Medicine for a Sick Linux Box

Squidgee writes "This is the site for "LIAP: Linux In A Pillbox". It is an interesting recovery distro made in the vein of pharmaceuticals; each floppy based 'minidistro' cures one specific Linux ailment. Or, as Luke Komasta (The creator of LIAP) puts it: "My Linux project contains "pills". Each of them is good for one disease, but it doesn't work good enough for another. When you know what you need a Linux for, you may choose a good pill. And of course, as you know, there is no drug which is good for treating all diseases." It's an extremely interesting approach to Linux recovery, and one that appears to be more effective than the other varieties of floppy/mini-cd based recovery systems. Worth downloading in case you ever need it!"

Comments

link missing

[jsse]

The link to its ftp server seems to be missing...

If you want some working linux distro in a floppy you may look at Tom's. It's my favourite, it helps me install Gentoo Linux on some boxes cannot boot from CDROM.

Besides, you can find list of Linux floppy/CD distros here

Re:Would like comparison disk

[lpontiac]

You can implement this yourself easily enough.

Let's say you want to do it for all the files in /root, /bin, /usr/local/bin and /etc. The following will get you a list of md5sums:

#!/bin/sh
find -s /root /bin /etc /usr/local/bin | while read x ; do
md5 $x
done;

Put the output of that into a file after a fresh install. Save it to disk. At any later point, do it again into another file. Use diff to find the differences.

The wonderful thing about Unix is that you can do this sort of thing with the standard shell and 5 lines of script :P

they're metaphors

[Bodrius]

They are metaphors, they were meant as metaphors and they are still primarily used as metaphors.

Jargon does not start as jargon, only after it's used has been established in their technical context are they considered the "jargon" or idioms of the field.

Jargon terms have only three origins:
- Metaphors: process, kill, zombie, kernel, pipe, thread, batch, stack, etc.
- Codes and Acronyms: tcp, lisp, java, pc, minix, perl, etc.
- Idiotic Puns: more, less, archie, most shell commands.

Some, like GIMP, UNIX or GNU have mixed origins, but I'll let you decide which origins are present in the mix.

Not only are most computer science terms based on metaphors, very few people expect you to understand them properly without the metaphors. That makes learning concepts more difficult, and makes knowledge incomplete and not-portable.

Re:Would like comparison disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: While this is a good idea, a kernel module can get around this technique (infiltrate the kernel, and any program on the system can do whatever you want- including md5sum).

Be sure to boot from a known good floppy/cdrom rescue disk for full effectiveness.