Month: May 2004

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I read the Cringley article on WRT54Gs as “disruptive technology” after seeing the /. post. Since then, I’ve bumped into some further discussions in blogland, and seen several interesting projects that provide FOSS distributions for the lil’ router that could. VERY cool.

I don’t have a single “g” mode card, but I may get one of these anyway just for the hack value. The EWRT guys have managed to include a NoCatAuth-based captive portal, which is something I’ve been toying with doing with a spare old laptop. See…even I’ll take the “ease of use” road occasionally, Lee! *grin*

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Bullet to the head

Well, last night the time had finally come. I like Gentoo, don’t get me wrong, and my laptop has run it as it’s Linux distribution for some time. But upgrading a Gentoo system is PAINFUL on it…and though a 1GHz machine isn’t very fast nowadays…it’s actually the second fastest machine in my house. emerge ‘world’ takes all weekend, if I’m lucky and it works. And then, last night, the final straw. The freakin’ thing ran out of disk space about 80% of the way through. I’m not enough of a Gentoo-geek to know what I could and couldn’t whack from the /tmp/packages stuff…and the whole thing had been annoying me for 6 months anyway. So I whacked it.

I’d been looking for an excuse to play with the new Debian Installer anyway. So I burnt a beta 4 CD last night, and crossed my fingers. (the other reason I’d held off on re-installing had been the overall PIT-buttness of laptop installs, with funky hardware support, etc. The Gentoo install took awhile [like a week] to really get working right.)

I remembered to copy off a couple of relevant configs…X, lsmod info, wireless.opts. Maybe a couple of others. But guess what? I used wireless.opts b/c it was the easiest way to put back in the WEP info…but I didn’t need ANY OF THEM. D-I just freakin’ worked. Full hardware detection; X, DRI acceleration for X, audio, USB, PCMCIA…as far as I can tell, no errors. Suh-weet! Less than an hour after I popped in the CD, I was through the install, upgraded from testing to unstable (with a little experimental thown in for good measure…hey, it’s the laptop; might as well play!), and had GNOME 2.6 installing. I am impressed.

Good job, D-I guys! Now I just have to remember to send in an installation report. Back to “Debian Everywhere”…and I couldn’t be happier.

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The Debian X Strike Force guys rock. They take a lot of crap, and they take it in stride. (I should learn from them…) First they did the famous “How about…” banner for their webpage (since sanitized to remove the quote for those easi..well, offendable, anyway) …now an hilarious post WRT a screwup in the recent xlibs update:

“Somehow I managed to take a hit off the crack pipe when prepping the XKB data updates in 4.3.0.dfsg.1-2.

A patch file to fix this is attached.

(Yes, I’ve tested this fix.)

Here’s how to use it.

1) Save the attachment someplace like /tmp.

2) Become root.

3) cd / && patch -p0 < /tmp/unfuck_numlock.diff

Sorry for the fuckup.”

That made me laugh out loud!

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Digital Media Project(Berkman Center): “The goal of this multi-year study is not to advance a single agenda but instead to help educate stakeholders — government officials, the media, artists, businesspeople, and the public at large — about the choices and values that can guide law and technology to maximize the potential of digital media for the years ahead.”

Fluxblog: An MP3 blog. Interesting…blogs in this subgenre post a song, and write about it. (Link from Berkman…thanks!)