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comments: 0When I started to use Linux full time a few months ago, it was something else. It was special. Not many people were doing it, and those who were really had something. I decided to join in on the revolt against Microsoft. And indeed, others have joined me in this. In fact, just today..
jerm9x: i love linux
This thing is bigger than me, bigger than you; its bigger than all of us. But it's a little too big now. I mean, it was all cool when jean Paul and I made up the Linux room, but now there's 3 of us in here who run it, and the 4th is sure to follow. Downstairs 2/3rds of the people run it; hell even pranay decided to install slackware yesterday. So now what? Obviously, by virtue of the ammount its spreading, Linux is no longer "cool". So I did what anyone in my position would do.
I installed BSD. That's right, bitches. I'm the only one in the hizzouse who runs BSD now, and I don't think many of the other Linux guru's here have even tried it. I got a working system with a sleek ammount of software and quite a bit of compile time under my belt. Here are some of the differences so far I've noticed between BSD and Linux (mostly slackware..).
- demon's are cooler than penguins
- the demon console screen saver is pretty neat
- instead of mount -t smbfs \\etc\stuff /mount/point, I've had to use mount_smbfs -I IP_ADDR //user@host/stuff /mount/point.
- the kernel is rather large (monolithic), comes compiled with tons of modules, and is very easy to recompile.
- things take a little coersion to compile
- there is a notable speed increase in BSD
- bash was an option, and not my default shell (tsh was i think..)
- kernel module system not as robust as linux's
- the boot loader kicks LILO/GRUB's ass
Well, I guess a lot of that is different facts and opinions of mine, but I've had no problems thusfar. Actually, getting autoconf and automake to compile (so I could run gaim) was a veritable pain in the ass, but other than that things have gone as smoothly as I could hope for. As an aside, much to my surprise, X11 ran the first time with my USB mouse working (yay huge kernel) and my resolution set correctly, much UNLIKE slackware. I was glad I didn't have to go through that headache again. The only thing I'm missing at the moment is the ability to mount my Linux partitions; and I'm not sure if the kernel has reiserfs support so I might be screwed for a time.
In some rather somber news, 34 people died in a train crash in Zimbabwe near Dete. A passenger train collided with a "goods" train and the result was almost 3 dozen bodies charred beyond recognition. Its a tragedy. Were you expecting me to mention something else?
To directly tackle the issue, the space shuttle collumbia broke up into small pieces 200,000 miles above Texas this morning around 9:00. The flaming wreckage sailed through the morning sky at a speed of around mach 18 (12,000 mph?); needless to say all people on board were unfortunately killed. NASA's space program, suffering greatly from loss of funding and 30 year old technology (and the innability to disceren the metric system from the brittish royal system) will probably be set back even further, perhaps indefinitely, due to the incident. But why is it more tragic, more newsworthy than almost 5 times the number of people dying in Zimbabwe?
The men, women, and Jews (since CNN deems it so important to categorize them) aboard the shuttle knew that what they were doing was dangerous; intense training and scrutiny would not have been part of the preperation meal plan had it not been. They were fully aware that flying through the air at more than 10,000 miles per hour brought with it certain dangers, as did floating around the earth with possible exposure to vacuum and radiation. They died in the pursuit of science, I suppose; if you really want to take a very liberal appologetic tone about it. If you don't, then you could say they died trying to land a space shuttle. Their deaths might make the way for better design in space shuttle and might increase compassion accross the world for a few days.. certainly flags flying at half mast until Wednesday will probably make people accross America think twice. But its no more tragic; in fact, should be far more expected, than the innocent people killed en masse in Africa.
What do you think then? Going to go on with your day? Going to stop everything and mourn? Do your thoughts go out to the families? I don't know that mine do.. a few nights ago, our leader made the concious decision to condemn far more than 7 Iraqi soldiers to death by promising to wage a meaningless war in the middle east. In the mean time, channel 2 news wants you to be afraid of a nuclear attack via North Korea so that we can target them next.
Nelsen Mandella, expressing anti-american sentiment (with good reason given our recent 50 year history of ousting democratically elected leaders in favor of united states military officials; unless its panama and the ex CIA member is dangerous, in which case we just assasinate him), was called a communist and a racist (against white people of course) and ceremoniously added to the axis of evil by the curator of some political talk show last night. I couldn't help but think that most Americans don't even watch shows like that to at least stay aware, and those that do watch it are subjected to a disgusting display of American slanted propaganda; a classic case of media controlled by the government.
Website updates are probably going to have to wait another few weeks with the massive TCP bomb dropped on us on friday. I have to make some kind of HTML link-replacing library for cs365 and also make a little site with frames and tables by tuesday. Lets not forget the pascal lexical analyzer by friday, and then lets add the 20 process whopper of a project for TCP/IP the following friday. Who knows what will happen between now and then; besides another 365 and two more 465 homeworks, of course. Working my life away for the pursuit of knowledge isn't too bad, actually. At least, not while I can work to music. All plans for Jay_Ware are indefinitely suspended, as I'll probably run BSD for the rest of the semester (unless my patience runs thin and I put slack back on in a few weeks). Have fun kids!