, I've had to replicate part of the install to make sure I understood my notes. There was just too much of a lag between the action and the writeup.
The lawn is doing well - I reseeded and sprinkled some extra cover over a few of the barren bits - it should fill in nicely over the next couple of weeks, just in time to go mostly dormant for the winter. But still it'll hold the dirt down, instead of just being a mud puddle out there all through the rains. Now to work with me. See you later.
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Short one for the moment, folks... Good morning! In the most recent book proposal news, apparently the proposal goes before the Editorial Board at $PUBLISHER next week (as opposed to last week). No grand surprise to me - like many other businesses, they're having to assess which way the winds are blowing, and evaluate new book proposals in light of current economic conditions. But I am moderately hopeful, as at least the AE didn't turn green and throw up when she saw what I wrote. This is a good thing, neh?
Did you see Enterprise last night? I enjoyed it as a standalone, and time will tell whether it has series legs or not. There was a bunch of whining on Slashdot about various bits and character development. My observation is that anything we saw in STOS is fair game for exaggeration in this one, from people paranoid about transporters to Vulcan vs. Human tensions. We're going backwards in the overall story line. Me? I'm waiting to see what they make Andorians look like. Also, I still haven't figured out how they're going to explain the mutant human-looking Klingons so clearly all over the place in STOS.
I should only be working a half day today, so I'll try to get the balance of the Workstation Install-O-Rama series posted, OK? Of course, some of it's dated already, what with the release this morning of Mandrake 8.1. Meantime, y'all take care. See you later.
12:50 - sneak update... Also, I fixed the Enterprise link, above. CUL
Subject: Mandrake 8.1
From: "Bowman, Dan" <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 11:03:45 -0700
I don't know if I'll have the time to post this one.
Mandrake's forum with some info for early adopters:
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1229?=en
Dan
In this edition of Install-O-Rama, you'll witness the feeble fifth attempt to get all of the workstation installations I did over the last couple of weeks transcribed from my horrid hen-scratchings into something a bit more ... HTML. Let's see where and how far this can go, especially in the face of the release of Mandrake 8.1 today.
Redmond Linux (http://www.redmondlinux.org/)is hard at work in the Pacific Northwest, putting together a serious distribution with one goal in mind - make it EASY for people to transition from Windows. Personally, the lack of reboots in Linux made it easy for me. But Redmond Linux has build some nice tools that replicate a few standard desktop features that'll perhaps help a Linux newbie over the hump.
The installer is a modified Lizard (that is, the tool devised by Caldera). As this is a Beta of Redmond Linux, I won't hold it against them that the very first screen of the installation shows a Caldera Logo. So let's install this baby, GUI style...
Redmond Linux only offers KDE2 in this current incarnation, from a stunningly beautiful login screen (great screen wallpaper here). Once logged in, there are three tools on an otherwise barren desktop - Personal Files, Trash, Local Area Network, and My Linux System. Oh, that's four, isn't it? Heh. Personal Files is a directory on the KDE desktop inside your home directory. It corresponds to My Documents. My Linux System is equivalent to My Computer, and Local Area Network is a tool for accessing domain or workgroup computers, a reasonable facsimile of Network Neighborhood. You could probably jump into this one with both feet and give it a serious go...
I'm not sure what else Redmond Linux is waiting for before releasing a "complete" distribution. I might drop them a line and ask, as this is nearly ready for prime time, and might be a great foot in the door for Linux.
Mmmmm. I've failed again, haven't I. One at a time just is about all I can manage with all the other stuff that's going on. Tonight we've got dinner guests, then this weekend my folks are down... Whew - this Life thing never stops, does it? Hee hee. I'll cut you loose now to have a nice evening. See you on Friday!
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Howdy. Welcome to Friday. I hope that you're as glad to see this day as I am (unless you're across the dateline, in which case I'm sure that you enjoyed your Friday about as much as I am going to). We had friend Jim over to supper last night - I made chicken breasts marinated, seared, then simmered in a bit of Chardonnay, Pesto pasta, salad and bread on the side. Nummm.
On the Linux side of the fence, I pulled down all three discs of Mandrake 8.1 last night, burned them, and converted Gryphon over, just before bedtime. I'd been mucking about so much with my Debian install that I had broken a few bits, and it's just as easy to try out Mandrake as anything else, prior to going back (probably)...
I'm told that NIMDA is supposed to have fired off again overnight, according to a couple of articles that were both based on the same reportage. That being said, of course I forgot to check Greg's live counter on http://www.mazin.net/ last night, so I can see what the difference is this morning. The good news is that I've refreshed at a couple of five minute intervals, and don't see the number incrementing at all. At the peak in the first morning of NIMDA, we were seeing 40 to 60 hits a minute from the thing. Let me check the logs... Well, it is active, although there haven't been any hits in the last half hour from NIMDA, so we're not talking storm time. All I see in the main access_log is NIMDA and CodeRed II droppings. Bah. Thank goodness for Apache.
Now, I have a working day to attend, as well as several emails from this week that deserve answers. I'll see you later-ish. Take care!
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Good morning. It's late, I've only just woken up, I have a screetching headache, and the coffee's just starting to brew. Family's coming down for a small visit today, and I have some picking up to do, so I think I'll give this joint a bit of short shrift this morning, and perhaps return this evening....
Oh, one thing - Mandrake 8.1 on Gryphon, the Acer Travelmate, appears to be pretty solid... thought you'd like to know. And yes, David, KDE does feel sluggish - it has more and more with each passing revision. Much as I like some of the features that KDE offers, I think that a combination of something like fvwm2, Galeon and OpenOffice is seriously likely to meet my needs. One of the issues is that there are so many disparate bits of KDE that seem to have to be running - they load memory down pretty well.
Anyway, have a lovely day, and I'll see you later-ish.
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Well, we had lunch at Stoddard's yesterday, under the F16's flying barrier patrol over Moffett. Good food, nice time, cool planes. Now it's almost time today for the Costco/Safeway runs, and then who knows what next. Beyond that, Mandrake continues to ROCK for me, although it's giving Greg much grief, since he decided to play with JFS. Of course, this is the fault of Mandrake, isn't it...
Back later with more items of interest (one hopes). TTFN.
13:48 - I'm having the odd bit of success in mucking about a bit more deeply with Mandrake 8.1. For one thing, I've begun to make baby steps towards understanding devfs, at least far enough to understand how to find the mount point for a dynamic device like a USB Smart Media (tm) reader. I want to learn more before I start spouting off on the topic, but progress is being made. Hang in there with me. Also I am working on getting the rest of the Workstation Install-O-Rama ready.
However, the important part right now is something I read on Doc's site today, the section called Rhetorical asymmetry - a new (to me) way of looking at the coming conflict that has the ring of truth to it - go, read and think about what you've read. I've done so two or three times, and I'm still arranging my thoughts around the ideas.
Good day, and see you next [day | week | month].
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2001 Brian P. Bilbrey.