| « The effects of drugs | Ultimate deletion » |
Sat, Oct 25, 2008
![[Icon]](rsc/img/chain_link.gif)
As mentioned earlier, I installed Linux on somebody's laptop recently. Somebody who just wants to see what Linux is like, not somebody who knows much (or anything) about it.
I installed Ubuntu, in fact. And I was going to give a quick explanation of some of the differences. I was going to start with the "everything is a file that forms part of the one, single filesystem" thing. Then I stopped. Because in Ubuntu, when you put in a DVD, it doesn't (appear) to just become another part of the filesystem. It appears on the desktop as a separate disk. To explain what happens is actually quite complicated: It IS mounted as part of the filesystem, but it pretends it isn't.
So I just shut up and left her to it. I couldn't face explaining it. But it annoyed me.
Everything is a file. There is one filesystem, and everything is a part of it. This is a good thing, not something that should be hidden, or masqueraded as the windows-like multiple filesystems..
It made me suddenly very nostalgic for "proper" Linux. A Linux that doesn't hide things or pretend they're different from how they really are. A Linux that isn't all complicated GUIs trying to make things easier and actually just making them more complicated.
Oh yes they do. Put a DVD into an Ubuntu machine, then log out, log in as another user, and try to eject the disc. It won't work, because you're not the owner of the DVD filesystem that's been mounted in /media. The DVD shouldn't even be mounted, certainly not mounted by a specific user.
So I've got a spare partition, I thought I'd put a decent Linux distro on it to be an alternative to my current choices of Vista or Ubuntu. And Linux From Scratch seemed appealing.
But you need to install it from Linux and Ubuntu doesn't work with my laptop's wireless. So can't download the packages.
However, I know from the recent install that the latest version of Ubuntu is really good at wireless. So I installed the latest version over my old version, and it told me I needed firmware, and duly grabbed and installed it. So I was online at last & I downloaded the LFS LiveCD (easy way to get all the packages & patches) and started working through the instructions.
Or at least, tried to. But Ubuntu doesn't come with the ability to compile software and I can never remember the name of the package you need. Hunted it down & got it, tried again. But I got weird linking error messages. So I got annoyed and decided to look into ALFS - automated installation of a base LFS system.
Downloaded it, tried to start it, got the error message that ncurses wasn't installed. Except it is.
Nnnng.
Ubuntu is clearly not a good place to try and install LFS from. Booting off the LiveCD would be a good idea. Only I have no discs to burn it to.
But this is Linux. Everything is a file. There's no difference, to Linux, between an iso file and a physical CD.
So I mounted the ISO image via the loopback, copied the kernel and initrd files to the hard drive, created a grub entry capable of booting off the ISO (root=iso:/dev/XXX:/path/to/lfslivecd.iso) as per the LFS instructions, and booted into the LFS LiveCD from the ISO image.
Try doing THAT with Windows.
The LFS LiveCD is actually a pretty nice environment. Check it out if you need a LiveCD with a nice but lightweight GUI (It's XFCE) with lots of development tools.
ALFS is now perfectly feasible, but errors out right at the start trying to install GCC. The 1GB partition I have is too small to make it through the install process. A completed LFS is small, but the build process requires all the source code and compilation files, it needs more that a gig.
So I mounted my Ubuntu partition, and put the build directory on it instead. The install ran overnight and I woke up this morning to a completed LFS on the big Ubuntu partition. This I copied over to the smaller one. This is perfectly doable, because everything's a file and it makes no difference where it is on the actual disk.
The system isn't bootable yet - I haven't figured out all the things I need in the kernel - but the number of problems you can solve by virtue of the fact that in Linux, everything is a file and filesystems can be mounted and shunted around and chrooted... it's pretty impressive.
And the way DEs and distros are trying to hide "everything's a file" behind icons to auto-mounted DVDs and the like.. Sorry, guys, but I think your approach sucks.
Creative Hedgehog
Colmena colmena. (Quizá del celta *kolm?n?, der. de *k?lmos, paja; cf. bretón kôlôen-wénan, de kôlô, paja, y wénan, abejas). 1. f. Habitación natural de las abejas. 2. f. Enjambre que vive en la colmena. 3. f. Recipiente construido para habitáculo de las abejas. 4. f. Lugar o edificio en el que vive mucha gente apiñada. [...]
28/07/10 - SPN3730 vocabulario 2
Hari's corner
A few of my faves - please comment if you find them interesting
24/07/10 - Photos I've taken - my favourites
Place of Stuff
Joseph‘s story continues… Ten of his eleven brothers travel to Egypt to buy food to get them through the famine. Incidentally, something has occurred to me: in the tales of Joseph, God seems to be more bothered by getting Joseph into a position of power than in either preventing/alleviating the famine or in making the Israelites get [...]
24/07/10 - The Bible ? Joseph is an Evil Genius
Advice From a Single Girl
So Friday (last) started out so well, I knew it was going to be an awesome day.
I slept in (ahhh, bliss) and went for a morning walk to mail some....er...mail (because, seriously, what else can you mail? turtles?) and it was sunny and warm and I hadn't had any caffeine yet so I got myself a Slurpee. Nothing says awesome Summer day like a 10 am Coke Slurpee cooling you down in the sun.
But do you know what really tipped the morning into full-blown awesomeness? The two shirtless, amazingly hot guys who jogged past me, sweaty and gorgeous as I walked home. Ahhhhh, sugar, sun, and sexy, my own personal Summer trifecta.
I went over to where C-Dawg was staying and picked her up (so there would be no driving necessary) and we came back to my apartment, poured ourselves a summer-worthy drink and headed out on the town.
We wandered through downtown, people watching and talking and laughing and window shopping and then we headed to one of the local patios and ordered up a pitcher and some appetizers.
And that's when the real fun began.
You see, C-Dawg and I love people watching. And more than that, we love making up little stories about people and trying to guess who they are. We'd soon discovered that Friday would have to be known as "Everyone Looks Familiar Day" because I kept on seeing people that I thought looked familiar but I couldn't tell if they actually were or if I was just imagining it.
We decided that the couple next to us had just boated in on their yacht and that the guys across from us were all discussing their volleyball league's last game.
We also tried to narrow down which men C felt were too young for me and which she deemed "just right." Once we'd narrowed my age-group down to a ten year span she tested me to see if I could actually tell which guys were ok and which were in the "are you crazy, he's way too young" category.
I did not do well at this. (sigh)
As the pitcher got emptied, a table behind us became filled with a bunch of guys. C-Dawg, needing to "get out of the sun" (which we're pretty sure the guys could tell was an obvious ploy for her to be able to stare at the guys instead of having to pretend to look around and can I just say thank goodness for sunglasses and how easy they make it to check out cute guys?) sat next to me and we started to figure out the back story for these guys.
Later, C decided to choose which of the guys she'd set me up with and when she did she very kindly me that I could go out with the nice, sweet, geeky one because I'm a geek too at which point I protested until she promised she was a geek as well and it wasn't a bad thing. (Strangely enough I know what she means.)
At one point, the waiter came over and there'd been this on-going joke between the three of us because servers kept on trying to bring us food we hadn't ordered and I kept on making this dumb joke about it and then when C-Dawg told me the joke was getting old and the waiter laughed, I turned to him and said (and I quote) "Hey, I'm just going to keep saying it because it never be's not funny!"
At which point he suggested that this wasn't our first patio of the evening and I couldn't stop laughing because I couldn't believe I'd said "be's" and how as I'd said it it had TOTALLY been a word.
Ahhh alcohol, what silly things you do to my brain.
We hit up a few more places after that and went for dinner at my favourite place and then watched an awesomely bad movie back at my place. (Hi, I'm Victoria and I'm going to say the word 'place' as many times as possible in one sentence. I are a good writer.)
It was pretty darn awesome and I'm sure there's more I can think of, like how she wet-willied a statue and how she almost convinced me to give nice geek guy my number and how we sat outside the best ice cream place in town and convinced a bunch of other people that yes, they really should go inside and get a cone.
A good day, a great afternoon, a fun evening. It always be's like that with the C-Dawg. I can't wait til we get to do it again.
30/07/10 - It Never Be's
Nation
  This was possibly the most ridiculous show I have seen in a long time and I can get Sky 1 I know ridiculous. It could be summed up in three sentences Do you know what's in your cereal? Want to? Read the label. Instead it went on for a hour about how evil the [...]
27/10/09 - Dispatches ? do you know what?s in your breakfast? (warning...
Blogroll generated by MagpieRSS
![[Links]](http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/skins/112/rsc/img/chain_link.gif)
Dominic just discovered that if you have two thousand mockingbirds, technically you've got two kilamockingbirds :).
30/07/10
![]()
I last listened to:
The Offspring - She's Got Issues
Most recent photo:
Submersible houseboat