Tux has been Linux's mascot since shortly after the release of the
2.0 kernel. He's been known to be quite the fellow for the ladypenguins,
and
A Brief History Of Tux - So
Far will surely tell you more than you needed to know about this
dashing fellow. All too often, it's a working vacation for him, but he's
considering a hiking
trip or a cruise sometime this
Summer.
Heather is Linux Gazette's Technical Editor and The Answer Gang's Editor
Gal.
Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning
English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator
for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal
computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other
pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most
everywhere today...
Heather is a hardware agnostic, but has spent more hours as a tech in
Windows related tech support than most people have spent with their computers.
(Got the pin, got the Jacket, got about a zillion T-shirts.) When she
discovered Linux in 1993, it wasn't long before the home systems ran Linux
regardless of what was in use at work.
By 1995 she was training others in using Linux - and in charge of all the
"strange systems" at a (then) 90 million dollar company. Moving onwards, it's
safe to say, Linux has been an excellent companion and breadwinner... She
took over the HTML editing for "The Answer Guy" in issue 28, and has been
slowly improving the preprocessing scripts she uses ever since.
We're thinking of a very special edition of "Foolish Things We Do With
Our Computers". If you did something foolish, or had something foolish
inflicted upon you by your otherwise favored silicon lifeform, and
you're willing to have just a little more fun with it in public, send
it along to us.
This does not have to be in article format. You can just send it to
The Answer Gang (tag, at our happy domain linuxgazette.net) with the
subject "Foolish Things With Computers" and we'll gather them all up and
roast marshmallows over them. Let us know if you want your name left
in - we'll take these anonymously too. But don't just make them up; we
want real tales that make us groan and go agh I won't do that again!
In the issues numbered about 85 to 89 we had articles about the use of
voice on computers in developing areas, for hadicapped usage, and the
like.
Sound systems on Linux have improved considerably - we've had Jimmy
cover "Songs In the Key of Tux" - but we haven't come back to the topic
of ordinary voices. Voice Over IP got a mere nod in my Answer Gang
blurb last Summer.
If you are interested in writing an article on this topic, see our
article submission guidelines
and then drop us a line!
Sent to our author Kapil Hari Paranjape privately, printed with
permission.
-- Heather
Hello,
and thanks for your amusing article about the Knight's tour in
Linux Gazette. I don't understand Python, but I have some
experience of the Knight's tour problem.
Mathematicians might have annoying habits, and one could be
to end their articles with Exercises
Like:
4.There is apparently a better algorithm than Warnsdorff's for the
Hamiltonian circuit. Find it and implement it.
with some decently efficient Java applets and some about the research
done about the problem of how many closed tours there are.
(At least I would call that problem 'hard')
Once again, Thanks for your article
and Best regards
Here's a reply to my posting of the Packet Writing material on my own
site. I've gotten his permission to forward this into TAG as commentary
on the original, so if you want to use it... ?
best,
.brian
Hi Brian,
Actually the time for UDF formatting of a CDRW is consistant with Nero's
packet driver (InCD) under Windows. InCD used to have multiple selections of
"Format" and "Quick Format" available but only the "Format" option was
available for a BLANK CDRW disk and formatting could take up to 45min to an
hour. A previous formatted UDF disk would let you "quick format" and take
considerably less time; some times as short as 6min.
Of course, I suspect the "quick format" is really only doing a quick erase
and random verify of the file system. This would be similar to a 'quick
erase' of a CDRW disk which was written/formatted as an iso -- erase the
header and directory structure but don't bother with rest of data (i.e. lets
hope the surface, etc. is OK and we'll just overwrite for the new
compilation).
I had a Mount Ranier capable CDRW drive at one point and I noticed that it
worked a bit differently. Apparently MR drives can format and write "at the
same time" and also do formatting in the background. So, when using MR
(instead of UDF 1.5) it appeared only the disk headers and directory
structure was initially formatted. Then, as data was sent to the drive (by
"drag and drop" or whatever) it was cached and buffered, then the space
needed was formatted and written to in the background. When the disk was
ejected a significate delay occured while anything left in the cache was
written out to disk and the disk cleaned up. It appeared that only as much
of the disk was actually formatted as needed because you could "force" a
full disk format in MR and it would take about as long to complete as a
format as UDF.
Users should also be aware that UDF file systems are much, much less safe
than standard iso compilations. They are more effected by heat. Not all UDF
file systems are equal -- especially now that various revision levels are
out (UDF1.5 appears to be "standard recommended" while there were revisions
up to 2.5 last time I looked). In practice I've found that using packet
writting is tends to work only for the computer/drive you write it on and
only for relatively short term storage.
Note the fact that Windows XP's setup for CD writing uses a disk buffer and
writes only a iso. It simulates a "drag and drop" random access file system
by mapping the CDRW disk to the buffer (actually a system folder called "cd
burning") and then just burns asks to burn a standard iso. For adding to a
written disk it appear to load what is already on disk to the buffer adding
to the new files then erase the CDRW disk and re-burn it. I suspect even
good old Microsoft figured the odds of including UDF packed writing would be
adding another can of worms to XP.
David Yerka
PS: I have been testing Xandros OC 3.0.1 and I find I like it quite a bit. I
didn't find 2/2.5 really ready for an average business user but Xandros 3
looks to be a true MS desktop killer. A number of my clients are fed up with
paying through the nose for Windows "upgrades" -- some really feel MS
tugging the chain -- so they are very interested. I even have one office
where the practice management application will run under Crossover Office --
and the developers have decided to commit to a Linux version for release
next year.
This was pretty good article but it seems to leave out something.
Because of that I've had hours of pain.
Perhaps a note could be added.
Here is what seems to be missing:
setting up AXIS_HOME, AXIS_LIB, and AXIS_CLASSPATH, as in
set AXIS_HOME=c:\axis
set AXIS_LIB=%AXIS_HOME%\lib
set AXISCLASSPATH=%AXIS_LIB%\axis.jar;%AXIS_LIB%\commons-discovery.jar;
%AXIS_LIB%\commons-logging.jar;%AXIS_LIB%\jaxrpc.jar;%AXIS_LIB%\saaj.jar;
%AXIS_LIB%\log4j-1.2.8.jar;%AXIS_LIB%\xml-apis.jar;%AXIS_LIB%\xercesImpl.jar
;%AXIS_LIB%\wsdl4j.jar
Can somebody look into this? It never happened to me...
Please confirm if this is fake or not.
Tille.
...............
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 16:57:59 -0800
From: Brian Wildasinn <address_elided>
Hello TLDP,
URGENT NOTICE: Trojan LG TLDP archives alert!
On March 25, 2005, I download some files from TLDP. My download script shows a time stamp of 9:10PM, which downloaded the entire ftpfiles directory at linuxgazette from my home LAN at 66.218.50.80.
I have a WinXP notebook attached to a wireless access point. After downloading some Linux Gazette tarballs from http://linuxgazette.net/ftpfiles, my security scanners show an active suspicious port open. I could telnet into port 5400 on WinXP from my FreeBSD box over my LAN.
Using NMAP security scan on FreeBSD `nmap -sS -P0 <wireless access point w/WEP encryption/router MN-700>` showed port 5400 open, which is described as "5400/tcp excerpt Excerpt Search" or Bladerunner Trogan.
Here is the results of ClamWin from my infect notebook:
Can somebody look into this? It never happened to me...
Please confirm if this is fake or not.
What you have there is a pair of false positives. I'm not sure what in
Linux Gazette issue 86 Clamwin thought was an instance of
"Exploit.IFrame.Gen", which I gather is an MS-Outlook exploit. The
Gazette has a feature near the end of many issues where the text of
particularly hilarious spam and/or virus mail is published and mocked,
so that might well be it.
I would guess that the "HTML.Phishing.Bank-1" Clamwin thought it found,
I'd guess it was (likewise) erroneously triggering on the "Spam
Cuteness" item in Jimmy O'Regan's "Linux Launderette" column.
Brian, there's nothing wrong with paying close attention to your
anti-virus software if you're on MS-Windows, but you'll want to read the
results with at least a little skepticism: For one thing, given that
the Linux Gazette files are a magazine, and that you read the contents
rather than executing it as a program, it's unclear to me how -- even if
every issue were packed chock-a-block with MS-Windows worms, trojans,
viruses, and exploits -- those could have been anything but inert
curios.
You may indeed have an alarmingly open "port 5400" on your MS-Windows XP
box, of course -- for entirely independent reasons. Good luck with that.
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
The Answer Gang
Linux Gazette 113: The Answer Gang (TWDT)The Answer Gang 113:
...making Linux just a little more fun!
The Answer Gang By Jim Dennis, Jason Creighton, Chris G, Karl-Heinz, and...
(meet the Gang) ...
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and
You!
We have guidelines for asking and answering questions. Linux questions only, please.
We make no guarantees about answers, but you can be anonymous on request. See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LGSearch Engine
Hello folks, things are a bit hectic over here at ye olde Answer Gang. It's
been a complete madhouse - no wait, an incomplete madhouse -
Just check out the Lifehacks we have this month. Hopefully they'll keep
your life less tangled than ours. We're saving up our Tips and our threads
from The Answer Gang about Linux itself will be
back next month, after we get
the backhoes rolled away, and the forklifts are gone... Sorry for the
dust, folks.
There's a friend of mine who says, when tech does poorly, buy stocks
in raw materials for construction. After all we know the backhoe is the
real enemy of the internet! I wonder if it's time to sell those puppies -
it looks like things in the tech world are pretty much looking up. Not
necessarily all at once, but certainly, there are signs of Spring. Renewal
is here, there are random() seeds everywhere. We're getting to the
/root of things (with a bit of hack and /-ing, true).
Duck season, wabbit season... allergy season.
Ok, enough of that, I'm hiding indoors and doing programming until
Summer.
Share drinks with your friendly local bartender in the TAG lounge, and
this is what you get:
Happiness is like water. It might come back as rain, but it's always there
if you look for it.
Diving into something new, or coming out of deep waters? Sploosh.
Remember to protect your silicate buddies from the elements.
See you next month, folks
p.s. Yes, we do celebrate April Fools Day around here.
Please send us any Foolish Things You Did With Your
Computer for a special run in next month's issue. Any particularly yummy Answers you have discovered, are
also welcome; by this means you, too, can join The Answer Gang!
Send your submissions to: tag .at.
linuxgazette.net - Thanks!
p.p.s. Yes, questions are good too, we're always eager to answer you.
Well, almost always. We don't guarantee an answer (tho stumpers are likely
to land in Help Wanted). However - please don't ask us
things you don't want published - the Gang's not a private place. But you
can be anonymous, you only need to ask that too. -- Heather
Lifehacks
From Jimmy O'Regan
Answered By: Jimmy O'Regan, Brian Bilbrey, Raj Shekhar, Heather Stern
I'm looking for everyone's lifehacks. For more information about what a
lifehack is, scroll down -- I've included the introduction to an article
I was writing for another site (cough) that I couldn't make relevant
there -- but in short, it's things that make your life easier, like Ben's
quote catcher or my screen scrapers (they save me ~5 minutes per day
that I can waste on IRC instead
.
So drag out your ugly scripts, or at least say what they do in
principle. (No, I don't have any that haven't been made into articles
already :)
-- Jimmy
Lifehacks
Lifehacks
are an idea that was put forward by
Danny O'Brien
at the
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
. Lifehacks are the result of taking one of the basic principles of
self-help -- find out how the experts work,
and emulate them -- and applying it to geeks.
One of the least surprising discoveries of the Lifehacks research is
that "Overprolific Alpha Geeks" spend most of their working lives using
the shell. Two of the
conclusions
of the talk are that geeks will have private blogs/RSS feeds.
Why would you use private blogs?
Most people need to provide their bosses with periodic reports. Because
feed aggregators are available for almost every imaginable platform,
reading feeds is not an issue. Having reports available in a private
blog offers two immediate benefits: each report is archived in a known
location; and the feed reader provides notification of new entries (as
well as keeping its own archive of entries). Making reports available as
a feed can also boost productivity and increase communication --
sysadmins, for example, can generate many of their reports from log
files, and add this to the feed so their boss no longer needs to wait
around for a formal report; programmers can use scripts in CVS (or other
version control systems) that generate a report containing a list of
changed files and the log message for every commit.
A popular use of blogs is as a whiteboard -- people thinking out loud,
inviting passers-by to offer suggestions or criticism which may help to
improve an idea. By maintaining different blogs with varying levels of
availability, people can share ideas with the appropriate audience
without revealing things they would prefer to keep secret.
The most basic advantage of writing down an idea is that you no longer
have to worry about remembering it. Even writing to a completely private
blog, as a "todo" list, has advantages. Writing an idea forces you to
clarify your own thoughts: the simple act of writing an idea down to
remember it can lead to you expressing it well enough to share it with a
wider audience. Once an idea is written, it can then be refactored --
you can share it at a later date, when you have developed it further.
Another advantage is that each blog entry is automatically dated, so
each idea can be compared with public blog entries from the same time,
so you can discover why the idea was relevant; and if nothing else, a
blog provides you with a single place where you can archive your ideas
and
"secret scripts"
in case you need them again.
Semi-public blogs, available only on a company or department intranet,
allow co-workers to keep track of each others activities and to offer
and receive suggestions about ideas without publicly exposing company
secrets. Information put on a semi-private blog may later become
suitable for public consumption, such as a note about a bug in a
product, or information about server downtime.
[Brian]
Thank you.
Thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!
This is the sort of thing that I've been doing unconsciously for the
last 20 years, and what's been lacking is the vision to make it a
conscious process.
Every machine I have does webserving, I drop stuff into the serving
space for testing, for review, for remembering.
I put stuff on my public site so that when I forget I ever knew how to
do a thing, I can google for the answer and find what I wrote once upon
a time (that's happened THREE times in the last year).
I rsync everything, everywhere. Cron takes care of most of it,
occasionally I'll manually run a set to a sometimes running box, and
then shut it down and put it in the basement. Mostly that's private
stuff, and not the things that can be replicated or are static,
committed to DVD+R (like the ogg collection).
I run
phpGroupWare
at work with Calendar, TroubleTicket and Todo modules active.
I publish fun and useful links in my webspace on the internal server -
everything from a demo of how the Windows messenger error looks when
Samba +
ClamAV
+Samba-vscan catches an inbound virus, to the mods I might
make to my cube to get a nerf-weapon war type of battle-cube.
All of my email accounts are IMAP, I have 5 active places, and I copy
stuff from account to account, in and out of the assorted todo
sub-folders as I want to apply the topic to the part of my life in question.
[Jimmy]
I do the same. Anything that I really like, or may need in real life,
I email to my phone (my phone has Blackberry email, so email to my
private account comes in like an SMS message: straight to the phone, no
need to check :)
Email is one of the top geek ways of keeping information, according to
that survey. Wanna remember something, mail it to yourself.
[Brian]
I don't have a useful PDA. I've had FUN ones, linux-based, but I'm
thinking I need a real one, one of these days. Useful AND used. All the
Linux ones provided tools to sync/work with Windows boxen. Um, sorry,
don't run that one, got any other choices? I'm leaning towards Treo. Any
thoughts?
[Jimmy]
I use my phone as a pda. Getting
SyncML
going is something I really want
to do, but I'm not sure I want to be synchronising across the Internet
when the phone is right beside the blasted PC :(
[Brian]
I have one "blog" that I'm experimenting with, using
Wordpress
. There are parts of it I like, but for many purposes I really like the
read-in-time-ordinal of journalling rather than the reverse mode of
Blogging. I suppose that's why I've never really mentally connected with
RSS feeds, even though a great number of people I know think that feeds
are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Are these "problems" for me?
Am I just in the wrong phase of a Candlestick-Two Faces conundrum?
Thoughts, please...
I LOVE the idea of using a blog as a log watch aggregator. That ROCKS!
[Jimmy]
Heh. That was an obvious use I didn't see mentioned. Back in college I
used to have a bunch of scripts that ran grep over various log files,
diffed them against yesterday's, and mailed the result to an admin account.
I used them to track things like who used su and when etc., and had
something similar in root's .bash_logout so I could compare and see who
was doing what (not to snoop, just to offer a helping hand to the newbie
admins).
[Brian]
What's in my ~/bin: 87 scripts, mostly ugly hacks to run CLI and GUI
tools in a specific order. For example:
Since the USB card reader doesn't ALWAYS see media inserted, a quick
cfdisk brings that problem to an end. I mount the card, copy the
contents to the directory I specified on the commandline. Ick, no test
for correct input, eh? Unmount, prompt, call another script to convert
all to 640x480. use
GQview
to pick and choose. Those I keep, I may edit
using
GIMP
from within GQview. When I'm done, I have the 640x480 snaps
that I'll use on the website. Exit GQview and the script continues. Make
thumbnails of the remaining files. Copy everything into my local copy of
the webtree. Blow the whole processing tree away, leaving me with camera
originals on the disk. I don't use this one much anymore, because I have
a new camera and a new method of doing some of that stuff. I haven't
automated it yet because I've been too busy to save time. Sigh.
[Jimmy]
I keep my photos on
flickr.com
(and on CD, but they're easier to find on
flickr), and my links on
del.icio.us
. In issue #110 I described what I use
to get a montage of my last N photos (
Flickr and Perl
) and
My tip in #112
has a script I use to get a Netscape bookmarks-compatible version of
all the links I have in del.icio.us.
[Brian]
I have another little script, a three liner that drops me down into the
current year's working directory in my web space, pops a firefox window
pointing at http://localhost/xxx/xxx/blah.php, and fires up bluefish
with the most recently edited page in the window.
I have a number of scripts dedicated to setting up ssh tunnelling for
VNC
connections to windows desktops at my last-but-two employer out in
CA, where I still consult from time to time, and it's much easier to
answer Netscrape or LookOut questions when they can SHOW me instead of
trying to describe things over the phone.
[Heather] For being able to show someone _else_ that VNC session,
VNC snapshot
over at sourceforge looks nice...
[Brian]
I have lots of little scripts for rsyncing chunks of my local machine to
other places, for web publishing, for backup, for sharing data.
I need to spend more time being efficient, writing still more tools to
do my work for me.
[Jimmy]
Same here. I'm finding more and more that it pays to take a step outside
myself and really pay attention to what I'm doing, then use this function:
[Raj]
One thing I use heavily is Emacs. It has a number of nifty modes which
make life much organized for a programmer. I will list a few
especially good ones
PlannerMode is an organizer and day planner for Emacs. It helps you keep
track of your pending and completed tasks, daily schedule, dates to remember,
notes and inspirations.
emacs-outline-mode:
very useful if you are writing an outline for an
article or just taking notes. (I find wiki-mode more user friendly, see
below)
[Raj]
emacs-wiki-mode:
This is a Emacs mode for maintaining a local Wiki.
Though I use it for making outlines of articles and keeping notes during
meetings. The main idea is that you write using plain text, but it is
rendered on emacs as html. (emacs-wiki-mode comes with emacs-planner-mode)
Instead of having a personal blog to keep a track of
personal-todos/inspirations etc. , I use a wiki:
http://rajshekhar.net/wiki
[Heather]
The great thing about
MoinMoin
is, it supports access control lists,
so it can be public and private spaces at the same time.
Yeah, pardon my dust over there at SysadMoin, it's only available inside
our LAN at the moment while I'm preparing an upgrade. Not moin's fault - I
had a hard disk go crunch - most annoying - geez, it's a good thing I make
regular backups. A few merges, oh, I have to re-do my dark theme too...
Ahhhhh, backups. If there's one "hack" I've taken back
out of the computer world into my real life, it's making sure to have
backups. Backup plans, backup copies of contact info, someone to backup
for me if that old problem about not being able to be in two places at
once strikes home. Save early, save often, save extras.
Over in #moin on freenode, where I have been hanging out a lot lately,
there's one fellow (deitarion) who's cleaning up not only a lifetime
of loose notes but also organizing and commenting on a number of files
he's gathered over time, using MoinMoin Desktop Edition, in other words,
a wiki designed to be personal:
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DesktopEdition
He seems to have saved a bunch of space already and be working on some
search engine tricks for it, combining it with
GTKtalog
(commandline fans may prefer
SwissDB
)
and planning on a local web proxy to manage his external bookmarks.
He's working on saving enough space and/or being clear enough on what's
his, to have this help his emigration from his current distro to Gentoo.
[Jimmy]
One of the best tips I saw is one from JWZ. He keeps an /etc/setup
script, and every time he does anything from the root account, copies
and pastes it into the script, and comments it saying why, before
copying it to his other machines, so he can have every machine set up to
exactly the same state whenever needed.
[Heather]
Jim (the Answer Guy) and I both keep a README file for each of our
machines, either in /etc or in / (I like to hardlink them together;
keeping /etc on a seperate partition from / is rare and creepy, but a
symlink would do nicely - hardlinks, though, protect it from being
deleted by the fs if one of the links is removed).
This file datestamps any interesting changes we do to a machine,
possibly including script bits, fstab tweaks, etc. Reading it should
be enough to figure out how to spin up another machine just like this
one even without the box itself.
I also keep one of these in each complete chroot area I set up, since I
treat them like whole machines. Which brings me to the next Lifehack :)
For chroot'd environments that aren't just the single app, I change its
/etc/hostname to something that clarifies what it is (past examples
include "rescue", "minideb", "dev-potato", "memoryalpha" for my trek
stuff), and I change the part in the root user's setup (/root/.bashrc)
so that instead of asking for hostname:
export PS1='\h:\w\$ '
...it uses the contents of the hostname file:
export PS1="-=[ `cat /etc/hostname` ]=- \w\$ "
Note the doublequotes - if you use single quotes, the command to cat the
file is going to be used every time, and you don't really change a
chroot's hostname all the time, do you? (I certainly don't.)
Since my chroot'd prompt also looks different, even without colorization
tricks that I use on my terminals, I can easily tell that I'm in the
chroot, and which one I'm in. So nice when I'm ssh'd in and using a
screen session heavily.
If you haven't heard of
screen
then for goodness' sake get it. Job control
is nice, but this gives whole windows with real terminals, so the
human can multitask too; things that you might want to background can
be run in another window where they think they have foreground; it can
be told to log one of its windows (great when a compile or some other
scripted thing is about to spout lots of text you want to read later, or
grep through); with some rather careful permission settings it can even
be used in multi-user mode, so you can show a junior admin, your kid
sister, or a linux newbie you're helping spin up to speed, the exact
things that you're doing. With screen you don't need X and vnc unless
you need graphics :)
We're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what
kind of people we are, what we're capable of, because we've told ourselves
what kind of people we are. You're a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses
and strengths you've told yourself you have.
(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can
easily talk yourself out of having.)
You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don't like
the story your life has become -- tell yourself a better one.
"How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think"
(http://speakeasy.org/~lion/nb) is a braindump book about how to keep a
paper version of a wiki.
Submitters, send your News Bytes items in
PLAIN TEXT
format. Other formats may be rejected without reading. You have been
warned! A one- or two-paragraph summary plus URL gets you a better
announcement than an entire press release. Submit items to
bytes@lists.linuxgazette.net
As always, you should download kernels and patches from your
nearest mirror.
Intel License
Intel has tentatively proposed
eliminating the Intel Open Source License, substituting
for it the more common BSD license. This would be a small
contribution to reducing the proliferation of licenses that
has occurred in recent years.
Nero, the popular Windows CD/DVD burning software, has
recently been
released for Linux.
NeroLinux is a closed source application, and is available
free of charge following registration on the Nero website.
Originally hailing from Ireland, Michael is currently living in Baden,
Switzerland. There he works with ABB Corporate Research as a
Marie-Curie fellow, developing software for the simulation and design
of electrical power-systems equipment.
Before this, Michael worked as a lecturer in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, University College Dublin; the same
institution that awarded him his PhD. The topic of this PhD research
was the use of Lamb waves in nondestructive testing. GNU/Linux has
been very useful in his past work, and Michael has a strong interest
in applying free software solutions to other problems in engineering.
Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs
around in a pair of colorful tights fighting criminals. During the day... well,
he just runs around. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.
Free as in Freedom: Part Four: Epilog - 2000 VAIOS and a Grain of Zen
The KDE and GNOME desktop environments make it possible for people who
have no knowledge of Unix or GNU/Linux commands to use a GNU/Linux system
as easily as they'd use Mac or Windows for web-browsing, word-processing,
email, games and the things most users spend their computer time on. It's
only going to get better, and one day many people might know GNU/Linux only
through the GUI.
I asked Okopnik, "Do you think this is a 'good' thing, that people are
finding out they have an alternative, but at the same time using that
alternative almost exclusively on the GUI level, like they would use Mac
or Windows? Have you noticed more of an interest in Linux or an enhanced
readership since Linux became both market and user friendly? If so,
are these new users less interested in the "technical" aspects than in
having a stable GUI-based system to for work and email and net-surfing?"
Okopnik wrote, "Actually, this is an issue that I brought up in an
involved discussion with the LG staff and the Answer Gangsters (The
Answer Gang answers Linux questions sent to us by our readers, and the
discussions and the answers become part of LG.) My viewpoint here is
that it's actually a very good thing - modulo the awareness that the
Command Line (CLI) exists. That is, people are perfectly welcome to come
to Linux and use only its GUI capabilities as long as this serves their
needs - but when the GUI proves insufficient, the capabilities of the
CLI are there, just underneath, providing the perfect security blanket.
"In an article I wrote for Java Developers Journal, I related an
example of this. I had a client whose Web developer left them in the
lurch with several hundred HTML files without the ".html" extensions.
This wouldn't be too bad by itself - renaming a group of files isn't
difficult - but the thousands of HTML links within the files referred
to those extensionless names as well. With GUI-only tools, this is a
nearly-unsolvable disaster. From the CLI, it was a matter of a single
short line of code:
perl -i -wpe 's/<a href="[^"]+/$&.html/g' *
"The readership of LG has certainly changed over time. Where we
used to get dozens of questions on fairly technical topics in The
Answer Gang, we now get only a few - and they tend to be simpler, less
technical. The email I get from our readers indicates that there has
indeed been a definite shift in the user base; the old Linuxer who would
bang on a problem for hours so that it could be reported (and quickly
fixed) is being... well, not _replaced,_ but reduced, percentage-wise,
as the mainstay of the population. The new user is often just that -
a computer user who just wants that email/web/document/spreadsheet
processor and maybe a few games on the side. There is, however, a
cultural shift that occurs even in those users after a while: you
cannot live in a society based on a given moral premise and ignore
that premise, or even stop it from penetrating into your life (even if
you try to prevent it.) The original "hacker ethic" of Linux lives on,
strong as ever in those who use the full extent of this OS, and inherent
(and growing, however slowly) in those who use it even without that full
knowledge.
I wrote, "I was considering the license for Documentation -- I forgot
what it's called..."
Okopnik wrote, "The Open Publication License. There has been quite an
evolution of licenses on the documentation side; the OPL is pretty much
the last product of it (there are a few others) and is by far the most
popular, simple, and comprehensive. The LG remains under it because I
did _a lot_ of applicable research."
I wrote, "It almost goes without saying that this article will be
'free' but it's probably a good idea to say it because I've been
'burned' before, as have other writers I know, having articles that were
meant to be "free" stolen by publications that charge a fee to readers
-- online or off."
Okopnik replied, "This would be a good reason to implement the 'no
commercial distribution without prior permission' clause."
I wrote, "Tell me about your experience with licensing and your
research. For instance, how does one particular license affect LG as
opposed to another?"
Okopnik wrote, "When I took over the E-i-C/publisher slot here at
LG, I decided to revisit the decisions that had been made (and cast as
procedure) in the past with regard to as many of them as I could find;
in my opinion, this needed to be done to keep LG fresh and relevant.
One of these was the license under which we accept and publish all our
material.
"I had asked Rick Moen, a member of our staff who is very knowledgeable
about the nitty-gritty of various FLOSS issues including licensing to
comment on our use of OPL; I also threw the floor open to others' input. As
a result of the discussion and familiarization with the basic issues at
stake, I did a lot of my own research, and came to focus on the OPL (which
was the license LG was using at the time) and the CC, the Creative Commons
license (see http://creativecommons.org/; I
recommend the site highly, particularly their "license-choosing wizard"
which helps you pick the appropriate one for your application.) The latter
held a lot of promise and flexibility, but in the end, I had to vote
/antiquo/; the OPL, with a little clarification, supplied all our needs.
The front page of LG now states:
"All content released under the Open Publication License v1.0
(options A and B not applied)
"The clarification in the parentheses was the only thing added. Given
that the author of OPL himself, David Wiley, considers it dated (he
became CC's Director of Educational Licenses and shut down the Open
Content site in 2003), we may well transition to the CC at some point in
the future. For now, though, the OPL serves our purposes and creates no
restrictions on the author's rights (theirs supercede ours) that I would
find objectionable.
"LG's only concern is the right to distribute freely in electronic
format. Should you wish to prohibit or restrict commercial distribution,
or want to be contacted before anyone converts it to print, we have no
objection or concern; in fact, we have no say - and this is what I,
in my capacity at LG, see as perfectly suiting our needs. A slightly
different attitude than you'll find in a commercial environment, I
grant... " wrote Okopnik
I wrote, "This is a particularly interesting/different attitude for a
magazine."
Okopnik wrote, "The Open Source culture often produces those. Once
money is not the primary motivator, a number of interesting results show
up. FLOSS is a social experiment gone successful -> mainstream -> wild,
a meritocracy/gift-based culture that focuses on exchanging people's
best abilities for community recognition and respect. Part of the secret
of its effectiveness is that you can't cheat people out of respect
the way you can with money - it can always be lost or withdrawn. Like
any other human system, it has its imperfections (see Cory Doctorow's
"Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" or James P. Hogan's "Voyage into
Yesteryear", both of which describe a respect-based system as the basis
of an economy), but they're a) usually self-correcting and b) several
orders of magnitude less extreme at the edges than what we have now."
I wrote, "It actually brings up the question, "what is a magazine"
(online or off)? I always thought of a commercial magazine as a
corporation using artists and authors to sell advertisements while
at the same time providing a venue for artist/authors' works. But a
zine like LG, which provides essential, often crucial information to a
specific audience -- i.e. Linux users -- has a unique responsibility as
an "education/information venue." By placing author's rights above the
rights of the magazine itself, you are serving as a mediator between
your audience and the kind of information you offer them."
Okopnik wrote, "/Tetigisti acu/;
well done, sir. That is precisely our function and mission. We want to
introduce people to Linux, get them to the point where they'll know enough
to ask the right questions and to find the answers. This would set off all
sorts of alarms for a commercial venture - we are, after all, training our
readers not to need us after a while - but I'll happily hang up my
editorial hat once most of the world is Linux-competent. :)"
I wrote, "I see LG as a "mediator" between Linux Users and the
millions of pages of information pertaining to Linux. At some point an
'editor' is needed, otherwise a reader can just do a Google search on
various subjects without a coherent 'theme.'"
Okopnik wrote, "Precisely so. Does it surprise you to learn that I'm
a teacher (seminars in programming, network security, etc. for Sun
Microsystems and others), and have been, in one form or another, for
most of my career? I suspect not."
"What's FLOSS?" I asked.
Okopnik wrote, "An unwieldy compromise of a name that the majority
can live with. As you've probably figured from your exchange with
Stallman, there's some disagreement about exactly what this whole
movement should be called - and Free/Libre/Open Source Software is what
we got as a result. Like dead yeast in beer, it's harmless and doesn't
even affect the flavor."
I wrote, "Interestingly, or by strange coincidence, I destroyed my
wife's Windows installation on a super-powered custom-built PC she uses
to run the Maya 3D program (she teaches computer graphics and 3D at New
York University)."
Okopnik wrote, "You do realize that Maya is usually run under Linux
these days, right?"
I wrote, "Doesn't matter; the university's program is locked
into Windows. Anyway, she warned me not to mess up her dedicated Maya
machine by 'playing around with Linux' and of course I told her this
was an impossibility -- oops. Problem was, I switched, after a year
of smooth sailing, from GRUB to LILO and totally corrupted the Master
Boot Record (MBR). This brought up an interesting point: virtually no
one knows how Windows works. I was able to fix the LILO problem, but I
had no idea how to do anything in Windows, nor did many people I called
who actually teach courses on the Windows OS. To make matters worse,
the only boot disc available was the original installation CD, which
you can only access via a password, which we forgot. So, even though we
"owned" the system, there was no way of getting in. We had to call in an
expert, the person who built the machine and installed the software, the
President of Compusoft Computing Systems himself, Philip Keough, who is
all of sixteen years old..."
Okopnik wrote, "In an information-based economy, intelligence (and
the wisdom to use it correctly) is the winning factor. The side
effects still tend to surprise the hell out of people, which makes for
interesting food for thought."
I wrote, "I recognized this as an opportunity not only to save my
marriage, but to interview a certified computer whiz from the 'younger
generation' (painful, those words) who grew up with both Windows and
Linux. His high school -- I think the President of Compusoft Computing
Systems is a junior -- just provided a Sony VAIO laptop for every
student, loaded, of course, with Windows XP. The school was considering
GNU/Linux, but decided to go with the 'industry standard.' I asked him
if anyone among his hacker friends, not the 'mainstream students,' was
into GNU/Linux, which I thought would be the OS for rebellious young
geeks. His answer was exaclty 2 out of 2000 sudents, are familiar with
GNU/Linux: himself and some other kid who publicly proclaims 'give me
Linux or give me death' but secretly runs Windows 2000 as his main
installation. I asked Philip why this was so, why kids at such a young
age would want to feed into the 'industry standard' way of life. His
answer was that Windows felt more "professional" just as Adobe Photoshop
was 'more professional' than The GIMP. So much for garage-band rebellion
and the Ramones...
"If what he was saying is true, and Mac is viewed as something for
graphic artists, like the old SGI, but otherwise obsolete, then there
is only one operating system on earth, and it's a damned bad one," I
wrote.
Okopnik wrote, "You have to remember that the OS competitive arena
is the entire world, while what you heard was a single opinion from a
single person in a single location. Furthermore, if he had said 'Windows
can do X, Y, and Z whereas Linux can't', or 'the software that we're
mandated to use requires Windows', well and good (although I don't think
that it's possible to defend the first argument); since his entire
area of focus is on how an OS 'feels', then he's off into mysticism as
opposed to rational judgement."
I wrote, "So, in reference to your LG audience: is GNU/Linux just
a toy that hackers boot on week-ends to unwind, or is it viewed as
a genuine alternative to Windows? The feeling I'm getting, or I
was getting from Philip, is that even the most dedicated GNU/Linux
enthusiasts share their hard-drives with some version of Windows for use
in the 'real world.'"
Okopnik wrote, "Well, let's see. Many schools, hospitals, and
government installations in India run Linux. Same for South Africa. France
has passed a law that says "Open Source is to be implemented whenever
possible"; Brazil, which was 8% of Microsoft's business a couple of years
ago, has followed suit. Germany has been using Linux in their security
departments, and is now implementing it at every level - federal, state,
and local. China has decided that it's their official OS; Korea and Japan
have joined them in investing several billion dollars in FLOSS software
development recently. Most of South America is switching, led by Peru (Dr.
Villanueva Nunez, a Congressman, responded succinctly and brilliantly to
the fear-and-doubt tactics that Microsoft tried to sow when the decision
was made; the translation can be found in many places on the Net.) This is
just off the top of my head; there are many other countries which have
decided that FLOSS simply _works_ for them (generally by making them
competitive in the world market and removing an unnecessary barrier to
their pool of talented but poor would-be techies.)
"Special effects - in e.g. Titanic, Shrek, The One, and many other
movies - are being done on Linux, simply because you _can't_ build
a real server farm for crunching serious processing under Windows
(incidentally, one of the most powerful computers in the world is a
massively-parallel rig built by students in Australia. Guess what it
runs?) The overwhelming majority of Web servers on the Net run Linux
- and many of those that don't are running Apache, a piece of FLOSS
software.
"I hope these random examples begin to add up to a coherent picture.
I couldn't even start to draw an outline of just how huge and pervasive
the entire FLOSS penetration into the OS market actually is," Okopnik
wrote.
Okopnik added, "Mac's gone FLOSS. Well, almost completely, anyway: the
base of Mac OS/X is another free Unix, BSD. The only part they haven't
really opened is their desktop manager (if I recall correctly, it's
called "Aqua") - but you can run plain ole' X on Mac hardware, and it's
available right from Apple's site. What's more, Apple has been edging
toward releasing the older versions of Aqua as FLOSS; their real edge
has always been as a great hardware and User Interface (UI) company
anyway, so they wouldn't lose anything.
"A lot of FLOSS software, unsurprisingly, can be compiled to run on
OS/X; the instructions for doing so are, again, available on Apple's
site - and so it a lot of already compiled FLOSS. Did I mention that
we're taking over the world? :)," Okopnik wrote.
I wrote, "But Mac long ago ceased to be any kind of real competitor
to Windows. Like the old Soviet Union kept the U.S. in check and vice
versa. Now the U.S. is a Monopoly run rampant -- like Microsoft. A
closed system is a closed system. The rest of the world, developing
better software on Linux, will catch up while Microsoft, who keeps its
position only through use of 'force' will wither up and die," I wrote.
Okopnik wrote, "Is it as obvious to you as it is to me and many
others? I don't understand why more people can't see that basic fact -
other than simply not knowing or understanding the issues."
I wrote, "I came across this quote by Stallman on the gnu.org site
(www.gnu.org/thegnuproject.html):
'The "Linux" magazines ... are filled with advertisements for
proprietary software that works with GNU/Linux. When the next Motif or
Qt appears, will these magazines warn programmers to stay away from it,
or will they run ads for it?'
"Response?" I wrote.
Okopnik wrote, "As it happens, LG is the one Linux publication that
does not accept advertisements, and therefore does not follow Stallman's
dictum; we prefer to remain totally unbiased (except by our own personal
prejudices, of course. :) I have to agree that commercially-driven
magazines do have their bottom line to consider; perhaps not above all,
but it is a very strong motivating factor. I'll admit to being actually
shocked for about 30 seconds when I saw a Microsoft ad in the Linux
Journal... but sober consideration prevailed. There's no reason that
they shouldn't have - the ad said nothing derogatory about Linux and was
placed in the more-or-less correct market for MS's purposes - but it did
make for an interesting contrast.
"For the people who were outraged by this - and judging from the
comments on Slashdot and elsewhere, many were - I'd suggest considering
the following Buddhist koan:
"'Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment.'
"Very interesting questions can be found in the moment between the
emotional response and the reaction..." wrote Okopnik.
I wrote, "Sometimes I wonder if I should be writing two different
articles, the GNU Story, and Everyone Else's. They're kinda picky with
their "GNU/Linux" not "Linux" and initially boycotting KDE because qt
was "proprietary" but I guess you need people like that, people who are
ready, willing and able to go 'all the way' to get a movement started.
If you don't mind me 'requoting' you from the previous section of this
article:
'We _need_ our radicals. They're ugly, scruffy, pushy, aggressive, loud,
and unfit for normal humans to associate with - but, O Ghod do we need
them! They sacrifice themselves on the altar of whatever the hell their
passion may be; they give up their right to be seen as "normal", and
make of themselves targets at which the majority of society will fling
rocks and garbage - and we, the human race, get to move ahead just
another tiny notch for each one of them. Granted, there are radicals on
either side of the fence - and lots of different fences - but the total
vector of these little steps *is* in the direction of progress; another
pragmatic belief of mine, and although I won't go into the philosophical
ramifications of it, it can be summed up as "'good' is just another way
of saying "pro-survival".' -- Ben Okopnik. That's you," I wrote.
Okopnik wrote, "I might add, 'Listening to these folks, however,
_does_ require turning down the volume and intensity controls, and
keeping a supply of large grains of NaCl handy. :)'"
I wrote, "I just want this article to introduce GNU/Linux to people
who aren't aware that it's a valid option -- especially now that KDE
and GNOME provide GUI 'desktop environments' that anyone can use.
Good to know know LG is sticking to the straight and narrow regarding
advertisements for proprietary software, though."
Okopnik wrote, "Well, we don't have an articulated social contract the
way Debian Linux does (http://www.debian.org/social_contract),
but we do have our priorities. 'Making Linux a little more fun' does not
mean distorting the truth for profit - and that includes being cautious
with regard to slippery slopes."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. It is free to distribute, reproduce or modify with the
author's consent. Read more about licensing software, text and
documentation at http://www.creativecommons.org.
Adam Engel has published poetry, fiction and essays in such magazines and
periodicals as Counter Punch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal,
Strike-the-Root, LewRockwell.com, The New York Art Review, The Concord
Journal, The Middlesex News, Accent, The Littleton Review, Ark, Smart
Shoes, The Beacon, Literal Latte, Artemis, The Lummox Journal, Fearless,
POESY, The Half Moon Review, Art:Mag, Chronogram, Gnome and others.
Adam Engel's first book of poetry, Oil and Water, was
published by Maximum Capacity Press in 2001. His novel,
Topiary, will be published by Dandelion Books in the
Spring of 2005.
He has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, executive speechwriter,
systems administrator, and editorial consultant, and has taught writing at
New York University, Touro College and the Gotham Writer's Workshop in New
York City.
Here is a short course (with some excursions) to help you take your
existing Desktop, roll it into an ISO pipe and smoke a USB stick or CD.
This is not a task for the faint-hearted - there are no automated scripts
in here!
Part of the reason for this hands-on approach is that each desktop
system will have its own quirks, so writing scripts which handle the
various conditions which might arise is painful. Secondly, there are
numerous choices possible - you must mix your own. Finally, I must confess
that I do not feel energetic enough to write the scripts at this point.
Instead, you have this article!
So if you have spent a lot of time fine-tuning your configuration and want
to waste some more time putting it onto a (re)movable drive - read on.
Making a read-only root filesystem
Since the chosen medium for our ``live'' portable system is a CD or
USB stick we do not want to write to it often. In fact, in the case
of a CD-R we can only write to it once. It should be obvious, however,
that a ``live'' system does need to write something if it is
to be counted as among the living!
While many mechanisms have been suggested to handle this, we
will (essentially) follow the system chosen by bootcd. To do this,
we need to create a directory /wraith, an archive
/wraith.cpio.gz and a script /etc/rcS.d/S01undead.sh.
The contents of the archive are rather system specific so you
will need to choose its contents. However, if you are really,
really impatient you can download the
listing
of the archive that I use and run the following:
Did you get a lot of error messages? No? Are you really sure
that your system is almost identical to mine? Yes? Then you can skip
the next subsection.
Choices, choices...
How does one find out what files need to be written to on a live system?
One way would be to find all the files that have been written
to on your current desktop. To do this first find out when the system was
booted - a good measure of this is when the root filesystem was last mounted.
So for example
# Use your real root device in place of /dev/root.
last_boot_time=$(dumpe2fs -h /dev/root | \
sed -n -e's/Last mount time: * //p')
You may wish to use the log files or the last command instead.
You only need to know the last boot time approximately; subtract a minute
or so from it just to be on the safe side - unless you boot the system
more often than that! Now create a file with that time stamp using the
touch command:
touch -d "$last_boot_time" /tmp/lastboot
You can now create the list of all files that were modified since that
last boot (for simplicity we will only bother with the directories
/etc and /var; you can add some other directories if
you so desire):
find /etc /var -newer /tmp/lastboot > /tmp/changed
# And, just for fun...
find /home -newer /tmp/lastboot > /tmp/home_changed
Have a look at these lists but don't delete them just yet. You should notice
that there are three types of files that are written to on a running
system.
Files that are automatically written to but can be empty at the
start like log files or the mozilla cache directories.
Files that have information which we may want
to change but rarely. Most configuration files fall into this category.
Automatically generated databases of system information. Since
our system is going to be ``static'' we actually do not want the
system to update these databases. Thumb-rule: If the file is large in
size it probably belongs here!
We will split up our list, /tmp/changed, according to this
classification: /tmp/write will consist of those files (mostly
directories) that are empty at boot time but get written to as the system
runs; /tmp/links will consist of the files that will be
quasi-static - we will keep a static version of these files at boot time
but we might want to change them on a running system. We will include the
third category of files in /tmp/links as well, since we will not
treat them differently - but ultimately you may want to change this.
We first create a directory to hold the files that will be modifiable
at run-time - say /wraith. Mount a RAM-based file system on it
by mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /wraith. Big Fat
Warning: This file system is ephemeral and will be lost
when you halt the system. If you wish, you can use the directory as-is
(without the tmpfs mount) during this subsection, but don't
forget to clean up its contents once you have created the archive as
explained below.
In /wraith, we will create the top-level directories like
etc, var, tmp and so on that we will
want to write to. In these directories we will create the files as per the
classification above. First, we'll do the writable but empty files:
cd /
cat /tmp/write | cpio -pdum /wraith
We expect these files to be empty at start-up so we will ``zero''
them. Do this only to the files for which you don't want to keep the
contents. For now I assume these are all the files in the list
/tmp/write:
for file in $(cat /tmp/write)
do
if [ -f $file ]
then
> /wraith/$file
fi
done
Of course, we also need an empty tmp directory:
mkdir /wraith/tmp
chmod 1777 /wraith/tmp
Next, we create the links.
cd /
for i in $(cat /tmp/links)
do
dir=$(dirname $i)
top=$(echo $dir | cut -f2 -d'/')
rest=$(echo $dir | cut -f3- -d'/')
name=$(basename $i)
mkdir -p /wraith/$dir
ln -s /wraith/$top.ro/$rest/$name /wraith/$i
done
# As a safety measure to ensure that all configuration files
# have been created
mkdir -p /wraith/etc
cd /etc
for i in *
do
ln -s /wraith/etc.ro/$i /wraith/etc/$i
done
This is more complicated and needs further explanation. The idea is to
make the ``static'' versions of the files available under the .ro
top-level directories. So, for example /wraith/etc/hostname will be
a link to /wraith/etc.ro/hostname.
To see this at work create etc.ro and var.ro as
sub-directories in /wraith. For each of these directories (say etc)
we run a pair of commands like the following. (Warning: Be careful here. If
you haven't created all the links in /wraith/etc as above you may crash
your running system).
mount --bind /etc /wraith/etc.ro
mount --bind /wraith/etc /etc
After these mounts, the file /etc/hostname is a link to
the original hostname file which is now available as
/wraith/etc.ro/hostname. Since the left-half of this
link is on the RAM disk we can perform replacement surgery on it:
vi /etc/hostname.new
mv /etc/hostname.new /etc/hostname
On the other hand, if you want to change a file in a sub-directory of
/etc, it's a little more complicated:
After this you can edit the files in /etc/X11. Yes, this is quite
twisted but (once you get the hang of it) not difficult to
manage - especially since we expect that we will edit these files
only rarely. An alternate approach is to create the directory tree under
/etc in its entirety only leaving links to the files.
You can use the above mounts to test your choices of
/tmp/links and /tmp/write, but the real test will
come later. For now, undo the above mounts by a pair of commands like:
umount /etc
umount /wraith/etc.ro
You can also remove the .ro directories if you like.
Finally, we create an archive of this directory:
The cpio command will tell you how many 512-byte blocks you
wrote. If the archive is really large (more than 1MB or so) then you
probably need to re-do your choices.
Bringing the wraith to life
We need a mechanism to bring the /wraith directory into
operation at boot time. To do this, install a script like the following
one to run early at boot time. For example you could install the script as
/etc/rcS.d/S01undead.sh.
#
# undead.sh Mount and load up the /wraith directory for use
#
# Version: 0.3 01-Feb-2005
#
# If this has already been run then don't run it again.
# We can't handle two wraiths!
[ -f /wraith/live ] && exit 0
# Create writable space
mount -n -t tmpfs tmpfs /wraith
# Create the directory structure
cd /wraith
gzip -dc /wraith.cpio.gz | cpio -idum
cd /
# Perform the cross mounts with bind
# which is like a directory hard link.
cd /wraith
for i in *
do
mkdir $i.ro
# We use mount with the -n
# To avoid confusing the mtab
mount -n --bind /$i /wraith/$i.ro
mount -n --bind /wraith/$i /$i
done
cd /
touch /wraith/live
: exit
Finally, you edit /etc/fstab so that the root filesystem is
mounted read-only at the next boot - just change defaults to
read ro,defaults in the appropriate entry.
Don't stop just yet
Reboot and that's it! You have a read-only root system... or
almost. Actually, it is likely that you will find a number of places where
you didn't create the links you need or created the wrong links. Don't
worry. You can modify the /wraith.cpio.gz archive to your heart's content.
Make the changes you need to the ``live'' /wraith directory.
Now copy all the changes from /wraith into /tmp/ghost. The command
will generate the newer list of files. You can unpack the older
archive and compare its list of files with /tmp/list.
mkdir /tmp/ghost
cd /tmp/ghost
zcat /wraith.cpio.gz | cpio -idum
find . -xdev > /tmp/oldlist
wdiff -a /tmp/list /tmp/oldlist
Using the differences you can see what files you need to create in
/tmp/ghost in order to match it up with the running
/wraith. You can save your changes by something like
The changes will become automatic at the next boot. Of course, once you
write the filesystem to a CD, you will have no chance to revise it again!
Undo
All this looks too complicated and life is too short? Just remove the
script /etc/rcS.d/S01undead.sh, the archive /wraith.cpio.gz
and the directory /wraith. You will have your system as pristine
as before.
Making the initrd
We want our system to ``run anywhere'' - in particular, we should be
able to mount our root file system whether it resides on a CD or USB
stick (or perhaps even hard disk). If we use a CD then on
most systems this will be on the device /dev/hdb or /dev/hdc.
The USB stick usually shows up as /dev/sda or
/dev/sdb. It should be relatively simple to just
create a kernel which supports IDE CD drives and USB block devices.
When we boot such a kernel (with the correct root=<device>
parameter) the system will start up as expected on 90% of all systems
that one is likely to encounter. If this is OK with you then you
don't need an initrd so skip the rest of this section and read
the
HOWTO
on building the kernel with IDE CD and US support - don't forget
support for the ISO 9660 (CD), ext2 and vfat (Win95) file systems.
What about the remaining 10%? That will take 90% of the work as
usual. One possible solution could be to build all the drivers
of all possible CD drives, USB readers and the like into the kernel.
Unfortunately, automatically probing for some of these devices will
occasionally cause other devices to choke-up. It also seems like a bit
of a waste to take up such enormous amounts of kernel memory for unused
drivers. The solution provided by our intrepid kernel hackers is the
modules+initrd mechanism which allows you to write a script that chooses
which drivers to load depending on the devices found.
The steps
The boot loader (see the next section) will load the kernel and the
initrd into memory. We will use a ``standard''
Debian kernel image
which has essentially everything modularized (``essentially'' since we
must have support for at least one file-system built into the kernel
in order to load the init RAM disk - this could change if I understand
initramfs better).
After the kernel has done its thing, it sets up the file-system with root
on the initrd and executes /linuxrc but doesn't quite fully let
go - when /linuxrc exits, the kernel executes /sbin/init.
We follow Debian's choices when we visualize the boot process as follows:
linuxrc
This script doesn't do much since we want the
kernel to let go and execute /sbin/init (still on the initrd).
init
The program /sbin/initon the initrd is a script
that will run the following scripts:
loadmodules
This script loads the modules necessary to read
the CD and/or USB stick.
script
This script will provide the subroutine mount_root
to recognise and mount our chosen file system on /mnt.
The final steps of init are
Mount the root file system on /mnt and cd
to it.
Execute pivot_root which makes the current directory the
root directory for the kernel and mounts the old root directory at
/initrd. After this our ``real'' root file-system is
mounted as root.
Execute chroot . to change the root device of the
current process so that /initrd is free to be unmounted. We
must do this so that the RAM disk is free to be unmounted which frees
its space for use by other processes.
Finally execute /sbin/init on the real
root file system. This is the ``real'' init program which will
initialise the live system.
Debian has already provided the package
initrd-tools which
automates the building of the initrd. This already creates the
/linuxrc and /sbin/init needed for the initrd. So we
only need to provide the scripts loadmodules and
script.
Driver loading
Writing these scripts was one of the most complex steps for me as it
deals with the aspect of Linux that I usually encounter the least - at
least on a working system - booting! On the other hand, this
is the job for which most installers and other forms of pre-install
detection tools have been written. So we follow the ``teacher'' Tom
Lehrer's dictum:
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
(Only be sure always to call it please, "research".)
-- Tom Lehrer, "Lobachevsky"
There is a good IDE driver detection routine that is part of the standard
Debian initrd. The Knoppix initrd gives us a safe order in which to load
all the SCSI modules. The Linux-Live initrd has a list of the necessary USB
modules to boot off a stick. So we put all these together to get routines
which I call loadmodules_ide, loadmodules_scsi and
loadmodules_usb. The loadmodules script on the initrd will then
act as a dispatcher - it will choose which routine to run depending
on what boot time parameters we give.
Still, we should do some work. So (plagiarising from the
hotplug scripts)
I also wrote a procedure loadmodules_pci
that loads only those modules which correspond to devices
in /sys/bus/pci/devices which match the data found in
/lib/modules/kernel-version/modules.pcimap. This procedure
makes use of the sysfs file system that was introduced with Linux
2.6.x but something similar may be possible using /proc/bus/pci in
Linux version 2.4.x. The principle is that the kernel does
provide a list of all the PCI devices that it found; for each such
device it also provides some device information - the interface for
this is the sysfs file system or (in 2.4.x) the proc file system.
On the other hand, each module writer makes a list of all devices that
the driver is known/expected to work for - the kernel build process writes
these to modules.pcimap. By matching the two lists we should be
able to load only those modules which have a matching device. This only
works with PCI devices but most devices on PC's nowadays
(including SCSI cards and the USB controller) are PCI devices.
Here is the script
to loadmodules that resulted from the above deliberations. This
scripts depends on a list of
modules that are related to block devices.
Mounting the root file-system
The second script we will use
provides the routine to mount the root device. Again the sysfs
file system provided by the 2.6.x Linux kernel comes to the rescue. Under
/sys/block we find a list of all the block devices on the
system. If the root= option is given to the kernel we can
check whether this block device is available. Otherwise we check each
available block device to find evidence that it is our root file system -
by checking for the existence of the archive, directory and script that we
created above.
Using mkinitrd
The Debian initrd-tools package is
a collection of scripts and so can be installed on any GNU/linux system
(for example use the source package directly). The main script is
mkinitrd which will create the standard Debian initrd. We will
run this script and make some changes in order to create our ``special''
initrd. First off all create some directory say
/tmp/mkinitrd.confdir. In this directory we will create the
file exe containing the list of executables that we want in
addition to the ``standard'' ones like /bin/sh - in our case
we need /bin/grep. Next we create a list of all the additional
files that we want to include; this is mainly the list of all modules that
are in some way connected with the use of block devices; here is my list. Finally, we also need a configuration file. We are set to
use mkinitrd with this directory as our configuration
directory.
This will tell you the name of the working directory which will be
something like /tmp/mkinitrd.1234. Now you need to edit the
/tmp/mkinitrd.1234/initrd/linuxrc.conf file to reflect the
various file systems that you may use for your root file system.
Finally, you copy the scripts you created above and generate the
initrd with mkcramfs.
If you build a kernel with ext2 filesystem support instead of
cramfs, then you need to create an ext2 filesystem
image based on the /tmp/mkinitrd.1234 directory instead.
Putting it all together
We now combine the ideas of the previous two sections. I assume that
you have managed to make your root filesystem boot in a ``read-only''
mode and that you are currently running in that mode. I also assume
that you have created an initrd that can boot on ``any'' machine.
I know that the latter requirement is hard to check given that you
have access to only one machine at a time. Moreover, it is difficult to
find friends who will agree if you say ``I have on this floppy an initrd
and kernel that I would like to test on your system''; those
few will not remain friends if your kernel+initrd manages to
fry their system.
Selecting the boot loader
In order to boot off a CD or USB stick we need some software that can
do that. The nominees are isolinux,
loadlin and grub... and the winner,
in this case, is... grub.
The main file for booting using grub is called stage2 or
stage2_eltorito in the case of booting CD's. When these files
are properly installed (see below how this is done for CD's), they are
loaded and run by the booting machine. They look for a configuration
file /boot/grub/menu.lst. We use a menu.lst file that
looks like:
default 0
timeout 5
# Pretty colours
color cyan/blue white/blue
title Debian GNU/Linux with myinitrd
root (cd)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-2-686 root=auto ro quiet vga=791
initrd /boot/initrd.img
boot
Other than the kernel and the initrd, we need stage2 and
menu.lst in order to complete the list of steps given at the
beginning.
Making the CD
First you need a ``pristine'' copy of the root file system.
If you used the bind mounts procedure to make the root
file-system read-only, then you can just do
mkdir /tmp/pristine
mount --bind / /tmp/pristine
You then make a compressed tree of this file system:
mkzftree -x /tmp/pristine /hugeroom
where /hugeroom is some place with a lot of disk space.
Remove the directories /hugeroom/lost+found and
/hugeroom/boot from under this directory. Create an empty
/hugeroom/boot directory to which we copy the kernel image and
initrd. Into the /hugeroom/boot/grub directory goes the file
stage2_eltorito along with menu.lst. These files
will not be compressed.
Then we blank a CD (if necessary) and write our image to it. For a
USB stick, we just create a partition and dump the entire image to
this partition using dd. Since I do not have a system that can
boot off a USB, I can only check the floppy based boot for such a
system. Perhaps one of the readers can enlighten me on how this is to
be handled for USB-booting BIOSes.
What else?
You'll probably want to add a writable /home directory to
your system. You need to further customise wraith.cpio.gz for
that. Another thing that you probably want to do is to fix the
/etc/fstab file that goes onto the CD. Other config files may
also need to be customised; /etc/X11/XF86config-4 comes to
mind - for this to work ``anywhere'' it is best to use the
vesa driver. Similarly, use dhcp to configure
ethernet rather than a hard-coded IP address in
/etc/network/interfaces. On most systems there is a
hard disk and it is shame not to use it. You can set-up a swap partition
after you boot from the CD - be careful not to trash the host machine
though!
Afterword
Today one can find a number of GNU/Linux systems that work off Live
CD's. There is Knoppix - and then
there are its Klones.
There is LNX-BBC, tomsrtbt, LTSP and even one called Puppy! There are the CD-based
installers for the common distributions. But, I am still not
satisfied. Each of these make choices that I am not comfortable with. They
choose KDE, Gnome or fluxbox, when what I want is
fvwm; or they choose xmms when what I want is
alsaplayer (in daemon mode)... and so on.
What's wrong with Sunil's excellent
article then? - just take a minimal Knoppix-like DSL and re-master it.
I would object that Knoppix puts everything in a cloop image
which makes it difficult to read the ``real'' contents of the CD on a
generic system; further this also makes it difficult to master and/or
re-master.
The first two keep the files in a compressed ISO file-system. That
makes it usable ``anywhere''. I did try these but for one reason or another
they didn't work for me. For example they required the installation of
additional packages on my desktop.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: I'm a terribly nit-picky kind of
person, and I have spent a lot of time fine-tuning my system and no
one is allowed to dictate what packages I must install and how they must
be configured.
[ I like this Kapil guy, and the way he
thinks. :) -- Ben ]
I enjoy tinkering with such things, and so I must have a system that I
understand fully. People also mentioned additional kernel features in late
2.4.x and early 2.6.x that simplify the building of a live CD. Finally,
isn't it fun to ``roll your own''?
This document was translated from the LaTeX Source by
HEVEA.
Kapil Hari Paranjape has been a ``hack''-er since his punch-card days.
Specifically, this means that he has never written a ``real'' program.
He has merely tinkered with programs written by others. After playing
with Minix in 1990-91 he thought of writing his first program---a
``genuine'' *nix kernel for the x86 class of machines. Luckily for him a
certain L. Torvalds got there first---thereby saving him the trouble
(once again) of actually writing code. In eternal gratitude he has spent
a lot of time tinkering with and promoting Linux and GNU since those
days---much to the dismay of many around him who think he should
concentrate on mathematical research---which is his paying job. The
interplay between actual running programs, what can be computed in
principle and what can be shown to exist continues to fascinate him.
Voice recognition shorthand and the birth of Weblish
It must be the former high school English teacher in me that hears
the omission of the subjunctive in movies, TV ads, and TV programs.
No, it is not a tense like the present, past or future tenses. No,
it is not a part of speech like an adjective, nor is it a verb form
like the infinitive. The subjunctive indicates a mood similar to the
indicative mood phrase, which indicates a situation of fact, e.g. a
phrase such as "The wind is blowing today". Subjunctive is
also similar to the interrogative mood phrase: e.g. "Did you wind
the clock today?"
The subjunctive mood can also be used to suggest a situation
contrary to fact: e.g. "If I were rich I would buy a new car"
or: "I wish I had enough money to buy a new car". The flags in
English that indicate the subjunctive mood are the words "if"
and "wish".
English is very simple compared to other languages such as French,
Spanish, German, Italian, etc. All have several pages in their grammar
textbooks devoted to the conjugations needed for the subjunctive mood. No
wonder English is becoming the common language, the lingua franca,
of the world! The basic reason, of course, is the simplicity of its
grammar. Even most scientific or technical papers are in English
(just a hundred years ago, they would have been written in Latin.)
English, though, does have its idiosyncrasies which are difficult
for foreigners (as well as for voice recognition software) to cope with -
including spelling and associated pronunciation. Take, for example, the
word spelled "wind". Depending on the context of the sentence,
we can pronounce it two different ways - such as in "Was the clock
wound?" versus "Did the wind of the blowing wind wound your
ears?"
There are a myriad of other words with the same dual pronunciations:
e.g. wound, refuse, compact, and contract. There is no end to them! And
then there are the irregular verbs - 300 of them - which have very complex
tense structures. My husband and care giver (I am a disabled woman in a
wheelchair), who came to this country after the Hungarian student
revolution was crushed by the Soviets, became one of the original geeks and
never really learned the irregular verb tenses. Instead, he uses the
auxiliaries, which he learned early and used in phrases such as: " I
did in fact see it" instead of "I saw it". It's no surprise
that the voice recognition systems prefer such expressions, which are much
easier to parse.
I have taught "English for Foreigners" for 20 years (my
wheelchair existence did not affect that, in fact it may have even
helped) to students on all levels, from beginners to highly advanced
technical experts. My husband is my worst student, but he does act as
my voice recognition robot sometimes instead of my computer - though he
does talk back and the computer does not.
I must say, I am impressed that so many foreigners speak,
understand, read, and write English even better than many Americans. I am
impressed, indeed, although I recognize they have no choice if they want
to succeed at some higher level of occupation. The Internet, the now
famous Web, has cemented this fact. Almost all websites - (addressed by
www... and ending in either dotcom (in the form of ".com") or
dotgov or dotedu or dotorg, etc.) are published on the web in English.
Even the website addresses (called URLs, Uniform Resource Locators) end
in dotde (Germany) or dotjp (Japan) or dotit (Italy), and symbols for
all the other 290-plus similar names of the countries of the world, are
published in English.
Google, the most favored search engine on the Web, indicates that at
this time there are 1,900K dotcom, 105K dotgov, 370K dotorg, 158K dotedu
and 385K dotnet webpages on the Internet (K, of course, stands for kilo
which is one thousand). But, most interestingly, the German-based dotde
accounts for 2,050K webpages, and more than half of those are in English.
The Web has had a profound effect on English. In place of proper
Webster-style English, a new language has evolved on the Internet:
"Weblish" (if I may be so bold in naming it). This new
language is now used all over the world, and it is constantly coming up
with new words most of which have an "e" or an "i" up
front. Email is, of course, a well known example, but once email was
created, there had to be a new name for the regular mail - so
"snail mail" came into use as a great descriptive term.
Examples are all over the Web, and more are cropping up every
minute. Just look at the URLs of the website themselves, and you will see
a whole new set of descriptive names: Froogle, the name for the shopping
website of Google, is one such imaginative Weblish variation of English.
One of my favorite new words is Lindows, the Linux based variation
of Windows. We all hope it will succeed.
But there is another interesting development on the Web. As part of
Weblish, there are the new hieroglyphs (also known as ASCII art) which
many people now use in their emails. For example, I am a disabled woman
in a wheelchair, so I like to sign my email with the following combination
of letters and characters that looks like a wheelchair symbol (click here to skip the ASCII text):
~\__
(o)\_
There are many other examples of this, like :-) for happy and so on.
My aging geek husband immediately suggested that we should call this
new symbology eglyphy or webglyphy or... and he went on
interminably with new words until I screamed: "Please spare me, enough
of this!"
But he is right, somebody will come up with the best name - and it
will be adopted by many and become part of the new language.
Then there is SMS, the new cellular phone based Short Message Service.
It uses some of the best shorthand out of necessity, since phones have only
12 keys. A good example: "CMI L8R" for
"call me later". And so on - you get the drift.
But the most important development of simplified, short word-based
English is due to voice recognition. Hands-busy, eyes-busy people, as well
as those with a functional disability can benefit greatly from voice
recognition because they don't have to use a mouse and keyboard to document
their findings.
Voice-activated, easily-used telephone systems will benefit people
in all walks of life. Anyone driving a car will find voice recognition a
much more effective way of manipulating a vehicle and communicating from
the vehicle. We are all hands-busy or eyes-busy at one time or another
- in the kitchen, in the garden, or giving care to children or adults
in need, etc. Personal computers have the capacity to accommodate voice
recognition systems, like IBM's ViaVoice. This is especially advantageous
to a large population segment of people with disabilities, those who are
chronically ill, and older people as well as their caregivers.
Using a keyboard is next to impossible or at least difficult for
this fast-growing group of people. Caregivers and their patients would
benefit from being able to use just their voices to document the
treatments or care they provide to their patients. Additionally, voice
recognition technology would allow them a hands-free environment in
which to analyze, treat, and write about particular cases easily and
quickly.
Linux Voice Recognition Project
The care-giving services market alone may justify the Linux-based
voice recognition project. Providing care to the needy is one of the
largest expenses in the Group of Ten nations, and it is the fastest
growing sector as well. Just in the USA, the segment of the population
which includes older people and people with disabilities and/or chronic
illnesses accounts for 100 million people. Add to that the 5 million
formal caregivers and 44 million informal care givers at work in
America, and we are looking at half the population!
In the care-giving field, the simplicity, reliability, and low cost of
Linux for servers, tablets, embedded devices, and desktops are paramount
features. Obviously, the market for these new technologies exists. What
remains is for some courageous company with aggressive people to tap into
that market. Once those companies get the technology distributed, the needs
of many will be met, and a new mass market will open up - one that isn't
currently being filled. In fact, the field of opportunity already exists,
but it needs to be expanded to serve people with physical and functional
disabilities.
Yes, voice recognition offers great promise for the future. However,
it isn't perfect and it still needs to be improved. One improvement
would use lip reading to bolster its accuracy. Still another would be
multi-tonal voice input. Another would be improvements in the design of
directional microphones. Every generation of voice recognition software
will be improved as the hardware for Linux gets bigger and stronger.
IBM is, in fact, now working on a lip reading system for
installation in an automobile so that the on-board computer can
very precisely understand the spoken commands of the driver. So,
IBM, we need to get this technology into our desktops, ebook
readers, tablet computers, and PDAs as well - please? Why not
license your lip reading technology to a consortium of open source
developers, perhaps sponsored by a non-profit such as DRAIL, an
organization concerned with the needy? Or, even more effective
would be a licence for a group of such organizations, such as
Robert Wood, AARP, Elderweb, etc. who would put lip reading and
enhanced, precise voice recognition on an ebook reader, such as
www.ebook-gemstar.com
or the Korean manufactured one: www.ebookad.com/hiebook/)
or an iPOD (Apple's great music machine), or a tablet computer, or any
other PC that this segment of the population would feel comfortable
with.
Virtual PCs running on a community-based server to which the end-users
could connect with simple telephones (POTS) or video telephones (e.g., www.vialta.com) would be of great use. My
geek caregiver husband suggests that we should call this project
Wordows. "Oh no", I yell at my favorite geek,
"That is not so good: it sounds weirdo!" You need to be careful
when you create a new word in Weblish. So let us call it, if you will
permit me, "Slimdows".
With all these changes, the English teacher in me comes to terms
with a changing linguistic environment. Since life itself is constant
change, English must also change.
Janine has been a user of voice recognition software for several
years and is an advocate for Open Source solutions that will benefit
people with disabilities, such as the Linux-based voice recognition
project.
I am a registered principal investigator with NSF.
I am a disabled woman, but have great experience with voice recognition
and have an advanced system with IBM Via-Voice, so my writing abilities are
not impaired at all.
I have many years of personal experience using assistive technologies
(AT), and find it very helpful in SPMS (secondary progressive multiple
sclerosis). In spite of my handicap, I find it gratifying and fulfilling to
concentrate my efforts on worthwhile projects for very deserving companies.
Involvement such as this has proved to have healing power for me: I am
living proof of the power of behavioural medicine based on deep personal
involvement. The best way to use these intellectual strengths is to get
involved with collaborative teamwork and personal communications within the
disabled community and with companies who provide assistive technologies
for this community.
As a handicapped woman who still has control of her mental faculties and
voice, I have something to offer by connecting the right people so that I
can integrate systems through the Internet to develop a mutually beneficial
virtual community.
Personal communications and collaborative teams need assistive technologies
to further the self-esteem of the disabled. In short, involvement allows
disabled people not only a distraction from their problems, but also a
constructive way to spend their time while helping a cause they believe in.
Originally published in Issue 54 of Linux Gazette, May
2000
Never write it in 'C' if you can do it in 'awk';
Never do it in 'awk' if 'sed' can handle it;
Never use 'sed' when 'tr' can do the job;
Never invoke 'tr' when 'cat' is sufficient;
Avoid using 'cat' whenever possible.
-- Taylor's Laws of Programming
Last month, we looked at loops and conditional execution. This time
around, we'll look at a few of the simpler "external" tools (i.e., GNU
utilities) that are commonly used in shell scripts. Recall that shell
scripts are made up of 1) internal shell commands and structures, 2)
external tools, comprised of the standard utilities, and 3) installed
programs; the first are always going to be there, as long as you're
executing the script with the same shell (the shebang usually takes care of
that), the second will usually be there (but watch out for
non-portable syntax between different versions, e.g., the '-A' switch in
'cat', the various levels of regex parsing in different 'grep' versions,
etc.), and the last is essentially arbitrary since you don't know what
another person executing your script has installed (or not installed) on
their machine. If you're planning on distributing your script, you may need
to write code to test for the presence of any external programs you use and
issue warnings if they're absent.
Oh, and - the reason for the above quote: the tools available to you as
a script writer, as you might have guessed from it, are arranged in a rough
sort of a "power hierarchy". It's important to remember this if you find
yourself continually being frustrated by the limitations of a specific
tool, it may not have enough "juice" to do the job. Conversely, it does not
make sense to use some heavy-duty utility that's big and slow to perform a
simple operation.
Some years ago, while writing a script that processed Clipper database
files, I found myself pushed up against the wall by the limitations of
arrays in "bash"; after a day and a half of fighting it, I swore a bitter
oath, glued a "screw it" label over the original attempt, and rewrote the
entire thing in "awk".
It took a total of 15 minutes.
I didn't tell anyone at the time; even my good friends would
have taken a Clue-By-4 to my head to make sure that the lesson stuck...
Don't be stubborn about changing tools when the
original one proves under-powered.
cat
Strange as it may seem, 'cat' - which you've probably used on
innumerable occasions - can do a number of useful things beyond simple
concatenation and printing to the screen. As an example, 'cat -v file.txt'
will print the contents of "file.txt" to the screen - and will also show
you all the non-text characters that might normally be invisible (this
excludes the standard textfile characters such as `end-of-line' and `tab'),
in '^' (for Ctrl- characters) and 'M-' (for Alt- characters) notation.
This can be very useful when you've got something that is supposed to be a
text file, but various utilities keep failing to process it and give errors
like "This is a binary file!". This capability can also come in handy when
converting files from one type to another (see the section on 'tr'). If you
decide you'd like to see all the characters in the file, the `-A' switch
will fill the bill - `$' signs will show the end-of-lines (the buck stops
here?), and `^I' will show the tabs. Note that '-A' is just a shortcut for
'-vet' - something that used to be known as "taking your cat to the vet".
(Yes, Unix command usage can be quite odd. :)
'-n' is another useful option. This one will number all the lines (you
can use `-b' to number only the non-blank lines) of a file - very useful
when you want to create a `line selector', i.e., whenever you want to have
a "handle" for a specific line which you would then pass to another
utility, say, 'sed' (which works well with line numbers).
'cat' can also be used for "here-doc"s - i.e., to gen
![[BIO]](../gx/2003/sit3-shine.7-2.gif)
Tux has been Linux's mascot since shortly after the release of the
2.0 kernel. He's been known to be quite the fellow for the ladypenguins,
and
A Brief History Of Tux - So
Far will surely tell you more than you needed to know about this
dashing fellow. All too often, it's a working vacation for him, but he's
considering a hiking
trip or a cruise sometime this
Summer.
![[BIO]](../gx/2002/note.png)
Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning
English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator
for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal
computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other
pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most
everywhere today...
What Fools We Linuxers Be
Lifehacks
Greetings from Heather Stern
[Brian]
Thank you.
Linux Kernel![[Picture]](../gx/2002/tagbio/conry.jpg)
Originally hailing from Ireland, Michael is currently living in Baden,
Switzerland. There he works with ABB Corporate Research as a
Marie-Curie fellow, developing software for the simulation and design
of electrical power-systems equipment.
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/redundant.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/spinninglogo.jpg)
![[cartoon]](misc/collinge/volcano.jpg)
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/engel.jpg)
Adam Engel has published poetry, fiction and essays in such magazines and
periodicals as Counter Punch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal,
Strike-the-Root, LewRockwell.com, The New York Art Review, The Concord
Journal, The Middlesex News, Accent, The Littleton Review, Ark, Smart
Shoes, The Beacon, Literal Latte, Artemis, The Lummox Journal, Fearless,
POESY, The Half Moon Review, Art:Mag, Chronogram, Gnome and others.
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/kapil.jpg)
Kapil Hari Paranjape has been a ``hack''-er since his punch-card days.
Specifically, this means that he has never written a ``real'' program.
He has merely tinkered with programs written by others. After playing
with Minix in 1990-91 he thought of writing his first program---a
``genuine'' *nix kernel for the x86 class of machines. Luckily for him a
certain L. Torvalds got there first---thereby saving him the trouble
(once again) of actually writing code. In eternal gratitude he has spent
a lot of time tinkering with and promoting Linux and GNU since those
days---much to the dismay of many around him who think he should
concentrate on mathematical research---which is his paying job. The
interplay between actual running programs, what can be computed in
principle and what can be shown to exist continues to fascinate him.
Originally published in Issue 54 of Linux Gazette, May
2000