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 (such as it is). In review, I played and shopped on Saturday, starting and finishing a game called The Crystal Key from DreamCatcher. Some gorgeous graphics, but the style of play very nearly leads you through the game by the hand. Also Saturday was a shopping day in several ways, with Costco (minimal) and Safeway (major, stocking) runs. The shopping day ended at Outpost.com, where I picked up an Acer Travelmate 600TER.

Why Outpost? I've never shopped there before, but both Bob Thompson and JHR have, both with apparent satisfaction. Also I like the "free" shipping concept. Of course it's still built into the price, but at least there's no decision to make (and/or screw up) - free 'overnight' shipping. That means they should ship today, given that I ordered on Saturday, early evening.

Svenson alert: his site may be down for a while as his new provider shifts server farms. The Svenson backup daily link is here.

Tom and I had a couple of chats on various topics, some of which is documented on his Saturday and/or Sunday log of travails with the HP Pavillion. In followup searching for further resources, I re-happened across the newsgroup that addresses Caldera Linux products, alt.os.linux.caldera. I had been there early on in our book project, then it kind of dropped off the radar. Time for another pass through, since there's always an opportunity to learn more.

Time and past time that I should be gone. Have a great day, see you later-ish.

Mornin'. Tuesday, gray, far too early for my taste - I've been ruined by vacation {Grin}. Some good news, some less good news. The good news is that I picked up the printed-on-dead-trees version of the ETS catalog from the Pine Press yesterday. Ya, I ferry the actual product, too, since they're close to our apartment. IMNSHO, these look really nice - the printers do a very good job. The less good news is that the Acer notebook is still in process at Outpost. Hmmm - I talked to them yesterday and everything was supposedly done?

HP problems crop up here, too, y'know.I installed the spare 15G drive in Marcia's Pavillion 4445, the week before we left. Yes, I read the directions; yes, I had trouble, talked about it here, and got some assistance. Problem now is that the CDROM drive is extraordinarily intermittent - I can see a disc in the drive perhaps one time in 30, usually only right after a reboot. Hmmm. Time for a service call.

Tidbits from the news and other items - Sun to propose issuing StarOffice under GPL, how enlightened! Partition managers for resizing and more that run under DOS or Linux: Ranish, fips, GNU Parted. I have located several recommendations for Ranish recently on a couple of active newsgroups, and found fips on the COLeD2.4 disk. GNU Parted has a current announcement over on Freshmeat. Ooooh, nice little report on the weekend's geomagnetic (solar flare driven) storm, over on CNN.

Now to water the farm, then off to work with me. I've been trolling newsgroups and the web looking for people with problems or success stories in updating old versions of Caldera OpenLInux.... not a whole lot there. Hmmm. Today I complete a board design, and work up the sheet metal to fit around it. Then redesign another chassis that turns out to be too expensive to make (That's probably for tomorrow). Have a lovely day yourselves. TTFN.


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As usual, yesterday didn't proceed as planned. Good Morning! I began and ended my working day with extended on-hold sessions and reviewing talking points with both Outpost and the credit card company, trying to ensure that somebody did what they promised. Sigh. After many trials and tribulations, and at least two hours on the phone yesterday, I see that the laptop shipped last night. Given that I have a payment in from IDG, I could have paid cash for the stinking thing, but it's hard to transfer green across the wire - it doesn't recover well from the packetization process. Hmmm. All this was not Outpost's fault, it's just that the right, left and gripping hands at Amex all have their figurative heads up their literal... OK, I'll be nice... Heh. Anyway, it's on it's way, should be with me this AM.

Other bits of yesterday were consumed with unanticipated schedule adjustments - as I was opening up the design process for the video/audio distribution box we're working on, it came to light that we needed a quick board re-design for the S-Video+Audio balun to take advantage of component changes we've made to other product families. Hmmm. There went the morning. Then the afternoon was consumed with meetings. One more of those this morning at 10. Probably just as the laptop turns up.

The king is dead, long live the king. Ziff-Davis succumbs to the fat wallet of C|Net. The tab for this deal is about $1.6B as a stock swap - C|Net for ZDNet and Ziff-Davis (at different rates, of course, the online portion has greater "value"). Also, Sun made it official, StarOffice 6 to be released under GPL this fall. Whoooo-Hoooo!

Have a great day. Hopefully my toughest task today will be naming the new machine. First Grendel, then Grinch, and now ... ??? Any suggestions? Later.


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Good day to ye. A decent day all 'round yesterday, and about bloody time, too. Too much time on hold inbetween short bouts with customer disservice reps is an effective fun-killing pastime. Got lots of responses to the name the laptop query yesterday...

But first, thanks to Bob Thompson for clarifying the various ways I can screw up when setting up an IDE chain - I ended up getting a known non-cable select cable and a back-up CDROM drive set up and running in Marcia's HP Pavillion. It wasn't and isn't straight-forward: The first time I connectored outside the box, it worked. Once I assembled and screwed everything back together, it didn't work. Back out of the box, stretched out, swapped connectors and so forth (I may have a bad power connection, send me to PPC soon), then assembled and tested into the box again, a little at a time. This time it worked, and apparently continues to work today. Hmmm. Thanks for the assist, Bob.

The name suggestions included, mostly by order of receipt: Grumpy (2), Grace, Grouch (2), Griffon, Gruesome, Gollum, Gloin, Grody and finally any non-lead character from my current Fantasy book. Thanks to Marcia, Dan Bowman, Gary Berg, Bob Thompson, Gary again, Bob again, David Yerka, John Ricketson and Sjon Swijsen (no, can't type that one properly every day, sorry). We've (we being my internal committee) settled on a modification of the above, Gryphon, a good name for a travelling box. There's a tale behind the Mandrake install you see on the picture, but it shall wait for this evening. Short version: everything works, so far.

Have an interesting day and I'll catch up with y'all later.


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Howdy. TGIF. Well, from my end of the world, the Internet sucks rocks. Well, not the whole Internet, but possibly some key name servers or routers someplace. Mostly makes Netscape fall over dead, and lynx just times out too quickly for things to resolve. Maybe it's about time to install a caching nameserver and move up to Triple-A ball. I can eventually get to Bob's place (actually Pair's place, in Chicago) which implies that I should be able to reach Steve Tucker as well . . . Hmmm. Everything just miraculously came back to life - someone must have pushed reset. Well, then, I suggest you check this week's Clue. Marcia's talking about Yosemite for next year, and I still have Moshe's Admissions of a Penguinista sitting in my PBI inbox, waiting for me to learn more about ProcMail.

Installing Linux on Gryphon the Acer Notebook was a bit more of an adventure than I originally expected. The Linux part has gone fine (mostly), the excitement came from making Windows shove over in the hard drive. First and foremost problem, OF COURSE, this system doesn't come with proper CD's. It comes with steenking recovery discs. Since I don't own a real copy of Partition Magic (just the lobotomized copy that is bundled with OpenLinux 2.4), I generally just save data, a good idea in any case, repartition and re-install - good for cleaning out the dross in the system, too.

This I did. Then I pop in the recovery disk, expecting to tell it to install in the newly created partition. Nope, it runs a lobotomized version of Norton Ghost - mucks the partition table back to "normal", taking the whole drive back for Windows, and reinstalling all the grud. Sigh. Route one fails miserably.

Now I do have a trick for fooling the Caldera Edition of Partition Magic. PMCE has only 4 ways hard-coded in to break up a drive. Three of these involve saying how much space is going to be used for Linux, all three fairly limiting and not at all what I want. The fourth is "Maximum", which takes over all of the available drive space, leaving Windows with just 100 Meg free. Not a particularly acceptable choice if you plan on having a USEFUL dual boot system. However, let's say that I have 800M used by Windows right now. After defragging, I copy five ISO images onto the drive, making Windows total usage amount to around 4 Gig. Now I can run the PM, Caldera Edition. Then when I delete the ISO images, I have a little over 3 Gig of free space in my Windows partition, and all the room I wanted for Linux. Good idea, neh? I didn't do that, though, sounds too easy. I'd rather test something else that might not work.

Now you must know that I was headed towards Mandrake. I have heard rumors that DiskDrake, the partition manager tool written by Mandrake coders works quite well at many things, including re-sizing FAT and FAT32 partitions. Hmmm. OK. In goes the Mandrake 7.1 Hydrogen boot CD. Everything appears to be initially recognized properly. When I get to DiskDrake, I click on the resize button for the disk-filling Windows partition, and give it a new size, 4 Gig. Things trundle for a while, then come back, showing me 7.5 G of free space in which to play. Cool. Now I could have done the proper thing, terminate the install and test the windows boot... Nah! I continued with the install, under the usually misplaced but eternally optimistic assumption that everything was going to turn out all right. It did. I had to run scandisk to clean up a few odds and ends, but Windows still works.

In Mandrake 7.1 Linux, I have 1024x768x32bpp screen resolution, a working NIC, and things I might be able to do to get the modem and sound card running. The touchpad works fine, though occasionally it is easier to work with an external rodent, and X doesn't switch on the fly, if I plug in a mobile mouse. Then I just have to restart X and log back in, a matter of a few seconds. I did some battery testing yesterday, and got 3 hours of real work, no resting, by continuously downloading and installing software and utilities. This took the battery down to about 30%. Oh, yeah, battery monitoring and warning works fine in Linux. Then I used apm to suspend the machine, and left it suspended for the afternoon. 3.5 hours of suspence left the machine with 5% battery. Not too shabby. I have not found evidence that true hibernation works. Also, I will probably swap over to Caldera 2.4 this weekend - testing for the book, doncha know.

Now to get ready to take Marcia to the airport - she's off to a sales meeting in Arid-zona (State Motto - "Yeah, but it's a dry heat."), today through Sunday. Lucky her... heh heh heh. Have a great day. Later.


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Good morning, boys and girls. Can you say sleep deprivation? I knew you could! Great job. Hmmm. That's the lead in for the top story of the morning: I finished reading Alison Sinclair's Legacies. (That's just a plain link, I don't affiliate.) The publisher's blurb on the linked page is flatly horrid, and had I read that before I picked up the book, I probably wouldn't have. However, I found this in a bookstore up in Ashland, and the cover had a quote on it from Lucius Shepard, comparing Legacies to the work of Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke. This I have to read, just to be able to scream WRONG! later. Not a barn-burner of a start, but I stuck to it, since it has an interestingly woven past and present narrative structure. I picked it up last night, the last half of the book left, to read myself to sleep. I finished the last page at 2:30am. Whooo, a good ride. Definitely E-Ticket. This one goes on my re-read shelf.

I loaded OpenLinux 2.4 eDesktop on Gryphon (the Acer Travelmate 600TER) yesterday. It seemed to find everything (except the WinModem) just fine, including sound. The install was clean, fast and correct, terminating in a first boot that was nearly trouble free, with the exception of amd, which was giving trouble for connectivity reasons I will address momentarily. I mucked about a bit, then rebooted to test that the Win98 partition was still working and available. Yup. Back into OpenLinux, where it hung, HARD, on the PCMCIA initialization part of the boot sequence. Hmmm. I tried a couple of ways to get past it (not having a boot floppy, not having a floppy drive)... Sigh. Actually, in hindsight, I could have used the LinuxCare Bootable Business card to get in and mod things, but I didn't.

Then I tried Debian. I had downloaded the 2.1.x Binary Image ISO dating from December 1999 yesterday (again? I thought I snagged this last week sometime, but couldn't find it anywhere on my disks.) Now 2.1 uses the 2.0.38 kernel, as Debian is a fairly conservative distribution, without the same frenetic upgrade pace as the commercial distros. Now, there is a "Frozen" version, which is very nearly the release form of Debian 2.2 Potato (they name their versions after Toy Story characters, 2.1 was Slink, the next development version is called Woody), however there are no ISO images for frozen Potato and I have no floppy to do a standard install.

There's good news, though. Debian is the finest GNU/Linux distribution for upgrades there is. The .deb package format (equivalent, sort of, to .rpm) carries a lot more information, and the Debian tools (apt, and its bretheren) are better at package conflict resolution. So I installed a base 2.1 system, and dove out of the install at the package selection point. I modified the /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to fast, local sources for the Frozen version, and typed:

apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade

This got the lists of available packages from the online servers, nearly 4000 packages available these days. Then dist-upgrade upgraded all my existing installed software for the base installation to the pre-2.2 version, including getting new, necessary packages, and asking me configuration questions along the way. Then I used the Frozen package list at debian.org and got gcc, libraries, development libraries and kernel sources for 2.2.17pre6-1, the most recent kernel moved into the Frozen tree. Configured, compiled and installed 2.2.17, rebooted (needs must for hardware changes AND kernel installs). Picked up bits of X as recommended on this page and brought X right up, as XFree86 3.3.6-9 and above provide support for the ATI Rage Mobility AGP card built into Gryphon. Haven't got sound yet (and really, don't care if I do at the moment)... I have since upgraded to HelixCode Gnome and the Sawmill WM. Nice. I can replicate this again later, but will return this afternoon to eDesktop to MAKE it work, so we can describe how, in the book.

Connectivity problems. Do not add a new machine, willy-nilly, to a network with a paranoid setup like mine. The moment I tried to do anything but surf with Gryphon, I broke his connectivity. Grendel wouldn't pass packets anymore... It took me a while to figure this out, of course, since it had started off by working, and I have done so many installs on Gryphon in the last few days that I figured I was doing something wrong at the laptop end. Then I had my AH-Haaa moment, and checked the server log files for system attacks from an unknown system at the internal IP I am using for Gryphon. HA! Portsentry was on the J.O.B. Fixed and back on line in a trif - a good thing to have fixed, or the Debian bit never would have flown, since it was primarily a network/FTP install.

Even though I was awake until 02:30, I was upright again at 7:45, out having my hair cut at 8:45, and stopped at the store for a few essentials. With Marcia down in Arid-zona (109°F yesterday), I was considering the Thompson method - Open bag of chips; Eat. But instead I picked up some donuts for breakfast, and some milk, burrito shells and Italian Roast Coffee ice cream - I'll make 'ritos for supper tonight. Fresh pot of coffee brewed and half gone, rest in the butler and the kitchen is clean, this post is done, and I can get on with my working day. Have an interesting one yourself. TTFN.

From: "Matthew Harting" 
To: [email protected]
Subject: Linux Versions
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 11:27:09 -0500


I came across your site through the daynotes.com index and I noticed 
that you have worked with several versions of Linux. One of the 
companies I work for is going to be setting up a mail server and web 
server in the near future. The database we are using (D3 from Pick 
systems www.picksys.com) says it will run under the Red Hat and Mandrake 
Linux distributions. I was wondering if you had any recommendations 
about which would be easier to set up? The system for the mail & web 
servers would be separate for the database server, however I only want 
to learn the ins and outs of one distribution. I will be used as a 
server only, not for a desktop or workstation.

Thank you for your assistance.

Matt Harting

Hi, Matt. Nice to hear from you. 

Mandrake vs. Red Hat. Hmmm. I like both distributions. For quite a
while Mandrake was simply a re-packager of the Red Hat GPL edition,
with extra gee-gaws added, some cleaner integration of such things
as KDE, and a nicer installer. That latter is not to be discounted,
since a blown installation will drive a user away, or so I've heard.

I briefly had a gander at the D3 installation guide from picksys.com
- they sure are *clear* that they support only Red Hat's version of
Linux. Of course, they tell you Mandrake as well, since Mandrake
uses the same filesystem hierarchy (as opposed to FHS, which is
still in development). 

There are a couple of really nice features which are available from 
the Mandrake installer that I didn't see in the RH 6.2 install
(doesn't mean they aren't there, but I do always run expert install
so that I can see all the options, I hope). That is baseline
security levels - Mandrake offers 5 security levels, from (and I
paraphrase) "Hi, Kiddies" to "Ultra Hyper Paranoid" - the levels
have to do with services enabled and running, etc. This does not
change the requirement for a user to manually check and harden an
installation.

The advantage that RH brings to the table, in a corporate
environment, is brand recognition and support. RH is the (current)
widest distribution, and if there's any question at the rarified PH
(Pointy Haired) levels, then on the face of it, RH is a safer bet.

For purposes of getting the job done, either will do.

OK, I am upright. Good morning. Yesterday I spent much of the day spelunking through the Caldera website, Knowledge Base, and following up leads on assorted things. As a sidelight, I find (as I went to suspend Gryphon, and failed) that apm, the linux user-space power management utilities aren't installed ... Sigh, I thought I did an All Packages install ... Ok, so I did. Caldera doesn't include the apmd package in their distribution. I wonder if the correct hooks are compiled into the default kernel... and according to the KB article, they don't provide support for said. I wonder why?

About the pictures - Yup, Gryphon came with a few extra gee-gaws. Didn't have them in my specification list. We have an intro version of IBM's Via Voice, and a little video camera (which is, I think, a private-labeled Logitech unit). Cute. As you can see from the pictures above, Gryphon and I can do dueling cameras. Maybe I should have called him HAL...

The Via Voice I got up and running with minimal training, and boy, does that ever show. Below is an exceprt of a reading I did. The base text is Dan Bowman's post from yesterday morning. I laughed pretty hard at myself over this one. As I noted to Tom (sort of), it might be interesting to send an entire chapter of OLS to IDG, dictated this way... OK, so I'd never work in this town again. Certainly made me think of Arthur's introduction to one of the cargo bays in the Heart of Gold, and holding back the door behind which monkeys are clamoring to talk about this script they've come up with for Hamlet...

it's a travel a decade and you were packed enough last night the dead meat
may make it out of here corded heat builds up to much heat being relative
good thank prelates have to the coastal weather in B.C., when the weather is
nice and the Central Valley as it was over the July 4th holiday a coastal
weather is usually Wendy cold and just no fun for the Santa sectors when the
weather in the valley is hot and stagnant as it's been for last few days and
projected for the next several coastal weather usually starts out foggy in
the morning and clearest warm, after an.  The beach time starts later, but
also extends to sundown.  We're hoping it's real hard at home or abroad ...
paragraph

that blasted Belgrade ... he did it to meet again and here's an excerpt from
an e-mail I sent his way last night:

Heh. I'm Belgrade, huh? Anyway. I did pick up a USB SmartMedia reader at Frys the other day, and by way of testing, shot a few more pictures of the patio farm. They're over on this page, as I didn't want to inflict too many pictures on you in one day without you having a say in the matter. As usual, descriptions and linked file sizes are in the Alternate Text - float your mouse over the thumbnail to see what you're going to look at.

I awoke to Marcia's call this morning, and we had a nice little chat - this is a nice thing, we are a good team, y'see, and I rather miss her. She did meet up with Keri and Matt Beland last night, enjoyed her visit with them a lot, I think. Now, I am going to get to the bottom of this apm thing, then dive into writing. Y'all have a great day! Later.


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