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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. '"
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.
> 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.
One other reason why Linus and others might have been staying away from BSD was the whole legal morass it was involved in at the time. Who would want to spend time on a project which might well be declared contraband if AT&T's lawsuit against Berkeley succeeded?
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.
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.
he said why himself, he started Linux as an attempt to teach himself to program his 386. He never planned on it being popular, it was just a project for himself. Look back at the hole Linux is Obsolete thread, not much talk of any available alternatives.
treke
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
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
--
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"...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.
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
For a more detailed answer, get Andy Tanenbaums OS Design & Implentation, but for now, i'll try & explain.
An OS is just a peice of software, just like any other peice of software. To the CPU, it's the same opcodes (With a special exception, but we'll skip that for now) The only reason that an OS is thought of as "special" is because it is the lowest level of software that you run on your computer. But it doesn't perform magic.
Now, on the Intel x86, task switching (Which is what Linus's terminal emulator was doing) is fairly simple. You set up a few CPU tables (The Global Descriptor Table & Interupt Descriptor Table), and point a software interupt to your interupt handler. That is, and interupt occures every n nanoseconds, and your code is automatically jumped to by the CPU. Now, you can do anything in that peice of code, but an Operating System does something called scheduling, were it saves the status of the currently running "process", and loads the status of a previously saved process. (All this involves is pushing the CPU flags onto the stack, changing a few CPU registers, and then poping data off the stack) Then your interupt code exits and the CPU goes back to running the code. Except you've changed the CPU registers, so it actually goes back to running the code from the process you've just swaped in.
This is all there is too it, in theory. Your two (Or however many) processes can do anything a program normally would.
Just having the scheduler though, does not make your code into a kernel. You need things like memory allocators, device drivers, process loaders, a filesystem, and a callable API, before your code can be considered an Operating System.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus_ finland_period.shtml is a fairly detailed story about the beginnings of Linux and the problems that folks were having getting a PC version of BSD out.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
According to Rebel Code (excellent book by the way) 0.01 was released September '91 - but Linus only told a group of friends he'd met ont the Minix newsgroup. 0.02 was announced on the newsgroup on 5th Oct 1991.
Answer to your sig - 'cos liGNUx is ugly
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
I think that he hadn't implemented file permissions into the kernel yet, and this incident was what prompted him to do so. If there were no file permissions, then he could have done this as a normal user.