EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Good morning. As promised, here are some snaps of the overnight down to visit with the Bowman family. We had a really lovely time, they are gracious hosts, with the best behaved children we have ever met (snicker) OK, the first two bits are extraordinarily true, and their kids, Daniel and Bradley, are kids. I tried really hard not to play at their level, or Dan would have put me on a time out! Thanks and kudos to Dan and Shelley Bowman, for getting us out of our Silicon Valley shell for a little while.

While I am normally not over-fond of pictures of myself, I present evidence that I am not *always* at the computer. In fact, I didn't touch one for over 24 hours. Agonizing, really. Walked on the beach with the boys the night before, collecting shells. The next day, had a real breakfast (a rare and confusing treat for my tummy), then eventually wandered out to the sand. We played, they dug, a little bit of water, a fair bit of sitting about people watching and chatting, a hair too much sun - gotta burn going, but not too bad, as we were only out for about 2.5 hours. Marcia will have more pictures up in a little while, on (or linked from) her Musings page.

Tonight, we're having barbecue over at Pat and Nathan's. Sheesh. Social butterflies. When will I ever get any work (or play) done! Now to go drop the car off for service in preparation for our trip to Ashland and the Shakespeare Festival! Have a great day, see you later.

Good Morning. I've been doing a little more testing this AM, and have had some apparent success. First, though, for all it's faults and governmental flaws, it's really nice to live in the country that sucks least (in my provincial opinion). Happy Independence Day. Go to a parade, relax with your family, light something on fire (safely, safely, please) and enjoy yourselves.

Yesterday I was pushing the VMware envelope, trying to to do silly things so you won't have to, but despite the fact you wouldn't want to! That is to say, let's suppose that I am running, for sake of argument, Win2K. I want to be able to test and document a dual-boot configuration of Windows and Caldera's eDesktop for the book. Hmmm. I sure don't want to muck about with my running configuration, and besides - if I am running a true installation, then I can't run screenshot software, now can I? The problem here is that I can install Windows in a VM and document that. I can install Linux in a VM and document that. But I can't imagine that anyone at VM ever tried creating a dual boot VM!

So, the layout is as follows: I have VMware 2.0 (not 2.01) running under a Win2K host OS. I have SnagIt (screen capture software, strongly recommended) running. Win2K runs in a dual boot configuration with Mandrake 7.02 - both live on /dev/hdc (20G Maxtor). /dev/hdd is a 15G Maxtor that I use for test installs, any variety of things. In this case, I wipe the contents of /dev/hdd.

I set up a new VM to use a raw disk device (/dev/hdd) as a virtual disk. The default mode of operation is to create files (up to 2G in size) in the Host OS and use the files as virtual disks. The reason for using HDD as a disk is to get around the size limitation, and to be able to test the partition resizing features of the Caldera version of Partition Magic. So, I start up the VM with 15 G of empty disk, 128M of RAM, setup for a guest OS of Win2K, etc. I load Win2K into the VM and install, taking up the whole 15G, formatted FAT32. (If I had gone NTFS5, then I wouldn't be able to test PM). Install went just fine, completed in a little over an hour. I installed the VMtools, including the virtual screen driver to give me full resolution display. Then I downloaded SnagIt into the VM, and began an install of OpenLinux. I grabbed snaps of the opening splash screen and read all the prompts.

Ah-HA. The lobotomized version of Partition Magic won't run from within Win2K. So I am walked through a floppy creation sequence which results in a bootable (Caldera DR-DOS) floppy with PM on it. I reboot the VM with the floppy in the drive, and let PM re-size the Win2K partition, safe in the knowledge that it can't screw with the production box half of my system.

The job is done, I restart the VM yet again, resetting the Guest OS to be Linux. I run the install of OpenLinux eDesktop, doing screen captures all the way through, this time using the SnagIt version running in the outer, host Win2K instance. Finished, I have to muck about with the X configuration prior to installing the VMtools in the Linux guest OS, but finally everything is up and running - I capture the final screenshot I need - a login snap at 800x600. Voila.

Now I have a VM that dual boots Windows and OpenLinux. This is really rather odd, since using VM's, I could so easily have had separate instances. I think I need to let the VM people know about this one, 'cause they may not have tried it (not being as strange as I am). Additionally, I found a glitch in the 2.01 version of VMware, at least in interaction with OpenLinux 2.4 expert install mode. The good news is that 2.01 VMware can install in a Linux Host OS running 2.4test1 kernel (as I am in my Mandrake setup).

A bit of breakfast and coffee is certainly my due at this point - then it's into chapter work for me. Have a lovely day. TTFN.


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Happy Monday ... errrr, Wednesday. Sheesh. And we're off for Shakespeare Festival shortly, so my internal clocks are liable to remain fubar'd for the forseeable future! Kept the old nose hard to the grindstone into the evening last night - I think the installation chapter is just about there - I sent it off to Tom for yet another round of polishing.

VMware update - my supposed glitch is simply an extraordinarily long delay in the hardware probing section for SCSI devices during the initial boot up of the OpenLinux Lizard installer. Long as in on the order of 5 to 10 minutes in a VM (as opposed to 20 seconds or so in the real machine). My bad - I was simply impatient.

I am thinking of experimenting with other features of VMware for some of the upcoming testing - there are features called non-persistent and redoable disks. VMs use virtualized disks, that enables disk reads and writes to be effectively journalled rather than just buffered and written. The non-persistent and redoable version allow for a session to go forward, then (in one case) decide whether to post the changes to the virtual disk or not. If not, then on the next session, the disk will be in identical condition to the previous boot. I need to play with it a bit, but when I am mucking about with configuration parameters, it sounds about ideal - I can back out by shutting down, or commit if what I did works. Hmmm.

Now to work with me. Have a great day. See you later.


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Howdy. Right about now I am wishing that we had stayed with the Bowmans, sandblasting action and all. But more on that topic in a moment. How are you? Glad you could drop by!

Upgrade blues. Last night I went to drop the spare 15G HD in Marcia's HP Pavillion. The original 6G is coming up on maxed out, which Windows likes as an operating environment not at all. I figured half an hour, even counting the Rubic's Cube disassembly and assembly process. I designated the drive as a slave device and dropped it in the Secondary IDE chain, since the Primary only had a single connector cable on it, that lead in the other direction to a front (rather than cage-) mounted original drive.

I brought the system up in DOS mode, used Fdisk to wipe the remnants of Linux testing off the beast, created a single large partition and formatted it. When I brought the system back up into Win98, the CDROM was invisible, and Device Manager indicated that the Secondary IDE channel was broken. Hmmm. Interesting, since I could SEE and TOUCH the new drive (but not the CDROM). Anyway, I ended up popping the connectors to return to a known state - I may end up simply swapping drives and reinstalling Marcia's software from scratch. Hmmm. That doesn't sound like fun. But it may be necessary, since I can't understand WHY installing the drive disables the channel. It worked in my boxen.

Anyway, off to work, including a side trip to the tire place to get tire rotation done. Then I am trying to complete the design for just one more new product prior to departure. Snaps in about a month when it becomes a real product.

PS: Looking for old versions of Caldera - 2.1 or 2.2 would be GREAT! I am going to call LSL this morning and see if they have any lying around. I need to test the update scripts from the CDROM of the new version.

Take care and have a lovely day. Later.


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A successful day all round yesterday, finally! Good morning and welcome to my Friday. A busy day coming up today, with lots to accomplish. Several things ended up going right yesterday - I'll address them project-wise, rather than chronologically.

From: "Robert Bruce Thompson"
To: [email protected]
Subject: 
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 11:41:50 -0400

> necessary, since I can't understand WHY installing the drive disables the
> channel. It worked in my boxen.

It sounds as though you have a hard disk on your Primary ATA channel as
Master and a CD-ROM device on the Secondary ATA channel. If that's the case,
the most likely explanatino for the problem is that the CD-ROM drive is
currently jumpered as Slave. Officially, ATA doesn't support a configuration
with a Slave and no Master on a channel, but many CD-ROM drives come that
way, and most ATA interfaces allow them to work as the sole device on the
channel even though they're set to Slave.

I'd suggest you rejumper that second hard disk as Master, connect it to the
Secondary ATA channel and see what happens.

Bob

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Great idear. Thanks!

Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 12:58:55 +0100
From: Jan Swijsen 
Subject: Caldera 

since I can't understand WHY installing the drive disables the
channel. 

Did you check the jumpres on both CD and disk? master + master doesn't
combine well, neither does slave + slave.

PS: Looking for old versions of Caldera - 2.1 or 2.2 would be
GREAT! I am going to call LSL this morning and see if they have any
lying around. I need to test the update scripts from the CDROM of the
new version. 

I have both ( could be 2.0 and 2.2), in retail packing. Come and get it ??

--
Svenson.

Mail at home : [email protected]

Yah, it's just this miniature puzzlebox of a case (in RBT speak, a
girly box) is such a PITA to work with... I have solved the problem,
though certainly jumpers played a part in both the problem and the
final solution.

I had figured that an ISO of COL2.2 would still be about someplace
online. As it turns out, I checked quite extensively through a
number of archives that Google pointed me too, as well as all the
obvious places, like the depths of Caldera's ftp site. No Joy. So I
popped over to Fry's and bought an old book containing the release I
was looking for. 

Solutions: First - the HP. I popped all the drives, and indeed we had a jumpering problem - the stinking CDROM drive was set to Cable Select. I made sense of all the settings, and tried 7 different things... no joy. Although the POST would see the drives properly, as did the BIOS, Windows was being terribly recalcitrent. So I swapped the drives in the chain, and reinstalled Windows from scratch (from the HP recovery disks - we are among the lucky beneficiaries of the NO Windows CDROM or standard Windows CABS on a CDROM policy).

There's still work to be done, but a reinstall is a good thing for a Winbox from time to time - clears the deadwood. Additionally, putting the 7200 RPM drive as the booting and main drive is bound to be good for the system anyway. I had thought the shipping drive had been a 6G. It is in fact 4.3 G, a Seagate. It's parked at D, with all it's data still on it, both as a fall back (for the time being), and to allow easy migration of the data into whatever new structures Marcia builds on the box.

On the Caldera front, as I was mentioning yesterday, I was looking for a COL2.2 release, so I could install it (in a VM), and test the update scripts that come with COL2.4 eDesktop. The results of the search are in the reply to Svenson, above - I bought a book. One of the Que Using series, which had 2.2 in the back. Installed it late last night, and will try the updates stuff this late afternoon. That'll give me something to write about while we are gone...

But Brian, how're you going to write while you're gone? Pencil and paper work just fine, thank you! My scrawl is illegible to anyone but me... so what? Pen and paper? Me? Nah. I have come across a laptop that thought it was headed for the landfill. It's perhaps 4 or 5 years old, the screen has some... challenges in the evenness of it's display, and both batteries, system and CMOS, are history. But it runs on the brick just fine - what type of laptop???

An Altima Virage3 CD. I left it loading COL 2.4 on a desk at the day job yesterday. The installer works just fine on it - found the video and the sound! I am impressed with both Caldera and Altima on this one. Old box, so I went hunting information on it on the web, and found them at http://www.altima.com/ - a little glitzy on the splash screen - but they're still around and still doing laptops. Been in biz for 15 years, and still doing laptops. The one I am working with right now reminds me of an old Volvo - looks like it's gone one round too many, but it's coming back out of the corner, still rarin' to go. (To mix a couple of metaphors, but it's early, I haven't had coffee yet and you know what I mean, so be quiet).

If all is well today, then I'll get back atcha tonight with some more update on the Altima.


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Happy Saturday. Well, it's been a bit of a go-round, but TinyTim is up and running, and joy-of-joys, still running this morning. He works on the local network, even though I have no clue what kind of PCMCIA ethernet card is in there - and he works on dialup, even though the PCMCIA modem is a Motorola and not listed - you're seeing Bob Thompson's site for today, via dialup. I have SSH installed and tested, so I can back up text file work across the Internet back to my home box as well as check the email. The roaming dial-in numbers for our PBI account are on a sticky note on the machine, and everything seems to be working OK.

Yesterday, when I got to work, the overnight install had completed, but there were lot's of things left off of the minimum installation I had done for space conservation. So I went for a re-install, and got just far enough to make the HD unbootable before I realized that I actually had NO WAY of installing the software from any but a DOS environment. Let me give you a hint. I can have either the Floppy or the CDROM in the drive bay. Not both at the same time, and I can't hot-swap. Oh, and the system won't boot from the CDROM. Does this give you and idea of how much fun I had last night?

The eventual solution was to boot with Tom's Root Boot, a Linux emergency boot disk system, re-fdisk the HD to something an MS-DOS boot disk would format (several iterations to find the right combo of partition size and partition type - there's many more choices than the one or two that are offered by products from Redmond... and no, I don't own a copy of Partition Magic - yes, I probably should, huh?

So, finally I had a HD that would boot DOS, but I didn't have any CDROM drivers. Hmmm. So I use the floppy to copy bits of a minimal installation over to TinyTim's drive, and start an OpenLinux installation, which dies when it asks for the Modules disk. Fortunately, by that time, the CDROM driver is loaded, and I can switch consoles, mount the hard-drive, and copy the rest of the installation files (those over 1.44M in size) directly from the CD. Then I rebooted the machine, and restarted a full installation which went tickity-boo. When it was done, I had NO free space left on the drive (other than the 5% which only the root user can write to).

Therefore, I went through the installed packages, removing various fairly large chunks that I wouldn't be needing on a laptop. Am I going to be doing Java development??? Nope - that was a 50M package out the window. After a few minutes of pruning, I had 142M of free space on the system. That's about 100M free for normal users (Marcia and I).

Went outside and caught some snaps of the farm today as well. We are counting on others to water for us during our absence... I hope these aren't the last you'll see of this amazing patio farm. Overall, the plant health is good, though I have some infested chives to take care of this morning. Additionally, there are some tomatoes that may be ready to eat by tonight - yum.

Also on today's agenda - working with the upgrade scripts on the OpenLinux 2.4 disc. I would imagine that this has the ability to be really quite a smooth process - I have been really quite impressed with OL2.4 over the last week, as it has coped with old, unidentified hardware and other odd VM situations I have put it in, fairly flawlessly.

Then, of course there's packing to be done... I am terrible at packing, at least in some circles. I am all for throwing a couple pairs of shorts, underwear, socks and stylish Linux t-shirts into a plastic grocery bag, and heading out. Hmmm. That's not how it's done, apparently... WHACK! Yes, of course I am kidding, but I probably won't lay out any clothes until tomorrow... WHACK! later this afternoon. Hmmm. I love vacations.

Grin. Of course I am kidding, but I really am awful about getting ready to go. Marcia is fairly tolerant of my ... lack of enthusiasm ... regarding preparedness. Now to get on with my day. Hope your's is fun and fulfilling, too. Later.


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It's quite a burden being first out of the blocks. RBT hasn't posted yet, neither has Tom. Jerry may be taking the weekend off, and I would be pleased (and surprised) to see something from Matt later today. Shawn is on holiday, John is at the Calgary Stampede, and starting his new job tomorrow and Dave continues to mend. Steve must be on the road. Dan S. doesn't work weekends, Jim is an evening updater, Ben is occasional and JHR trails a day to report on an actual day's events. Jon, the new kid (and I would say that if he had 17.53 years on me) on the block, is holding up pretty well, though he isn't out yet today, and Frank's always interesting links and commentary aren't up yet today either. You'll note that I appear to have left Dan Bowman off the list... not really, and he has a Sunday post up, but it was there last night and so doesn't count as a Sunday morning post.

I don't count the European contingent (Bo, Svenson, Chris, Moshe and Bob Walder) in this contest, since they're tracked 8 hours or more off the correct timezone ('Merican left coast time, dudes . . . but none of them have Sunday posts either, and they're headed into evening right now).

One wonders about the dearth of Daynoters from 8 hours or so the other side of the center of the known universe (Northern California). We need representation from Australia, the Philipines and Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and perhaps even PRC, even though getting through their firewalls may be difficult.

Speaking of Daynotes, the main site is down while the switchover from iTool . . . Zanova . . . whatever, over to Tom's RS6000 propogates at the usual snail's pace through the hierarchy of name servers. Meanwhile, Tom's got a version up HERE, and of course you are welcome to use my Start page, which incorporates all the Daynotes Gang links on the right two columns.

Frank McPherson, in Saturday's post, takes special note of kids running to get books (well, not just books, but the latest Harry Potter thingy, anyway). They were doing a call-in bit on my radio station, KFOG, about people's excitement and reaction to the release of the latest output of J. K. Rowling. I would have to agree with and emphasize Frank's reaction. Anything that gets kids into books is an extraordinarily good thing.

Everything's packed and we're about ready to go. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, we've got one backstage tour, and four plays to see this week. The plays are Henry V, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, and The Man Who Came To Dinner. Of course that last is not from Bill, but instead written by Kaufman and Hart, but a good show. I have worked productions of Man and Shrew (I used to do technical theatre, aka sound and light). Anyway, time to wrap this up and take care of last things. Have a lovely week - I will probably remain connected by email (unless the laptop dies), and possibly there will be short posts. TTFN.


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