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!"
Well, for those who don't have enough experience to correctly diagnose what ails their box, it seems logical to make a diagnosis diskette, one that doesn't fix anything, but might give them a clue which pill has the best chance of fixing their problem.
And does the blue pill disk install windows ??
What disk do you use if your floppy disk drivers break?
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http://www.dennistighe.com
I'd always thought, to a large extent, the frustration of dealing with Windows and Mac had been due to their perverse propensity for the use of abstract metaphors which complicate rather than explicate problems. That may be helpful for new users, but new users Linux users do not tend to be. Do Linux users want to be treated like babies all of a sudden? I know I certainly don't. And, somehow, I don't believe the linux community in general is going to be too impressed with useful utility encased in meaningless, obfuscating metaphors.
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:
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