DSL Talk

The mkmydsl script is probably one of the most overlooked scripts in DSL, yet it has been there since day one when I released the myDSL system and the six example extensions that I made to start this whole thing. Why is it not in the documentation is a very good question.

SU's note - It is now!! ^_^

Ok so I've been thinking about this other project for a little while too..a forensic cluster...

I've been thinking why not DSL..anyone tried this before..I've got an old kingston 16 port hub and some old 386/486 boxes..I know the processors and ram will be slow..but augmenting a faste macine it might prove useful....

Linspire has broke a lot of ground when it comes to getting Linux into the main stream. I've been doing research on ISPs, and the few major providers that actually support Linux tend to only support Linspire. As a non-Linspire user, I find it a bit frustrating, yet I also find it very interesting.

Also under their belt:
The first to sell whitebox machines at Walmart
The first to come out with cheap Linux-powered tablet PCs
They also have a $500 laptop at Walmart which apparently sells so well that it is constantly out of stock.

There is a lot of criticism out there about Linspire's interaction with the Linux community at large, and also justifiable criticism of forcing newbies to run as root (are they still doing this?), but I don't think there has been a single other company that has pushed Linux harder into the world of the average consumer than Linspire. For better or for worse, they are the FACE of Linux to many.

For the last three years I've used SuSE Linux as my crutch, since it makes some annoying configurations very easy....winmodems are supported out of the box, YaST is a very easy GUI configuration tool for most systems files...

but I ran into something tonight that really made me angry. I have been installing gimp from source for the last couple of years without trouble, but with the latest 2.2.2 things went bad. When the configure told me I had to upgrade glib I thought that was reasonable, so I did....then tried upgrading gimp again. I was told to upgrade glib. Hmmm...I just did that. I checked my pkgconfig path, and found it included packages installed both from packages and source. Just to make sure I also installed glib with prefix=/usr, so my packaged glib was also overwritten. Still gimp tells me I have to upgrade glib. I tried to install the latest pango and atk, failing because they want the glib that I have just installed 4 times, followed by ldconfig and a reboot.

Please feel free to peruse / browse the documentation project pages and comment / reply to posts to add relevant information. This will then be taken out of 'comment' form and added to the book to make it more complete and edited for context, if the information is relevant/accurate.

Thanks for being a great community, DSL users!

-william
tronik @ #damnsmalllinux irc.freenode.net

My wife and I had our INS interview on Thursday and after successfully answering the interviewer's question as to where my wife worked and what her parents names were, they appoved our application on the spot and stamped my passport. All in all, probably less than 5 minutes end-to-end. Good stuff. Not that there should have been any problems, but since these things could effectively derail your life if they go badly wrong I guess I should have been concerned, but for some reason I just sort of new it would all work out. :-)

Yay!! Im here to stay! :-)

Well, last week at work was the first week back from vacation, if ya can grok that. It was mostly a slow week, my boss went to the indoctrination for the new RIP software powering our yet-installed Direct-to-plate system. This thing will make work so much easier, I may be out of a job. Maybe.

Things are speeding up on the network at work. The DNS/mail/webserver machine will be going live and handling company email within the next week or so. I'm pretty sure everything will be okay, but never having to do it for a company before, I'm a little anxious.

I've sent email from the server just fine but I can't receive email at that machine because the DNS points to our current hosting provider's machines. Kinda sucks because there really isn't any way I can test everything before we go live. I'm pretty sure the DNS has all of the correct information, but how the hell am I to know until we go live and something breaks.

I decided to go ahead and get a journal account. I'd commented on a couple of entries before as Anonymous but had my comments deleted. I went to make another comment on "Flaming" today and thought, "You know, if they don't like it, they'll probably just delete it again. Might as well start up your own account and mirror the comments in your own articles so that at least your opinions will still stand if someone decides to get all delete-happy again."

Well, probably not those words exactly, but most of 'em. The general gist of 'em, at any rate.

One of the main problems that users of older hardware tend to have is the lack of a math co-processor. I'm not sure if this has ever been corrected as my old Pentium machine was donated to charity about six months ago, so I can't test it anymore.

This is a fairly big problem as it alienates a large chunk of users with old-ass hardware, some of the very people we're trying to reach with DSL. A simple kernel recompile turning on math co-processor emulation will fix this problem without affecting users of newer machines. It causes no slowdown, whatsoever, and might enlarge the kernel by a few k.

Flaming is still continued because it's effective if applied correctly. Consider if a new user comes into the forums and asks a question that has been answered a hogjillion times.

Would you flame them right away? Of course not. Simply tell them the answer and point them to the FAQ of whatever knowledge-base that addresses new users questions.

What about a second or third time the same user asks a question that has already been answered in the aformentioned FAQ or knowledge-base? At what point do you stop spoon-feeding the newbie and make him read the damn docs?

[newbie] How do you open a terminal?