Terminally Incoherent

Utterly random, incoherent and disjointed rants and ramblings...

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Which OS are you?

This is too funny!

You are Amiga OS. Ahead of your time.  You keep a lot of balls in the air.  If only your parents had given you more opportunities to suceed.
Which OS are You?


I actually used to own Amiga 600. It was a thing of beauty - 1MB or ram, crappy CPU and no Hard Drive. Oh, and no numpad on A600 keyboard either :) You would boot the OS from a floppy - but half of the time you didn't even need the OS - most of the software for Amiga was bootable at the time...

And the OS - it was awesome. In total it was 3 floppies, but you essentially needed only the boot flopy - the remaining two were extras and some more complex software. And it was a full GUI point and cick environment too. It made Windows 1.3 look like crap in comparison, and the shell while still not unix like was still way more powerfull than MSDOS.

And of course you could get an external hd, and expand RAM if you wanted to. Ah... These were the days...

To funny that this semi random quiz matched me up with this OS lol

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Apt-Get funbits

I was updating my knop/deb at work today and I stumbled upon an interesting bug...

Unpacking libntfs5 (from .../libntfs5_1.9.2-2_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libntfs5_1.9.2-2_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/libntfs.so.5.0.0', which is also in package ntfsprogs
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libntfs5_1.9.2-2_i386.deb

It seems that I'm ntot the only one with this type of problem. And it seems to completely halt apt-get from doing anything but attempting to do that one installation. Fortunatley there is a quick solution - unpacking the damn libntfs5_1 library yourself:

dpkg -i --force-all /var/cache/apt/archives/libntfs5_1.9.2-2_i386.deb

That worked for me... Hey - I'm learning... I'm still very much windoze user, although I'm working really hard to overcome that defficiency.

Linux Wireless

Funny thing... The other day I was screwing around with Knoppix at work and I was finally able to get the damn Linksyst wireless card to work under Linux. However, for the life of me I cannot get that hellish thing to work properly under Windows ME - go figure.

The trick here is to grab the original windows drivers. In my case I needed a *.inf file and a *.sys file (for some reason I got complaints back from the system) when I just used the inf files. I used the nidswapper that comes bundled in Knoppix 4.6 to import these drivers. I'll dig out the details later but I think this was all it took to get wlan0 operational for me.

The rest was just a cake-walk. I used Knoppix wavelan config script and set up all the wireless network info and then network configuration script to get the DHCP going. And that was all it took. I was amazed how easy it was - considering my struggle with the hellish winmodem at home.

I was so impressed with Knopp after that, that I actually did a HD install on one of the office spare HD's. So now I have a pseudo-Debian running on my office laptop. And I'm beggining to see why people go so crazy for Deb. I can't get over how cool apt-get is. I installed 5 apps right of the bat including firefox and thunderbird - and no dependency bullshit, no unclean installs, no nothing. Beautifull! I'm really considering trashing the Mandrake (or confining it to a small partition) and seriously looking into Debian for my desktop...