DSL Talk

For those of you who don't know, in 'net lingo, flaming is the (usually uncalled for) large-scale verbal berating of a person for having an idea or opinion that differs from your own. It usually contains lots of 4 letter words, wonderful mental inagery, and threats of physical harm if the opinion/idea shows up again.

Anyways, this practice often ends up making the flamer look stupid, and making the flamee, usually a newb, or other inexperienced person, feeling angry and hurt. (face it. stuff people on the internet say affects you the same as what anyone else says.)

Flaming has it's roots in the early days of the internet. It takes the place of things like ritual hazing in fraternities and other clubs/institutions. The same mindset of "since i've been here longer than you, i must somehow be better/smarter/more-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex-even- though-i-have-no-life-because-i-stay-on-the-computer-all-day-and-never-see-a-girl than you".

I am trying to install DSL on to my home computer (Athlon). My system has two disks. There are LVM (Logical Volume Manager) partitions on the disks. I'm running half a dozen different OSs.

When I try to boot DSL 0.9 from CD, X does NOT start. I'm stuck with a console login only. The message log from the boot has errors for each partition that has LVM. Could these LVM partition errors keep X from starting?

Has anyone put DSL on a flash based mp3 player? Is anyone interested in having a bootable? I am not referring to the iPod linux craze but something like:

ScanDisk Digital Audio Player (Silver, 1Gig)
http://tinyurl.com/5ftnp See at buy.com
http://tinyurl.com/5skg4 See at SanDisk.com

or anything from iRiver, possibly the iFP series?

Well, I guess I should start off by asking if anyone has recommendations for bootable MPS players, or knows if any are as I am still researching this… I believe that this is formatting option for the device drive, and that you would need to partition the drive so that the mp3 player’s OS is not deleted in reformatting... right?

I'm working on building a mini-itx machine(parts purchased through DSL store) for computer forensics. The idea driving this is a small, fast portable field foreniscs machine. This can be used for for imaging only or for previewing evidence. And hopefully user freindly enuf that windows addicted Field Detectives can use it with a minimum of re-training.

Of course it will run DSL as its embedded operating system. I admit that I cribbed the case design from John but I wanted to buidl a prototype form what I had laying around...I had some acrylic plexiglass from a nother project and bought the rest at the local hardware store.

I wasted some precious time yesterday, but ended up with what I hope will eventually evolve into a conveniently-organzed theme switcher for Fluxbox. I'm not talking about just changing styles, but changing visual settings of other applications as well (maybe icon sets, too). Since I use a lot of text based applications, it's particularly useful for me to modify the foreground color of aterm and the bash prompt to blend with the chosen fluxbox style.

Currently I have a system set up in my liveCD backups which allow me to chose just before loading X which theme I want. If I do nothing, Fluxbox will look like this black&white screenshot

Wife had second ultrasound yesterday... its a girl! Fascinating watching the hi-res ultrasound images. Its amazing that something so unbeliveably complex could be created in such a short time. And, boy is she cute. Time to start thinking about names now. Not long until the big day on May 25 :-)

TrainGUI is turning out to be much better than I expected. Originally I wanted a simple GUI builder that I could use to launch perl and bash scripts, but now Ive got almost a complete IDE. Still trying to figure out if I want it to produce super simple code with globals for all the controls and simple perl subs for callacks or if I want to make all the controls objects that overload the callbacks. Hmmm... do people realy want to define their own controls? Guess I'll do some more thinking. One way or the other I'll probably have a working first version out in a few weeks.

At the time of this writing, for i386 DSL you need at least 16 megs of ram to boot. This does not provide X windows functionality, only console (at boot run 'dsl 2' for console only). 24 megs is the recommended MINIMUM for X windows. Of course, the more ram the better, since thats where you're working, in ram.

You will find that with only the minimum of ram the most you will be able to do is use primarily the preinstalled software that comes with DSL.

i attended the first dc404 (defcon) of the new year ('05) today and it was great. even got a couple people interested in DSL. Gave some CDs away and attempted to put DSL on some peoples usb-keys but ;p there were networking problems beyond our control.

Since friday people living in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and probably some other European countries will find the magazine LINUX INTERN with a bootable DVD with DSL (0.9.0.1) and other Linux distributions on their newsstand.

There is no sepate article on DSL in this issue, but it is used as an example to demonstrate how SYSLINUX works for booting from USB stick.

As mentioned earlier, the DVD uses Grub as bootloader which is much more comfortable than navigating through F-keys and entering cheatcodes (which is still possible). If the DSL community is interested and there is a chance of convincing the chiefs to make it the default bootloader, I will write (and document) a configuration for german and english and hope that other DSL users will translate keymaps and menu entries to other languages.

I finally was able to get dsl to boot from a liveZip. I'm posting this from a parallel port liveZip damn small linux!

The first thing I did was get the zip drive working from the liveCD so I could set it up. I used the following commands:

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/zip
modprobe ppa ### the drive needs both power & a disk here
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/zippy ###you might have a different sda#

look at the drive and make sure it's nothing you want and make sure that you're looking at the real zip drive. When your sure it's nothing you want, unmount that drive and use cfdisk to repartition it. I made a 55 Meg primary partition type linux and made the rest a linux swap partition.