Yearly Archives: 2002

Slackware 8.1 is go… (mostly)

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I’ve just finished the first stages of installing Slackware 8.1 on a spare partition on my box. Up and running to a command line in a mere few minutes – very straitforward so far, although I’ve yet to set up an X server. I’ve been running SuSE for the last year or so, and found 7.3 to be a pretty good intro to the wonderful world of Linux, but over the past couple of months I’ve been finding myself a bit dissatisfied with SuSE (and rpm), particularly after upgrading to 8.1.

I did a total reinstall for 8.1 as I wanted to completely redesign my partition layout to allow space for Slackware and LFS, and as such was expecting a fairly painless install onto a nice freshly formatted piece of disk. ‘Twas not to be … nothing really Bad, but just a series of irritating things to fix once the system was running. And although I had no trouble sorting it all out I suspect that a total newb might have had to spend quite a while reading to fix things.

Now I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing for a newbie to have to do, but SuSE are regarded as a fairly safe bet for beginners and some of the problems – such as the modules for controlling DVD and CDRW drives – hadn’t occurred in 7.3, so why suddenly an issue in 8.1? Most newbies probably want to spend a bit of time learning about commands like ls and cd before they get onto modprobe and gcc.

Maybe I’ll post a bit more about getting 8.1 to the same stage as 7.3 got itself another day. There’s certainly been a fair bit of traffic in alt.os.linux.suse about some of these problems, so it might be helpful to some people.

Anyway, I’ve got to go and configure an X server and compile some winmodem drivers, so I’ll be signing off now. Bye!

The Solstice

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At last, it’s going to start getting lighter again.

Not being a Christian, I tend to think that the fact it’s the solstice on the 21st sort of makes the holiday spirit a bit more appropriate. I suppose that if I wanted to follow this feeling through to it’s logical conculsion I’d want to do the gift giving today, but I just can’t bring myself to be *quite* that anal :-)

I’m not a pagan either, but I think that seasonal turning points like this are worth observing, and I like the reminder of the cyclical nature of things. So pause for a moment and reflect upon the fact that we’re now at midwinter, and things can only get lighter and warmer.

Can I be on _Thought for the day_ now?

The Two Towers

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On a lighter note, I went to see this last night – fantastic! I’m not going to attempt to review it here at the moment, suffice to say that if you enjoyed Part 1, you’ll enjoy this. Get to your cinemas!

Mass Arrests in US

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Reports are appearing everywhere of mass arrests of Muslims in the US. Here is the BBC’s. It appears that people from certain (predictable) countries living in the States but without full residence rights were required to report for “registration” – and many were promptly arrested when they obeyed. Comparisons with tactics employed by a certain European country in the mid twentieth century are inevitable.

Needless to say there is already a lot of coverage in the blogosphere. Demosthenes says this and Atrios says this. I’m off to see if any of the rightwingnuts and warbloggers have had anything to say on this issue. Especially Steven Den Beste – he’s always castigating the left for not shouting down their more rabid members, so lets see what he has to say about this one.

Hello? Still quiet, I see…

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I’ve been really busy at work this past couple of weeks, plus I’m doing the honours as Best Man at a good friend’s wedding this weekend, so still no posts I’m afraid. Missed lot’s of good stuff, but hopefully I’ll get it together to maintain this blog a bit more frequently as of next week. I’m going to start trying a few different Linux distros soon, so I might put up some of my thoughts about those. Maybe I’ll even get around to LFS, too.

All is Quiet

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I haven’t been posting much lately, although I doubt that anyone’s reading this anyway. Not that I ever check the logs for traffic, but there you go. I was planning to write something in response to Eric Raymond’s post on Today’s treason of the intellectuals, but haven’t had the time as of yet. Hopefully I will, but it’s looking like it’ll be a bit delayed, if it ever appears. Oh well.

Censoring Adverts

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The BBC reports that an advert for a satirical cartoon, 2DTV, has been banned for being insulting to President Bush. To my mind this is utterly ridiculous. I’m sure that President Bush isn’t going to lose a great deal of sleep over what a few satirists in the UK have to say about him – I imagine that he’s got more important things on his mind.

Not to mention the fact that public figures are by their very occupations open to ridicule – This is one of the things which marks a free society. You do not seek to become a high profile politician, a movie star, musician or sportsman without some expectation that someone out there will end up taking the piss out of you. This is fundamentally different to libel or slander.

The Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC), the body responsible for clearing ads for broadcast, argue that President Bush hasn’t granted his permission for his appearance in the ad, and so it can be banned. If this is indeed the letter of the law, then I suggest that it’s a bad law, and I’d argue that in essence he has granted this “permission” purely by seeking to occupy the role that he does. It goes with the territory. (Note that ads are apparently subject to stricter regulation than actual TV shows.)

There might be some mileage in having guidelines which discourage the mocking portrayal of people in adverts where the context doesn’t fit, but in this case the show in question is a satire and the context couldn’t be more appropriate.

Living in the Future

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Heard a couple of titbits in the news this morning that serve to remind that we already live in the future.

In the UK a Doctor calls for public debate about the ethics of Face Transplantation. Apparently this could be of benefit in reconstructive surgery where the patient has suffered extensive damage to their, err, face.

Dr. Severino Antinori, the Italian famed for being a vocal proponent of human cloning, announces that the first three human clone births are imminent.