…but I’m right! Get yer historical hero clay figurines now!
This list often changes:
I have two hard drives. One is an 80 Gig Maxtor Diamond Max 9. Hopefully, it will last for a long time. The other us a 16 Gig Seagate U-series drive that I bought for $5.
The large drive houses my main distro, Ubuntu (currently Hardy Heron, somewhere around Alpha 4-5) and the smaller one houses whatever I want to play with. Right now, its got Arch, running e17.
As I’ve been reminded lately, online conversations aren’t quite the same as ones that you carry on in person. Like playing chess through the mail, you have a chance to contemplate a response, and read hidden (and unreal, usually) meanings into what has been written for the world to see. I find that quite often, people read, and thus assume, the opposite of what you want to convey.
Why is this? Bad writing, I think. There’s a reason that everyone is not a best selling writer. Its simply because we’re not all good enough. Like me. I write (quite a bit and quite often at times, as this blog can attest), but I’m not a good writer. If I was, there’d be no question as to what I mean when I scratch down my thoughts.
Like a wound that doesn’t get attention, the results of your words can be a growing infection, which if not stopped, can cause greater problems. This seems to be true of the online writing subculture now. With tools such as Blogger and Wordpress, which can help you post your literary genious to the world with a few words and the press of a button, it becomes easy (perhaps because it appeals to our laziness) to write things and publish them without nary a thought. You can write the most affecting and ingenious masterpiece, or you can write the most putrid and abominably substandard tripe (which I hope that this post doesn’t turn into - I’m posting it anyway).
One thing that online publishing has done for civilized society (at least the extremely small percentage that have access to computers) is to help introduce total strangers. Due to the feeling of relative anonymity that writing on the internet affords, people are more willing to comment on a stranger’s thoughts. As time goes on, the parties involved gain a small insight into what the other is thinking at times. The problem is that we don’t learn nearly as much as we assume (ass u me) and this can cause issues later, when we feel that we are in a comfortable place. We slip up and think that we’re carrying on a conversation as if in person. The dynamics are all different, though. In person, you can quicly elaborate on what you mean, when someone misunderstands you. Online, you can’t in real time, and, thus the wound festers. This is where the quality of your writing comes in. If you don’t write well, you’ll create conflicts where the opposite was intended. I admit that I am sometimes guilty of that, as are many people. Its natural. Writing online has become like writing in a diary. Who gets their diary proofread by an editor? When left to ourselves, we don’t proof our work as well as it could be and it comes out ending up substandard (look at the works of Karl Marx and Stephen King’s later works - too much literary freedom and not enough editing, producing verbose effluent, obscuring any genious that may lie underneath).
I’m going to try to break this habit of mental laziness, so that when you read my writings, you may understand the point I tried to make. I will try to do this for you. I hope that I succeed consistantly.
I won an mp3 player a few months ago. Its a Sony Network Walkman, model NW-E403.
This model sports 256MB of flash memory (holding 55 mp3s right now) and an incredible 35-50 hours of play on one charge! (no batteries to put in - charges via your USB port). It seems quite easy to navigate and the songs are entirely playable. I like the fact that this unit is quite small but the display is still easy to read. The requirement that you transfer your songs through the provided Sonicstage software is a bit of a drag (Windows only), but it seems to work reasonably well. You can also store files on the player as well, if you want to connect it to a PC and use it that way (but they’re not viewable in the mp3 player’s display). For the price that I got it for, it was great, of course. Now, this unit seems to buck the trend and be less expensive if bought in person. I noticed that the price online was as much as $30 higher than what the local electronics store was selling it for.
This unit also comes in 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB models. If you are intested in this neat little toy, I’d suggest that you shell out the extra $20-30 for the larger capacity.
Wow! Thanks to Corey Shields, I found out about a kewl video site that has some neat stuff collected like this absolute must see video! You’ll be amazed!
Really! They look delicious, don’t they? Neat stuff you can find by clicking the “headline” above your mail folders in GMail. Neat (…or is it - I’m curious enough to let you know - have to substitute Pace for Chi Chi’s).
This page is where you’re going to be dazzled by how awesome it can be to have Gentoo with Reiser4 and Nitro-sources from the beginning, instead of that messy “after” stuff.
Stay tuned. I’m still figuring out how to say what I want to. I’m going to leave this part up top until I get enough written that it actually looks like a helpful page.
There are some things that one needs to know to do this:
I started my install by getting the right system/CD to install from. I headed over to the Gentoo Wiki to get the cd image because lxnay only makes DVDs now and I have no DVD burner. I downloaded the ISO for the 2.30 Live CD, which is the latest version on cd. It does have a fairly recent 2.6 kernel (from around last March) with Reiser4 patches, so you can create the Reiser4 filesystem with it. Otherwise, there’s no point to this whole exercise, right?
For those who have a DVD burner, you can get a more recent incarnation of this neat idea by downloading the Live DVD, which can be had through links from lxnay’s website and the Gentoo Wiki. You’ll have the advantage of being able to install a lot from the DVD itself. I’m never really interested in that, so I won’t be discussing it.
I got the file from within a Microsoft Windows environment, so I grabbed the md5sum and compared it to the one generated from the output of winmd5sum, a free graphical md5sum checker for Windows from Nullriver. Always do an md5sum check on images that you wish to boot from. If they don’t match, download the file again - its been corrupted some way.
I then burned the cd image using Burnatonce, I think. Its been two weeks, and, frankly, I had too many beers at that point to remember which software I used for the job. It may have been Nero (a little hint - with Burnatonce, you’re getting a free cdrdao front end with no bloat. You can burn a CD image with a double-click and two clicks - no coasters) but not likely. I then booted the computer with the CD in the drive and the installer started loading. If you don’t do this much, be sure that you BIOS is set to boot from CD before your hard drive.
Once the installer was finished loading, I had a full Live-CD environment within which to do with whatever I want. No, folks, this is not a pretty graphical installer like Anaconda. With this Live-CD, you’re greeted with a command prompt (which is not a bad thing). If I knew how to make a screenshot from that point, I would, as its got more info there than anyone seems to have reported. There is a short blurb (kind of like the MOTD) explaining that you can use links2 to browse the install instructions from the CD and/or from the internet at http://www.gentoo.org. The instruction to set up networking is stated as well. You’ll be prompted to type “net-setup” at the prompt. I did this, as I got my install fresh off the internet. There’s a dialogue box that pops up showing the device representing your network interface (I only have one, so there is no choice - although I did install a dialup modem afterwords to interface with faxing software later). You would then either choose to get on the net via PPP (if you’re insane enough to install over dialup), DHCP, or manually. I chose manually, as my piece of crap Linksys BEFSR41 router doesn’t broadcast and assign addresses via DHCP, although the server is on.
The rules for the IP setup are generally the same. You’re going to set it up with a private IP range, either 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.x.x.x. I always choose what the router’s default range is. The Linksys uses 192.168.1.x. I understand that dLinks use 192.168.0.x. Whichever. The subnet is 255.255.255.0 (if you have a complex network, then it’ll be something different, but you’ll also be ignoring this part of the instructions if so, right? Don’t forget to add the router’s IP address as the gateway address. Then, if nameservers are asked for, I use my router, as it finds the nameservers from my ISP and uses them. This keeps the setup simple, effective, and easy to troubleshoot.
At this point, I must disclaim that much of what is to follow is a combination of knowledge from the Gentoo Handbook, the Wiki article, and stuff that I’ve picked up along the way.
The next step is to test the success of your network configuration. Typing ifconfig eth0 gives you the status of the first ethernet card (the only one for me). You should see an IP address and some stats for rx and tx transfers. If all’s well, you should, then, be able to go to the internet with links. I do, at this point, and go straight to the Gentoo Handbook to get the most up to date instructions. At this point, using the Handbook is the simplest way to get going. All instructions really remain the same, except for the Reiser4 specific instructions. I’ll concentrate on that part next.
I gotta say, neat! I was browsing my site stats and noticed that the second most popular duration for visits is really long!, which means that I’ve got visitors that take off quickly and those who can’t leave. Hmmm. Thanks to those in the second list! I hope that my sponsors have provided you with good experiences too. 
