DSL Talk

ordered a powerbook g4...

can anyone say emulation? =)

mmmm...

my two favourite things, bsd, portable computing...

with the ability to work on DSL ;)

OK, I am about as upset as I have been for awhile. My not for profit work has almost come to a complete standstill because of childish adults.

Here's some background.....

The building I use for No Computer Left Behind is a wonderful old building that was up for demolition. A man came along and decided he wanted to save the building. He struck a deal with the Historic Landmarks of Indiana Inc. to refurbish the building. If he received a 501(c)3 federal NFP designation, they would sign the building over to him.

Well, on Monday, he received his 501(c)3 approval and faxed it to the organization. Today (Friday) as he is gone to a meeting at this organization, they sneak into town and change the locks on the building. They have decided now that they don't want to give him the building now that he has put thousands of his own dollars into it with new heating/air and other upgrades. So now, I cannot get to any of my equipment! He is meeting with the organization president on Monday morning so I will wait to hear from him before I do anything. He is determined to fight this in court and I am determined to get the press involved if they do not come to their senses. In the mean time, I am basically on hold. It's very frustrating because I was going to be giving PC's to kids on Monday evening.

Well, I'm not really sure where to begin on this entry. I'm so pissed I can't see straight and I need to vent a little, so if you could care less about my emotional concerns, musings, insights into my (often deranged) mind, or whatever, skip this entry.

This is more of a LiveJournal style post.

And I disabled comments on this post and didn't put it on the front page (I can do that, ya know ^_~) because I really don't want feedback.

Anyways. I'm mad.

In late November, or maybe early December, Will and I came up with an idea for an offsite database of how-to's, tips, tricks, etc for DSL. So we set upon the quest of designing a site to access this. Okay fine, Will did the site, I did the document structure and most of the documents, how they would be read onto pages. Background stuff like that.

ok, i use a varity of oses : linux (ark, dsl), windows ( 98se, 2k, xph), bsd (free, open) and beos

so i need a new disk for my win2k box, the other was keyed up pretty badly, so i called my local computer shop, thinking they would get me a retail copy, well they would not, they said i should be running windows 98se as my cpu is only a p2/450, ok now i think 98se is ok, but not for that box.
"so why cant i run 2k?" i asked, "its not a home os" was the reply
and they would not sell a copy to me!, even tho i was going to pay full price (285$)!
now thats just plain stupid!

[moderators note: Things like this should go on the Forums! Not our personal blogging site. Please do not post things like this in our blogging section. ;) Thank you -will]

that dillo window that opens every time i start dsl is getting very annoying so if you know how please tell me how to disable the annoying dillo window at startup

i bought Adam Bregenzer's Zaurus for a wireless linux terminal, and now im going to sell it @ cost to someone else...because I don't have time to use it. And I thought I would...its an amazing little device. I feel so crappy for letting it go, but it needs to be done. This Army stuff is definitely keeping me busier than I expected with my life and, I just need to get rid of it...

Why do i not always seek to make a profit? :( sometimes it saddens me because occasionally I have money problems...well more often than not....

so im in this ultra-secretive security research group...well its not really ultra secretive, but it is a security research group, and its all well and good...and I'll be utilizing DSL a lot. probably....

As many here have seen, I built a cheap mini-itx box using hardware parts and one of the fanless 5000 boards. I find myself using it all the time these days. You guys know these are not the snappiest systems, but they do run DSL nicely.

I'm using my plexiglass computer most of the time. Just yesterday my Mother-in-Law (actually a very nice lady!) was over her and wanted to check her email. I asked her what she thought when she was done. She said, "That was strange, I am use to being able to hear the computer turning on .... It was almost eerie."

Hello DSL..izens...ians...Users...none the less. ;)

I have been offline for the majority of the past several days taking a much needed break from the whimsical world of...well, the world...I've missed our community and whatnot, so I felt I needed to come back and post regarding my reflective time, at least on DSL.

I realize that we've had several releases in the past and that is wonderful...However much ground *I* feel we have gained, I am always asked by people who use DSL locally (Atlanta) what we are doing to improve DSL and make it better for users...I hear things like "wow, 1.0 really looks cool but, I still can't use it on my machine"...why... No serial ATA Support. So I now that I am back it is my goal to facilitate an easier way of upgrading the kernel in for everyone ;p and still maintain a 50mb limit in DSL...since I have that kind of time right now.

So I got home yesterday, and my wife tells me, "I'm sorry, I washed your thumb drive." My DSL/qemu pendrive was sitting on a shelf in the laundry room in a small puddle.

I managed to pull the ends out of the little aluminum extrusion, let it air dry for a few hours, and after plugging it in, it booted! I dd'ed the contents to an image file in case I suffer a more catastrophic failure (should have done that when I got it.)

Alot is said about getting Linux more accepted among the masses. I have said before that the only way to do that is through the kids. I saw an example of that last night.

I was meeting with 3 families to give them their first PC. For those that don't know, I use a remastered version of DSL for these machines. One family came in with 4 children. These kids had already seen one of my PC's from another family that had received one. The kids ran by their dad and right up to the PC. Immediately they clicked on the wmdrawer button, brought up their favorite games, and went to town!! They were having a ball! The fact that these PC's did not have M$ on them did not matter in the least to these children. They already knew how to navigate the OS and were having fun.