Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

History: Distro CDs are cheap, so why not, ever since Rehat 5.2 came
out, I tried out: BSD, Caldera, Corel, Debian 2.2r3, Gentoos, Mandrake
9, Pink Tie (RH 8), Slacware 7.1, Storm, & Suse 6.4 & 7.3; on a 486
(I'll never do *that* again) and lotsa stuff from the 180mhz Pentium
Pro, (which wasnt too bad) Socket 7 & 370, slot 1, running at about 800
mhz tops. I cant afford faster chips.

I'm kinda like a shade tree mechanic in a rural area, given dead pcs in
hopes of getting something that runs back. I recycle a lot. I always
traded income for more independance. Got a comp sci minor in 71; and got
my first pc when I looked at what the terminal screen could actually do
that was useful. Which happened as soon as I saw I could write on this
screen and go back over my typos before printing a paper I had to
submit. I knew how slow the cassette tape was, and waited until I found
a deal on a used Franklin with a 180k floppy drive.

Along with the STAR micronix printer, it was a quantum leap in my
ability to communicate, which only one other thing comes close to, which
was the 2400 baud modem for 200$, and getting online to screens
something like this. 1984 was a brave new world for a lot of us. But we
have reached an era of diminishing returns, where the multimedia aspects
of the interface dont function, and crashes the whole system so that you
cannot do what I am doing right now, bitch about it.

online. BSD, with surprising candor, says to install a small dos
partition. Cause sometimes, when the schitt hits the fan, Linux wont
boot, and your rescue disk dont rescue (we all know the half life of
floppies these days is three weeks), if you can boot dos, you can use
LTOOLS to access your ext2 (but not ext3!) drive, to copy whatever you
care about before you try to fix the problem. Besides, there are a whole
raft of partition and diagnostic tools that run from dos, which would
identify a *hardware* problem before you go looking for a Linux software
patch. 

But what'd be kewl, was something like a smooth download script that
could be unzipped in the DOS c:\BL directory, which would go ahead and
install the modem driver, the ppp, (pap/pop CHAP,
MS-CHAP...awthentikashun) and the net interface to get you to wherever
you could download the patch or whatever. A neterface that makes minimal
demands on the hardware.

But, given the variety of platforms, video drivers, & drives, is that
hopeful? We only read messages from the unlucky people who have trouble
with Linux.

The 'awthentikashun' thing looks like a synergy that has evolved between
Microsoft, the OEMs, and the Linux distros. I can see that the sabotage
software problem could get out of hand, and that greater and greater
filter daemons will be on the servers trying to get information from
your computer to verify who you are. But also try to gather any data
that other organizations would see profit potential in.

I read a lot of trouble people have trying to install downloaded Linux
apps. There is a bewildering array of source code libraries, compilers,
archive formats, and desktop archive/file management tools. But is there
a dos batch program which would pkunzip -d into the correct directory
structure, so that BL could install the neterface on the ext2 partition
or optional ramdrive, and get a guy online after a crash?