Diary of a Wolfeman

Well, I had a couple hours before the barbecue started yesterday, so I went ahead and tried the ftp install of SuSE 9.1, and I am very happy with the results.

I thought it would take alot longer, since it was the openning weekend of the process, but I was up and running in just about two hours. It only missed one package during the initial download (a console font package) which it correctly installed when I did an update later.

There will of course be the minor annoyances of renamed packages and paths, but that really only hits me in a couple of programs, as I can usually build from the source code. Aside from that, the interface is slick as always, there’s a ton of stuff already installed, and it has a solid feature set.

Two things I was disappointed to see: the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and an implementation of a WindowsXP-style “autorun selector”. Both of these things are easy to kill though, so it’s not a huge problem.

Now to shove the ATI drivers down it’s throat :)

Just can’t explain. Duck, this is so you, I’m surprised you haven’t had this thought already.

Queen of Wands

Symptomology:

That’s right boys and girls: allergy season has arrived. I had thought that maybe the sinus infection I had last year may have cured my allergies, since they usually show up before now, but I guess it ws just Mother Nature playing tricks on me.

Maybe this year I’ll have better luck finding a combination of treatments that allows me to function instead of simply knocking me out. I tell ya, those packages shouldn’t read “may cause drowsiness”, they should read “don’t make in fuq’ing plans”.

Achoo!

Ok, I’ve played with it for a couple days, and I have to say that Arch Linux definitely shows alot of promise…but it needs more work.

There are several known bugs in the package lists, most notably in KDE itself. While I was able to get the sound working, I had to jump through a number of hoops to do so, and arts still isn’t quite on the bandwagon, even though alsa is.

One major drawback is going to be the hardware incompatabilities. There are certain hardware vendors that only provide rpm drivers, (notably ATI video cards) and this system is rpm-unfirendly. While it is possible to get these drivers installed, it is a long and arduous process that leaves this distro in the hands of the guru rather than the mid-level enthusiast.

If you want to learn more about how Linux works, right now would be a good time to play around with Arch, before the developers iron out all the kinks. If you want to run Linux but don’t want to have to delve deeply into the command line, stick to one of the big boys like SuSE or Mandrake.

As for me, I think I’ll be investing some time into an ftp install of SuSE 9.1 over the weekend.

Ok, so far, I have gone through three different hard drives before I found one that would stick, but I don’t believe that has had anything to do with Arch. Finally got it working on an 82.3 gig, split kinda half-n-half for / and /home.

Not a bad little system. The pacman package manager works as advertised. A simple ‘pacman -Sy {packagename}’ gets you the latest version, checks (and downloads) all dependencies, then installs the whole kaboodle, all from the command line. (Anyone who has ever tried to install mplayer from scratch will appreciate that!)

This is still a young distro, so there (of course) are going to be some shortfalls in the package lists, but it looks to be fairly simple to build your own packages out of tarballs. The nice thing is that the packages that are on the list are right up-to-date. (I didn’t realize that Gaim had finally gotten the ymessenger snafu figured out until I installed it last night.)

Things I still need to figure out:

Nothing too major, but it will take some playing. The big irritant is that Arch uses the DevFS filesystem, which means the nomenclature is once again, different than what I’m used to, so I can’t simple copy over the /etc/fstab file from my working system. (/dev/hda1 is now /dev/discs/disc0/disc1 for instance)

All-in-all, a distro to watch. A good middle step from the uber-user-friendliness of SuSE or Mandrake to the gotta-know-everything of Gentoo or Slackware. As they move towards the 1.0 milestone, things should get pretty sweet.

Well, I’ve gone over the hill and through the woods to Grandma’s house for the weekend, and I’m typing this on the computer I put together for her out of spare parts I had lying around the Den. She had a PII-MMX 233, and we’ve just installed my old eMachine eTower 500 Celeron. Which runs better than twice as fast as the poor old dinosaur we’ve just retired (after gutting it for the video card, a 32Mb nVidia PCI card.)

Aside from a small memory issue with her dialup, (IE, we forgot the settings) everything has gone quite smoothly, and she is quite happy with it. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma!

My brother John is home on leave from the Marines for a week, and he showed up for dinner before running off with his friends. He looks good, and we’re all damn proud of him for taking the huge leap of joining the military.

Unfortunately, his unit will be shipping out for Iraq when he gets off leave to releive another unit who is coming home. He was talking about the Rules Of Engagement our troops have to follow over there, and it’s scary. Each family in Iraq is allowed to have an AK-47. Now, as an American, I’m all for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms we were granted in the Constitution, but an assault rifle is a bit much, ya know? If they see an Iraqi walking down the street with an RPG (that’s Rocket-Propelled Grenade, not D&D) they can’t fire on them until that person shoulders the weapon – the theory here is that they may be taking it to the military to turn it over.

I just hope nobody does something stupid. Like leave Dubya in office long enough to keep my brother there long enough to get killed. We need to end this ‘war’.

The folks over at ITWorld.com write that a Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years not for spamming per se, but rather for identity theft when he spoofed two accounts to send out “more than 800 million spam messages”.

This one brings it home to me today, since I noticed several bounced emails in my inbox from AOL mail servers. According to the messages, I have tried to send email to a few dead AOL accounts, and they are kindly letting me know that those accounts no longer exist.

Which is right neighborly of them, but I haven’t sent anything to an AOL addy in months. Someone is apparently spoofing my comcast email address.

Since there’s been less than a dozen of these bounces, I’m more inclined to believe that this is the work of a virus on somebody’s home computer. It is probably sending an email to every address in that person’s addy book from every address in that book.

So, if anyone out there has received an odd message from me that you weren’t expecting, let me know so we can compare address books and maybe figure out who the poor slob is that got infected.

Now if I can just track down the loser who keeps sending me vitamin ads to my blog email address…

According to Symantec, there has already been a virus (W64.Rugrat.3344) released for the IA64 Windows platform – which hasn’t even seen wide release yet.

The virus is just a proof-of-concept, and it’s interesting to note that it won’t affect AMD64 Windows platforms – or any current 32-bit Windows platforms for that matter, unless you’re running 64-bit emulation. All non-Microsoft OSes are of course, immune to this virus.

Danger to the average user as of right now: NIL.

Belle de Jour has this to say about sausage:

Isn’t the concept of sausage odd? Minced pig stuffed into part of a pig’s digestive tract. With herbs. It’s more like an anal necrophiliac bestial fetish than a foodstuff. Someone once told me of a speciality sausage from his homeland, which amounted to pig tract stuffed with more pig tract. Words fail.

Wired News: Army Reboots GIs’ Tired Fatigues

Okay, I quote this article for the following bit (from the second page):

There’s still a slight whiff of vaporware in the air at Natick. Powering all these doodads, for instance, won’t be easy. The Army wants to keep the total “power budget” for FFW down to 15 watts or so — a quarter of what a typical light bulb takes. “We don’t even know where to begin,” sighed Kalish Shukla, FFW’s power-management chief.

They have at least one idea, though. “Avoid the use of Microsoft Windows operating systems,” a recent memo on the subject directed. FFW is going open source. Cleaner software needs less energy to run.