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.

Well, unless I believe that (A), the book is going to sell a million copies (of course it is!) or (B) I'll stop by a 7-11 this afternoon and pick up a winning Lotto ticket, then I guess Mondays like this, getting up and going to work, are going to keep happening. Ah, well. Keeps life interesting, anyway.

Welcome back, sorry for the interruption in service. Tom's ribbing aside, the Linux box kept chugging away last week. Unfortunately, the DSL Modem de-sync'd. This means that the modem is no longer talking to the mating piece of equipment in the nearby Pacbell CO, and no packets get through to Grendel. When I got home, popping the power switch on the modem was all it took. So, following the advice of Dan Bowman and Matt Beland, I am getting some hardware (ordered) and software (downloaded) to address this problem. More as events progress.

Marcia's trip update is here, pictures are here, and mine is over here, if you're interested in such things.

On tap for this week we have LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, right in my backyard, as it were. Additionally, Marcia's got dental surgery, and who knows what's going to happen at work. I sure don't. Ah, yesterday. Right. I finished Troubleshooting, and re-created most of the pictures for the other chapters. A little more of that and those'll be done, then on into the next chapter. Now off to work with me. Have a great day and I'll see you later.

18:15 - Good evening. Busy, busy: more screen shots to get, and some playing about with Samba GUI tools is on tonight's plate. So here's this - a nice bit of in-bound email to brighten a young hack's afternoon:

From: "Holden Aust"
Subject: Thompson takes to Linux ?!?
To: [email protected]

Bill,

  I've been meaning to write and thank you for your musings and comments on 
Linux on your site. I've been reading a number of the Day Notes sites and, 
although I still have to work on Windows PCs at work and for friends and relatives, 
I'm trying to move to Linux, both at work and after hours, as fast as I can. At work 
we're in the planning (and testing) stages of moving most of our desktops and 
notebooks over to Linux and I'm really close to the point of telling my friends and 
relatives that "I don't do Windows anymore" (I've already got most of them setup 
as dual-boot Linux/Windows PCs). So it's good to read a Day Notes site where 
somebody uses and discusses Linux.

  I see that over at Bob Thompson's site, he recounts another, all-to-typical, 
horrible experience with that RAOBM (Really Awful OS that Bill Makes). He's 
hopping mad and says that he's finally going to give Linux on the Desktop a real 
try with help from you and Tom Syroid. I sure hope you guys can help him get 
over the rocky parts of the Linux path and get him to the Promised Land (the one 
where you don't take rebooting and crashing and the process of installing apps 
trashing the OS for granted as just the way PCs are). Based on some comments 
he has made on his site, I'm a bit afraid that his attitude may be like a lot of people 
who say, "I'll use Linux when it looks like, feels like, and works exactly like 
Windows." I usually try to suggest that even though Linux isn't exactly like 
Windows, it is just about as easy to use, that there is more than one way to do 
things, and its incredible stability more than compensates for whatever it might 
lack today. If Thompson does start using Linux and recommending it, even 
Pournelle might give it a try!

  I imagine that you and Tom are going to recommend Caldera's distro to him, 
because of the experience you've gained in writing your book (which I look 
forward to reading). I bought my second or third copy of Caldera a year ago last 
spring, but its neat new GUI installer locked up on a couple of PCs that had ATI 
Mach64-based Video Expression boards in them, so I continued using SuSE, 
which I've been using for a couple of years. Recently I been trying Corel's distro 
in conjunction with their Word Perfect Office suite and have been generally very 
impressed with it. Corel has the easiest install so far (easier than Windows, in fact) 
and I'm getting very fond of the DEB Debian-based installer and Corel's enhanced 
control panel.

  I don't know whether you've looked at Corel or SuSE, lately, but you should be 
able to pickup CDs at the Linux World Expo. Corel says they will have their brand 
new "Second Edition" of their distro at the show - I'm going to pickup one for myself 
and one I've promised to send to Tom Syroid. Perhaps I'll see you there, although 
with the number of attendees they're predicting, it looks like it might be hard to meet 
up with someone, even if you were planning to meet them.

  Good luck to you and Tom in getting Bob up to speed with Linux.

                                  - - - Holden

Holden - 

Thanks for taking the time to write. Don't feel bad - you're not the 
first person to make the leap from my last name of Bilbrey, and start 
calling me Bill, nor will you be the last...

Linux is actually a pretty good desktop environment - though it wants 
an expert or a guru for the networking aspects from time to time. 
Distributions (several of them) have made some great strides in the 
last year, heh!

Bob is gonna be just fine with Linux. Like trying on new shoes, there'll 
be fitting pains, and a strong desire to pitch the whole thing out the 
window from time to time. As much as some people want Linux to be 
just like Windows, it isn't and it ain't. Interoperability is cool, and I 
could set up a Linux box that my mom or my sister could use, pain free. 
Could they set it up themselves? Not quite yet. 

One of the big buggaboos from Bob's perspective is the linking in of 
Windows shares... right now that isn't very intuitive, and there's a lot to 
learn, not to mention the fact that brothers Bill and Steve would like 
very much to make Samba fail to work properly (and may have 
temporarily succeeded with this special kerobus / Active Directory 
setup thing. 

Caldera's 2.4 eDesktop works really much better than 2.2 or 2.3 - it 
uses the 3.3.6 XFree packages, and the Mach64 driver seems pretty 
solid, it even recognizes the ATI Mach64 Mobility chipset in Gryphon 
the Acer Travelmate.

I suggested to Bob that if he goes for ease of use on his first distro, that 
we tie his hands behind his back, and throw him into a Debian install 
(not the fancy Corel version, but Debian 2.1, eh?). He graciously ignored 
me, probably thinking that he can bring in a Kerrier from the blind side 
while Malcolm reads a couple of HOWTO documents, then builds a 
running firewall box out of two discarded toilet paper rolls, a broken 
lightbulb and some tin foil, three bits of string and a NiCad battery, 
running FreeBSD. 

I have yet to muck with either Corel or SuSE, mostly for lack of time. The 
problem I perceive with SuSE is the packaging issue... .deb is cool and 
very, very good, .rpm is prevalent, and SuSE uses .tgz with some 
dependency features duct-taped to the side? Or am I mis-understanding?

I will definitely be collecting at the show - I'd really like to do an 
install-fest book next - that'd be fun. If there's no takers, then I might do 
that here, anyway. We'll see.

You *do* know what I look like, flag me down if you see me tomorrow - 
I'll be there most of the day.  

Take care,

Brian

Happy day. LinuxWorld Expo and Conference for me this day. Ya, ya, ya - I know, and my feet hurt already, just thinking about it, but cool toys, neat people and bad food - just can't be beat. And maybe I'll run into Holden, always fun to watch the world get smaller.

Debian 2.2 is out, but don't bother just yet - the FTP servers are swamped, and I am not sure that everything got out to the mirrors properly. This happened with the initial release of Gnome Helix as well - the primary servers got so busy that the mirrors only got partial data, then couldn't server their constituency properly... the announcement about Debian 2.2 is out, and there are installation manuals for the major architectures (including SPARC, Tom!!!) are over here. Hee-Haw.

Now to get on the phone with MCI and straighten out a little bit of a billing problem with them - fall out from yesterday's battle with PBI over the same billing issue I thought we had resolved last month. Sigh. Have a great day, I'll be back later with photo's and a show report.

17:37 - Hi. Should'a checked the batteries... sigh. I got a half a picture, I think of the Red Hat booth, and that's it. O'Reilly was selling books, Linux Mall was selling Penguin Mints, The Linux Store was selling just about everything else, including unoccupied booth space, I think (and doing a good job - no empty spaces left, good, active crowd). I was right, my feet do hurt. I want to take a nap in the worst way (standing up in a hailstorm in Texas would be a pretty bad way to doze, huh?). And yes, the batteries are charging. I hadn't done so at the end of our trip to Michigan, 'cause I did not want to forget the batteries and charger in the hotel room. Instead, I forgot to recharge (both sets) when we returned home.

Scores: Debian 2.1 shrinkwrap box with the O'Reilly title, Learning Debian Linux, PLUS Debian 2.2 hot off the presses. Hmmm. Sendmail Switch longsleeve shirt and some sort of promo disc, Caldera T-Shirt plus another full set of release disks. Linux Wizardry disc, Appgen PowerWindows NFR - an accounting app. StarOffice 5.2 CD, Mandrake 7.1 GPL, Abria SQL-Lite (a support and service product built around the newly GPL'd MySQL. Maximum Linux for September/October. More stickers than I can shake a stick at. I will be able to Linux-brand every flat surface in this apartment (and isn't Marcia going to appreciate that, eh?).

Nearly got off on the wrong foot, though... Tearing around the parking lot (one of the last three cars allowed into this particular lot), and screeched around a corner into a compact space. The door opener in the adjoining space quickly (and fortunately) pulled leg and door back, a good thing, too. It was Linus. I would hate to have to report on my website: "Ummm. Took Linus off at the knee today." That would DEFINITELY have been a bad move. Alan Cox would have had to get out the Beer Truck Book (unabashedly stolen from Matt Beland).

A heap of emails out of IDG from Tom. Sounds like work, looks like work... guess it's time to get to it. TTFN.


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Welcome to camel day. Tired. Between all the walking about, and going through Author Reviews for three (3) chapters yesterday evening, I am a little fried. Seriously, there are times when I'd much rather be playing than writing... (even though most of the time the writing is playing, if you catch my drift - I *am* enjoying myself immensely most of the time, except for the lack-of-a-life thing).

Lot's of things I am interested in looking at, working with, but one thing, one thing at a time, please. The VAX production lines at Compaq are shutting down, Michael Dell talks good about Linux and the desktop, while Michael Cowpland deserts the Corel ship. Culled from Slashdot and the Register.

Out of time, must run. Finished a sheetmetal layout on Monday - have to do the Silkscreen artwork for it today, as well as a modified version of an existing PCB design to fit a new housing. Then, if that goes as smoothly as it should, then I have to do some data sheet work - we're still way behind the curve on those, and some of the more recent ones have the wrong Fax number on them. Later.


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Morning. Sorry I didn't make it back yesterday, but it was an *extremely* eventful day, some of which I am not a liberty to discuss. Good things going on: I finished the PCB that I mentioned yesterday, and even squidged the design enough to fit 24 boards onto the same panel that used to only yield 16 pieces. It still mechanically fits the new housing, too (required, of course). Didn't get much done on anything else except email, unplanned meetings, and a number of heavy customer support calls. These were heavy because they were end-users who are purchasing stuff onesy-twosy, and need lots of guidance. I can't send them to a distributor, because then they'll get no help at all. I figure the payoff is in people feeling good about working with ETS, and that word getting around to potentially larger customers. Sounds like sales and marketing stuff, huh?

Christmas is coming early! I have the last of the needed Linux office suite packages in hand - yup, Corel came through - they're supposed to be shipping to Tom as well, but even though they're a Canadian firm, I came first. Probably this is payback for Tom getting RS6000 and Sparc hardware to play with.

Also in yesterday's haul - X10. Out of the box, plugged into the things I wanted to work with (the DSL modem and a nearby lamp)... and nothing. Well. I could dig into the software that I tried first, Flipit, and figure out what I was doing wrong, or fix the code, if necessary... but just at this moment I am rather results-oriented. So I went back out and got BottleRocket, another package for working with the CM17A (Firecracker) transceiver/controller. These are command line utilites. That's fine, since I don't need GUI control, I need it to work with the Downtime perl script that Matt modified.

So I compiled and installed Bottlerocket, and it just worked, every time. (Flipit, in many command attempts, from both machines in case I had a hardware problem, managed to turn the DSL modem OFF once. Never on, and I couldn't control the light at all.) BottleRocket works like a champ, cool since the stated revision is only 0.04c. Tymm Twillman, the author must have lots of cool enhancements planned to bring this up to rev. 1.

Then I started trying to work the tested and ready BottleRocket with Downtime. My system must be configured differently than Matt's, or something... I had to make changes to the script to make it run, which I am going to detail back to Matt later today, so that he can tell me how silly I am. Bottom line: it works. I have a little more testing I want to accomplish, but it's running, and loaded into memory at boot by having inserted the downtime command into rc.local. Why? Now when the DSL modem loses sync, the system will detect the loss, and if no return within a minute, then power-cycle the DSL modem to reset and re-sync. Hurrah.

I did not have a chance to work with the Corel package at all, yet, since I have gotten Author Review chapters back from Tom and <sickly grin> we're slogging through the changes from the DE, TE and CE. </sickly grin> That kept me occupied until my eyes were crossed. Now off to work with me. I'll only be putting in a half day at the salt mines today, as Marcia is getting her gums flayed by a peridontist this afternoon, and I will be around for the hand holding and the designated driving... Y'all have a lovely day, and I might see you later (probably).

Hi. Back again. I actually bailed out of work at about 10:30 or so, and fired off home again. Marcia called me to let me know that her dental surgery had been moved up to 11:30 (from 2:45). We got her there with 5 minutes to spare. Probably the early start was a very good thing, because she was in the chair for nearly 4 hours. Now she's resting comfortably, and I have just finished second review on Chapter 3, which included a major rework of a small section - this added two pages to the chapter. Whew. Now to decide what to write next. Probably Chapter 6. Hmmm. Got to get to it. TTFN. Oh, BTW, check out Nautilus - preview release 1 is out. I'll do that before I start writing. Later.


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Good morning. Welcome to Friday. Marcia is resting (reasonably) comfortably, following her encounter with the peridontist, but won't be going to work today - too many meds for that purpose. You are welcome to wish her well - I know she likes to get the mail, although she didn't even approach her machine last night, which also tells you something.

Well, briefly, I did get Nautilus (starting point: http://download.eazel.com/, it does work, I could not make it segfault - all good things. Recommends getting (and using) the Mozilla M17 release for browser functionality (that's right, another FM with browser built in... ::sigh::, but at least it isn't *built* in, rather just called). Since I was installing Mozilla anyway, I thought I'd try Galeon again - it's been another couple of versions since I was unhappy with it. Cool - much more stable, fast with a couple of features I really like - especially that the Javascript functionality is broken. That's perfect from my perspective. I may just stick with this as my primary browser (but who knows, I have some office suites to work through shortly... <grin>

I really should head off to work, since I am unlikely to pull a full shift today. Ok, off into the drive with me. Take care, y'all and I'll see you later.


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Trust me, it's all in your mind... it just seems later than normal. Of course I love using that word "normal", it's such a hoot! Nothing internal for me there. The facade is fun, though. You may think I've been lazy - well, I did sleep in a bit, but also I've been doing chores and puttering about this AM, sucking in caffeine and generally preparing for the day. Watered the patio farm, seen pictured here at left - it's doing well, though I need to do a spray to combat the Aphids again, later today. A mild soap solution seems to work best, and harms the plants not at all.

Ah. Hi. Sorry about yesterday - had thoughts all afternoon and evening about a second post, but never quite got around to it. Busy working on Chapter 6 - banged out about 10 pages - I have hopes of finishing both that and a round of Author Review on Chapter 4 today, so I am going to hold this post down a bit. Did see a few interesting things, though.

First, WeirdStuff is still around. Their store had been across the street from the old original Fry's in Sunnyvale, off of Lawrence Expressway. One day I noticed that Weird Stuff was gone, and was sad. They have the coolest collections of odd hardware, cables, tube amplifiers, ADM3A terminals and more. As the linked name shows, they are still alive, even though they have a nasty ugly website (IMNSHO), and their store merely moved. I have another trip to make soon.

Next, for those interested in firewalls and packet filters, here's YAHTD (Yet Another HOWTO Document), the IP Filter Based Firewalls HOWTO. The IP Filter package competes with ipfwadm, ipchains, and ipfw. The author really likes IP Filter, though, and I learned a couple of interesting things. Worth a gander. On the hot from the grill section, check out the new HOWTO, Linux 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO, from Rusty Russell.

There. That's enough to keep you busy for a bit. Now for me to get to work. Have a lovely day.

18:00 - Evening (well, late afternoon, anyway)! Thought I'd surface for a bit and see how the world's holding up. Mid-70's, breezy all day, clear skies. Nice. A day or so, Gary Berg wrote to inquire about Cygwin, the GNU toolset, ported to the windows environment. I remember using something similar (MKS?... just a moment... ya, MKS) back in the mid-1980's to have a shell environment on the DOS box I was using. I could use NFS to link to the Sun boxes that the software dev guys used... Cool stuff. Now Gary's touting Cygwin to me, which is cooler, as it is all GPL, and very compatible with what I do in Linux. Hmmm. I told him I'd play with it in my spare time . . . in November.

Subject: RE: CygWin
    Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 13:44:45 -0400
    From: "Gary M. Berg" 
      To: "Brian Bilbrey" 

Brian,

Well, I sucked about 14Mb of the Cygwin stuff down to my system (through my
modem, sigh) and played with it. It exploded into about 45Mb of stuff. I
pulled down most everything but the gcc compiler and gdb debugger (I skipped
them based on size/time).

It seems to run very nicely, giving a full BASH shell capability. I wish
that the "less" program was more like a standard "List" utility (like
LIST.COM or the LIST command in 4NT) but I borrowed the "more" program from
the MKS toolkit I have installed to do that. I prefer paging through man
pages in a full-screen list mode using all of the PgUp, PgDn, etc. keys.

I'm not sure how that BASH shell compares with the KSH shell I'm used to
from our work HP. Realistically I'll probably just use most of the programs
from the 4NT command line and skip BASH unless I need it for a shell command
file.

I'm not in a good position to really evaluate it all, but most everything
I've tested works. I had some trouble with the "info" program but that's
about it. Well, I had trouble with "man" until I download the "groff"
package !

Heh. Sounds like fun. I really do wish I had time to play with it. I
am filing these away for a rainy day. Thanks a bunch.

Good Morning. Lots of fun email this AM - that's all I've been doing for the last hour as I cut down the haemoglobin levels in my caffeine stream, speaking of which . . . yup, it's time for a refill. Ah. You wouldn't be able to fool me by switching with a really good decaf - I would know by taste. Caffeine starts the party right on the tastebuds.

In other news, it appears that there is a nascent version 0.5 of Bluefish on available by CVS. I may want to check this out - each release of the HTML editor has been chock full of worthwhile feature additions and enhancements. Ah, don't have to bother with CVS, there's a development snapshots page! Cool. New small toy to play with for 15 minutes before progressing with my day.

The good and bad news. Galeon is ALMOST good enough. I can't easily open new windows (I really like button 3 click to open link in new window), and I can't initiate downloads at all via the browser. Hmm, for me that just doen't make it. OTOH, it doesn't crash on me at all, so I can use it for standard browsing, and pop the url into Netscrape when I need to fetch something. Oh, and Galeon renders clean and fast. The Register looks good, as does ZDNet and Slashdot (all three challenging sites for a browser).

Speaking of the Register, in this article, RMS blesses Sun for the forthcoming release of StarOffice under the GPL. Whooohooo!

Now to climb into my working day. Take care, see ya later.


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