Linux Anecdotes
Doug Muth writes: "Earlier today, I came across an old document on
Lars Wirzenius's website titled
Linux Anecdotes, which tells about the side of Linux that we never knew. An excerpt: 'At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. '"
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I've never heard anyone say why Linus made Linux when alternatives like and Early FreeBSD and BSD Lite were available at the time...
It's called the fortune program.
As long as we're on anecdotes :> My introduction to Linux came during the days when I was pretty comfortable with the 386 we owned, and was making silly text adventure games in QBasic for some time after beginning with Extended Color Basic on the TRS-80 Colour Computer 2. I had heard about the university giving out for free (and they still do) distributions of something called Linux, and a distribution called Mini-Linux that you could run from MS-DOS itself. (Later I learned that any distribution could do this with the proper tools ;>). I tried installing that, and initially I was quite suprised; still text based, lots of messages popping up at the beginning but no big deal. Required a password; this I was a little worried about, what if I forgot it? But since it existed as a directory on the MS-DOS drive I could just delete it and re-install if I needed to.
The one thing that I -did- notice was that, compared to DOS, it was enormous. 35MB for DOS+Windows compared to a +100MB for Linux? Not a good deal when you're using a 200MB hard drive. Added to that, it didn't seem to like my sound card very much, and there was no place in sight for me to tell Linux where I could find it (none obvious to someone who has never touched Linux before, at least :>)
Now, about 7 years later, I'm extremely impressed at the amount of work that has gone into making Linux usable and user-friendly. Provided you have recent and supported hardware, Mandrake and Redhat make installation and configuration a breeze (though admittedly, spending an hour or four recompiling the kernel to get support for certain parts of the computer is a bit of a stretch of anyone's patience ;>) But for all intents and purposes Linux is already a solid competitor for the desktop market.
Hi,
/dev/hdc backup.img
Not to claim fame but to ask for help.
While trying to backup a UFS (Solaris/Sparc) partition, I run the (incorrect!) command:
tar cvI
Not to mention, I corrupted the first bytes of the UFS partition.
If someone has a Ultra 5/10 with IDE hard disk (was about 4GB), Solaris/Sparc,
could s/he possible send me the first 512 bytes of the disk?
You can use the command:
dd if=/dev/myufsdisk of=backupToSend.img count=1
My e-mail is: simos@hellug.gr
thanks!
I normally don't respond with such a boring comment,
I took a look at your posting history... and I beg to differ, bro.
Bill Jolitz 386 was released after Linux had gain momemtum, and BSD 4.4 Lite and FreeBSD was much later than that.
He might or might not have heard of the partial releases of BSD (for VAX and Tahoe) (Net 1 and Net 2), and in any case they probably wouldn't have helped him much. I doubt he at that time was qualified to port BSD to 386. Remember, he used Linux as a tool to learn about the 386.
I suspect lots of people have had the opportunity to do this. While installing Win95 for dual boot I made the big mistake of using MS fdisk. I was trying to figure out why MS didn't like the partition I had create using linux fdisk. I didn't think that I told MS fdisk to write anything to disk but it overwrote large chunks of the partition table. When I tried to boot into linux I found that I didn't have any filesystems left and that all my linux partitions except for / were gone. I used some scribbled down notes from several weeks earlier to figure out what my partition boundaries had been. I recovered everything but /usr. I goofed with /usr and didn't use 'fsck -b' correctly.
> Whoever moderated that funny doesn't have a heart. The poor guy suffered thru that experience, it's not nice to laugh at his
> mistakes.
If he posted that story here, he's asking us to laugh WITH him. Which I hope all of us are.
It beats the alternative: ``You're very angry about what just happened with your computer? Great, take this gun, go up into that clock tower & start shooting people. With any luck, you'll reduce the number of calls to tech support asking where the `Any' key is."
Not to advocate violence. Of course. Except against the humor-impaired.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I once did a dd if=bootdisk.imb of=/dev/hda.
/dev/hda had Windows 95 and a swap partition on it. /dev/hdb was where Linux lived. Nothing important was lost.
Luckly,
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I'm not sure if your comment was a troll or not, but ...
/dev/hda *is* a block device. It seems that what you are talking about is accessing a block device in raw mode (in raw mode the device is accessed without going through a filesystem). Getting access to a raw disk is useful for a database (filesystem's rarely cache data in a way that useful for a database which can slow things down considerably) but it's in no way necessary. You just end up with a slightly slower database, not that a slower database is a good thing.
First, if you actually read this, you'd see that we're talking about Linux circa 1991 - 1992. If you took a look a 386BSD then (I don't think FreeBSD even existed yet) you'd see that it wasn't much nicer then Linux was.
Second,
And why are you spouting off about fsync ? A journaling filesystem would be doing it's own syncronization as would a database accessing a raw disk device. fsync should eventually end up calling the filesystems sync function anyways.
And finally, yea the securelevel stuff in FreeBSD is nice, but OpenBSD is still more secure. Does that make OpenBSD a better OS then FreeBSD?
I tried to find the exact date Linus first put the Linux kernel on the net (I looked in ftp.nl.kernel.org) but I couldn't find it, only a (C) 1991 notice. Does anyone know at which date the 10th birthday of Linux is?
-- Cheers!
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
again... trying to make excuses for bad design...
"but it's in no way necessary."
secondly, putting a FreeBSD machine in securelevel 3 makes it vastly more secure than a default OpenBSD machine...
:-P
Now we know. MS-DOS/Windows is an overgrown filesystem. Linux is an overgrown terminal emulator.
I've done something similar. While installing an old version of Debian, I needed to edit my fstab. The boot floppies came with a tiny editor called ae. Momentary brain fade led me to do
/dev/hda
ae
Ok, my screen's full of binary garbage. Never mind. A brief bit of experimentation got me a file open prompt, and I had my fstab. I made a few alterations, and then saved. And, having just hit enter, saw where it was saving it. I spent the rest of the night rebuilding my partition table by hand.
That anecdote about using /dev/hda instead of /dev/ttyS1 sounds like BS. /dev/ttyS1 didn't exist in the kernel until very late, something like the 1.2 kernel line. Before that people used /dev/cua0, not /dev/ttyS1. You can still use the /dev/cua0 devices in the current kernels, but the kernel will throw a warning in syslog.
I set up a Netwinder at work, which was cool. I like that little guy.
:-)*
:-)*
At one point I changed the root password. Typed it, typed it again, then logged out. When I logged back in, the password was incorrect. I managed to type the wrong password twice. Sigh.
Netwinders don't have floppy drives, by the way
I spent ten minutes trying different possible erroneous passwords...
Luckily, I was able to boot from the rescue partition and fix it, but that required a fair bit of paniced searching because there was nothing in the included docs...
But then again, that's nothing compared to the time I did physical damage from a program.
I was working on a robotic arm with a big servo. A gripper had to move up and the servo would go forward at one point. I was debugging (that was hell, but that's another story) and there was no delay between those operations (I forgot to add it). Result: gripper didn't clear what was in front of it when the servo pushed forward at "nothing gets into my way" mode. Can you say, "smashy-smashy?"
No I didn't get fired.
"A stuffed penguin on every desktop."
Oh, I remember these old times with Prince of Persia on 386-PC's. It was also great fun to discover Linux on ftp.funet.fi
In those days I didn't know any UNIX at all so I had to start learning all these small and somewhat silly commands on my Linux box. This was hard but I mastered it in a few years.
Everyone was laughing at me on work for using this toy operating system. Time has changed and no one laughs anymore.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
number 2 was cinematic, sure, but it lacked that special something that PoP had. Guess it's like that with all sequels.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I spent the rest of the night rebuilding my partition table by hand.
I, also, once had to edit my partition table by hand. (Though not the hairy experience you went through.) And now I'm wondering how many people out there have done something like this. Less than one thousand? One hundred? How many people know the feeling of watching that computer boot up after having diddled with the partition table?
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
I editted my partition table by hand once, using a disk sector editor - and a calculator...
*Urgh*
Steve
---
Hahah that was great. I normally don't respond with such a boring comment, but that really should be modded up! :)
-bugg
Nope, it isn't hard :) A friend of mine once formatted a floppy in ext2 with the command "mke2fs /dev/hda". On a running webserver. Big one. It had only one hdd. /dev/hda. :)
/dev/vg00/lvol3 is the /home partition an the command is correct. So i pushed Enter and it reduced the /dev/vg00/lvol2 (as it was clearly written on the command line which 4 eyes inspected it :) and reduced the swap partition. On a live system. Also big one. I now use 12x24 fonts and read the command aloud at least three times in moments like that. :)
:)
I myself once reduced a HP-UX LVM partition on the fly. Not wanting to make any mistakes i grabbed someone to confirm me that everything was correctly written before i pressed enter. He confirmed me that indeed the
Shit INDEED happens
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Why would booting from a blank floppy wipe your hard drive partition table? That sounds like a really bad bug.
The shareholder is always right.
No, no. Microsoft already has a cuddly stuffed animal toy - it's the Microsoft Barney doll that sings and dances and is Evil Purple colored. Fear that! -- Gates doesn't have a chance....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Removing the remote access device in default OpenBSD machine is vastly more secure then a FreeBSD machine in securelevel 3.
Friend of mine was once formatting a floppy (under Win 9x) when someone distracted him and he formatted C: instead.... hit the Y without even thinking..... nasty!
;-)
Surprisingly Windozes didn't fall over straight away but kind of staggered about a bit first, it was interesting from a distance
All together now: "wouldn't happen under Linux!"
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
give me all your garmonbozia
YES!!! A Twin Peaks reference!!!
"How's Annie? How's Annie!?!"
Where should Linux go next, then? I think the answer is clear, if you think about it: fluffy toys.
;)
Aha! Good to see that Ximian knows this and are pushing ahead in this exciting new technology!
"...So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number..."
Reminds me of a time where I had to write a small program (years ago) for Windows 3.1. I had about 40000 (exagerating) files with "random" filenames that needed to be named sequentially by date, to the format "00000001.dat". One wrong character in a string of the source made the program think it should be starting from C:\ instead of the current directory, so it happily started in C:\, and renamed each (writable) file to a nice, clean, number, recursively searching each directory under it.
Not really relevant, but we've all done things just as dumb, although I doubt how many people would've been inspired enough to turn a mistake into an operating system.
There is something mildly disturbing about that ...
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
I knew I'd read some of this before (Especially the "dialling the harddisk" thing). Rebel Code by Glyn Moody has a few of the anecdotes from Lars, as well as some more from diferent people who were involved with Linux & Linus in the early years. The book even has some of the original news articles to the Minix group, which can be very interesting when you put them in context.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
"By then he'd already learned some social skills and knew that one just doesn't admit to liking computer games after the age of 12."
:) What was it last year, sales of electronic games beat out box office sales? Take that!
Oh my how times have changed
And for those of you horrified by how badly Linus got beat playing Quake at the Transmeta Demo, I'm just glad to see he hasn't lost his love of games. I think.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
It's not until you see the error about .html not existing that you realize what just happened.
You can touch -- -i in directories you are afraid of doing this in. Many would proably just instinctively answer yes anyway though.
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
I can't find the server-- DNS problem? Could someone post the IP address?
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Kieran! What's your e-mail address, you anon coward you? Mine's posted here or at http://kisrael.com
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
NO! NO! peeing cat barbie is a real product!
See? http://www.barbie.com/Catalog/product.asp?type=100 001&theme_id=100001&subtype=100001&product_id=1002 7
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
not even close
hahahahaha... ha.... *belabored, nervous laugh* ha... uh, ahem.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Is that dialing the harddisk anecdote really true? That seems like such a braindead mistake to make!! But I guess even Linus is prone to brain farting once in a while..
I've been playing with Linux since 0.99 or whatever was around in 1992/93... Every time I log onto one of my Linux boxes, I find something new that I can't understand.
The "Dry Finnish Humor" patch is currently being reviewed by Alan Cox and should be available Real Soon Now. Linus sees no need for it, as he already gets the jokes.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
That's what you get for conceiving of, designing, sweating over, compiling, debugging, researching, debugging, not implementing permissions in and then running Linux as root.
Jeeze!!
WTFWJD
Linux Anecdotes
for the I hate clickable links crowd,i w/texts/linux-anecdotes.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:liw.iki.fi/l
this story is what i call news that matters.
good job!