At the turn of the century, running a family household required two full-time adults. One to earn the money, the other to perform household tasks.
...and at the turn of this century, running a family household requires two full time adults and a fulltime babysitter/daycare.
At least in this corner of the globe (northern canada). I have friends who are on Social Assistance because even with two full time working parents, they don't make enough money to support a family.
I'm not quibbling with the rest of your post, just this one thing.
There are many places I wanted to jump into this thread. I finally chose this one because the subject heading best reflects my own view on this. Language does restrict thought, along with a great many other things. Your physical senses for one. Your past experience for another.
But the converse is true as well, thought constricts language. A word on it's own is just a symbol, a container to carry a concept from one place to another. Without the concept a word means nothing. Concepts which are already held in the mind have many avenues of escape. If a suitable word does not exist a new one can be fabricated on the spot. Or an old one retrofitted. However if the thought doesn't occur to you, the vehicle won't be appropriated.
The point I'd like to make is that language does not restrict thought in cases where the thought arose first; a baby has no words, but has no trouble at all communicating that it needs attention.
Where it get's interesting is when the language is carries a previously unknown or unthought idea. Most of thoughts in my own head during the course of writing this message were not there before. And they wouldn't have arrived there if it weren't for this interesing dialogue happening right now. It's not that I didn't have them, or more accurately, the capacity to have them, it's that I didn't think to think about them. And that's where language gets restrictive, if the language doesn't go there, neither will you. Unless some other conveyor-of-ideas like your eyes or ears bring them to you.
Personally, I don't think 'restricts' is a big enough word on it's own. It needs more shades of meaning like informs or directs or influences, or some word which combines those ideas. A car restricts your travel to roads (hummers, James Bond & Q aside), it does not let you sail or fly.:)
The cryptome page says that the document is based on hardcopy from an anonymous source.
Does anybody else find this strange? Did somebody sit down and type this whole thing out (~45 pages)? I didn't see the sometimes-garbled words and punctuation I'm used to seeing with scanned text. Admittedly I haven't seen this done for awhile so maybe OCR technology really has improved that much. Still, I find it questionable. What about you?
Native Win32 GIMP by Tor Lillqvist is hosted at: http://gimp.org/win32/, current version is Dec 18, 1999. There (was) also a Cygwin version which uses an X Server, but it's home page has disapeared from GeoCities. The author was Craig Setera. Haven't heard of a Mac port yet. See Netlabs for an OS/2 port.
I've been using Tor's Gimp for 'bout a year and it just keeps getting better (GTK themes even!). Adobe PhotoShop is still more refined and easier to use overall, but the playing field is much closer to level. Can't say much about Corel PhotoPaint. We have it. I use from time to time, but don't like it much.
I use Corel Draw more than Adobe Illustrator, but that's mostly because of familiarity. CD is buggier (on windows anyway). There are a couple of libre vector drawing projects for linux begun, but I haven't had a chance to seriously check them out yet.
nicely put: Or you could say
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
"innovation" does not automatically equal "good" and that's certainly not what I meant to imply.
Open Source like any other development model is a tool. The quality of it's products are dependent on the skill of it's participants. In that an OS project is no different from a closed source one. What makes any given OS project potentially superior is that regardless of the skill of the originators, if the central idea is sound or exciting enough, it can be improved by more skillful people further down the road (more easily than w/ CS solution).
This isn't a flame, but like anyone in the Linux community should talk. What amazing innovations have come out of us? It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
The biggest "innovation" of the community for which Linux is currently the poster child (Open Source, Free Software,... use the flag of your choice) is the development model. It's not what the software does (end results), but how it is produced (how you get there) that's significant.
I put "innovation" in quotes because in the digital world it's a pretty nebulous term and hard to define. Ideas and code and software are extremely promiscuous and incestuous. Pick any "innovation" of the last 5 years and you will find antecedants from the 80s and 70s and 60s.
Linux is a hotbed of "innovation" because it lives in an environment stripped of the rules and taboos forbidding sex. Anybody can screw anybody else, mixing genes and chromosones with glee and abandon, creating offspring similar but not quite the same as anything else. Gene swapping is common in the proprietary world too, but's hampered and restricted.
It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
True, many portions are reimplementations of closed-source tools. But many closed source tools are implementations of open source academic research products.
Sure with reparenting on they'll only see my post, but they might also get curious enough to click through to the parent. Since the comment is currently ranked at 5, I think it worked (or at least helped).
I hadn't thought about simply reposting the data with credit though. I'll try that next time and see what happens.
It's probably too late, this story is 1/2 way down the front page and all the moderators have used up their points or moved on to greener pastures (or at least less crowded ones).
In any case, I'm lending my karma whore +1 bonus to the parent of this reply. Go read it, it's informative.
Thanks for dropping by to chat with us. It's nice to be able to interact with you personally as well as be transported and carried away by your stories. Are there other forums where you do this as well?
[And before somebody chimes in with 'it's in his own best interests to do so', so what? The same could be said for many other stories/discussions here where the people concerned can't be bothered to participate or don't want to weather the inevitable flames and snide digs. I don't blame them, and when somebody does decide to enter the fray anyway, I think they deserve recognition.]
I think this is probably the sticking point for most people. It certainly is for me.
>But has Card any screenplay experience?
Abyss. The book is worth the read too. It was written at the same time the movie was being filmed and written. The book was necessary for the movie, and the movie formed the book. A very interesting synergy. I'd like to see more projects of this nature. BTW, after the book, the movie ending actually makes sense.
I like a snappy search engine response time as much as the next guy, especially when I'm looking for something fairly current or mainstream. But how can you tell a search engine to tread farther off the beaten path?
For example, a few days ago I was looking for the dip switch settings on an old 14.4k modem. Now I *knew* the info was out there on the web somewhere. I also thought it was highly unlikely to be in any of the major search engines in-ram indexes. I would have been quite happy to submit a boolean or reg-ex query to a search engine and then check back an hour later to get the results.
In my mind, instant gratification search engines are useful and have their place, but I see a whole segment which just doesn't seem to be addressed. Is anybody even thinking about working on this?
Since most companies seem incapable of releasing a product as open source without building their own personalized license plate, I propose the following guideline:
3 or 4 licenses are chosen as "definitive". Seems to me these would be Artistic, BSD, GPL, MPL.
ABC Company chooses which of the 3|4 most closely aligns with their needs, and then writes a license which contains only the differences from the definitive license.
Then those of us trying to understand the new license and choose whether we want to work within it or not can focus straight in the new/changed areas.
I read about an experiment (sorry, no references - too long ago) that studied these mental states. It involved three groups, on of untranced subjects, one of Zen-tranced subjects and one of yoga-tranced subjects.
Hmm. I heard about the same (or a similar) experiment except that it involved 4 groups - the three you mentioned plus vipissana, or insight, meditators. With the insight meditators there was an EEG spike at the beginning of the noise, then baseline, then another spike at the end of the noise. mmm Arising.... mmm Passing Away... And they too did not acclimate to the stimuli.
The humorous part according to the meditation teacher who related the story to me was the study organizers concluded the trancendental meditators were the "most advanced" because they showed no reaction at all.:)
As for "...altered states DO happen. Mystical? Bullshit!". Well what's in a name? Anything is mystical when you don't understand how it comes about. (btw, I'm not arguing with your sentiment, I agree, just casting a different shade on it).
I have wondered about this very idea many times, and my conclusion is the earlier in life the implant, the more 'natural' it could be. I think it would be hard work to train yourself to use your brain differently once most of your habits are well developed, like using your off-hand to write. +++
I wonder what it would be like to be able to patch in to a live weather satellite feed? Could you train yourself to interpret the data stream as images? Would that be even meaningful? Perhaps some sort of inner 'feeling' or 'thought' would be more appropriate (what do thoughts look like?). What would it do to your self image/conciousness to experience viewpoints totally divorced from your body? Would you even be able to relate to someone who couldn't experience the same things?
... not keeping up to date. Think about it, is it even possible to stay up to date unless you are actively working in the field? Even then I'm not so sure it's possible.
As many other people have noted, but I feel should be emphasized, the real thing which school can teach but seems to happen more by accident than design, is how to learn. Critical and analitcal thinking. Experimentation. Figure it out for yourself. Creativity. Sound familiar? All the hallmarks of hackerdom right?
Beyond that, what school is good for is (broad) exposure to fields of thought and ideas you might not otherwise encounter on your own. This one area where the internet is poor, because people, in general, surf to reinforce their biases not extend them.
[paraphrased] The Coral Castle originally called "Rock Gate Park", was built by one man, working alone. It took him 20 years to build - from 1920 to 1940. His name is Edward Leedskalnin.
Ed was 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. He worked by himself using only handtools. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, 3 foot thick, and weighs approximately 13,000 pounds.
When asked how he was able to move the blocks of coral, Ed would say only that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. This from a man who only had a fourth grade education."
I don't know about you, but the thought of having to lift a hand up from a keyboard to touch some spot or other on a 17"+ monitor and then back down to the keyboard make me cringe. I get annoyed enough just having to move over to the 6" mouse pad. Or worse yet, having to hold my arm up to the monitor for successive movement. Blechh.
Of course if the display was flat roll up touchscreen which could be laid down flat on a desk or drafting table or something, that could be something.
Now that I think about it, an artist at an easel (sp?) is holding their arms up all the time... I think the difference there is that the output device and the input device are one and the same. It's the idea switching back and forth between a keyboard and some other pointing method which chills me.
Overall it works, but there are a couple of problems to beware of:
passwd / group file automagic rolloverhttp://www.g eocities.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/conversion-tool s.tar.gz I didn't end up using the script since I only had two users to worry about. I did look it over, but I don't know enough perl to make it sing. The/etc/{passwd,group}files in the tarball were very useful though. Heed this note from the mini-howto's author: Trouble! convert passwd and group first, before ever installing anything debian related using dpkg. Otherwise the ownerships will be almost irrecoverably incorrect.
dselect|apt-get don't work completely -probably because my partition setup is unexpected, they always crash at the install phase ('unable to remount/usr' or something). That's okay, use apt-get or dselect to download the packages, then cd to/var/cache/apt/archives/ and use 'dpkg --install *.deb'. Keep an eye on the console for the 20-30 packages you will have to reinstall because of broken dependencies (here's where it is useful to do this over a telnet session so you can log all the screen output).
Here are my notes left over from doing my RH6.0 to Deb2.1 conversion:
-----[snip]------ >If you would, could you let me know how the conversion goes?
Well, I think I'm done, but I'm not sure if I broke anything or not. I imagine there will be few toys on the floor to trip over.:) (btw, I completely ignored version numbers for everything)
I did not take any safety precautions. The computer I'm playing with has no important information on it. I use solely for experimenting with and learning Linux. I fully expect it to blow it up non-recoverably at some point.
Step (1) - no problem except for the passwd/group thing (not having a debian version available); I just skipped that and came back to it later
(2) libstdc++ was already installed
(4) took me awhile, but I eventually found a nondebbin version of dpkg at ftp://ftp. [mirror].debian.org/debian/project/dpkg/
(8) This is the order that worked for me, but I had to try it a bunch of times so it shouldn' be considered definitive:
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libc6 ; core dumped after a segmentation fault at this point almost any command will segfault, even ls and rm. Don't worry All-Is-Not-Lost! (but I sure thought I was!!!)
$ ldconfig ; *wait* for ldconfig to exit, it really is busy doing something
* these files are new (not mentioned in the HowTo). The best way to make sure you get what you need is to go to http://debian.org/distrib/packages and search for the package you are looking for. It will also give the dependencies, download them too.
(10) Skip this step for an http/ftp install
(11.2) ---==--- $ dselect - choost Apt for access method, see bottom description panel for firewall/proxy setup
:: Proxy Setup (skip if you don't have one):: - if you have to setup proxies, *exit* not suspend dselect otherwise your changes will have no effect.
First try:
$ http_proxy="http://your.firewall.here:port/"
This is important for us MS weenies: don't use the command:
$ set http_proxy=bklah blah blah
because it's not the same as the previous one. I don't want to talk about how long it took me to figure this out.
- rerun dselect and try and Update, if the main menu returns too quickly your proxy is probably not working. Exit again and try this:
and edit apt.conf for your particular firewall setup. Hopefully you know a bit about how proxies work. I only had to change one line:
Proxy "http://firewall.gov.yk.ca:80/";
and comment out the following one (the 2 '//'):
// Proxy::http.us.debian.org "DIRECT";
- run deselect again and [U]pdate. This is where it started working for me.
(11.3) - dselect > Update downloaded about 40mb and then I ran into my next problem:
"mount: can't find/usr in/etc/fstab or/etc/mtab"
I presume because the script is expecting/usr to be it's own partition, which it isn't on my machine. Anyhow, at this point dselect is effectively dead in the water.
Look for/var/cache/apt/archives, it should have all of your downloaded.deb packages. Then run:
$ cd/var/cache/apt/archives $ dpkg --install *
and go get a coffee. But keep an eye on the machine because you'll have to answer a few prompts.
On my box, 5.deb's didn't install because of failed dependencies and 8 packages unpacked but didn't finish installing. From here it was a fairly simple matter of running
$ dpkg --install some.pack.age.0.10.deb
and figuring out from the error messages what it needs to be installed first (for the 5). And then running
$ dpkg --configure
for the 8 incomplete installs.
that's all folks.;-) =========================
do you know where the dselect/dpkg logs are kept? A few messages scrolled by of things to do and programs to run at a later date, but I don't remember them all...
Oh yeah, there's one more juicy tidbit: I never once layed a finger on my computer. I did all of this from remote using telnet/ssh and VNC.
I wasn't really intending to be critical or sounding like I thought you were 'wrong'. It was more a case of a nicely wrapped concept popping into mind and I just had to spit it out. Your first paragraph was a good launch pad.:-)
And like you, I'm an amateur (for the love of it) science (to know) follower.
The threads in the discussion clearly demonstrate why a conservative scientific mainstream is needed. Look at how many of these discussions turn into a sort of scientific wish fulfillment where things that people want to believe are put forth and backed up with evidence that the scientific orthodoxy was wrong in the past.
Agreed. This a very important concern. However it doesn't negate the usefulness struggling against orthodoxy. The two themes are mutually interdependent on each other. Iconoclasts need something strong, slow and stable to rebel against. The status quo needs heretics and crackpots dangerously running about in order to justify the walls. The walls are important, they hold everything inside. Or outside, depending on where you sit.
What's arguably the one of the most important characteristics about the style of development found in free software/open source world?
Seperate, and yet joined, Stable and Unstable source code trees, which are recognized as equally important and valuable.
Academia could learn from programming. I think the real issue is that we do not seem to have formally identified the absolute necessity of keeping both modes prevalent and balanced. We want one or the other to reign supreme.
Any kind you want.;-) GRASS follows the unix paradigm of being modular and command line oriented, so you can use perl, or python, or tcl, or whatever you like.
Slashdot Mirror
At the turn of the century, running a family household required two full-time adults. One to earn the money, the other to perform household tasks.
...and at the turn of this century, running a family household requires two full time adults and a fulltime babysitter/daycare.
At least in this corner of the globe (northern canada). I have friends who are on Social Assistance because even with two full time working parents, they don't make enough money to support a family.
I'm not quibbling with the rest of your post, just this one thing.
But the converse is true as well, thought constricts language. A word on it's own is just a symbol, a container to carry a concept from one place to another. Without the concept a word means nothing. Concepts which are already held in the mind have many avenues of escape. If a suitable word does not exist a new one can be fabricated on the spot. Or an old one retrofitted. However if the thought doesn't occur to you, the vehicle won't be appropriated.
The point I'd like to make is that language does not restrict thought in cases where the thought arose first; a baby has no words, but has no trouble at all communicating that it needs attention.
Where it get's interesting is when the language is carries a previously unknown or unthought idea. Most of thoughts in my own head during the course of writing this message were not there before. And they wouldn't have arrived there if it weren't for this interesing dialogue happening right now. It's not that I didn't have them, or more accurately, the capacity to have them, it's that I didn't think to think about them. And that's where language gets restrictive, if the language doesn't go there, neither will you. Unless some other conveyor-of-ideas like your eyes or ears bring them to you.
Personally, I don't think 'restricts' is a big enough word on it's own. It needs more shades of meaning like informs or directs or influences, or some word which combines those ideas. A car restricts your travel to roads (hummers, James Bond & Q aside), it does not let you sail or fly. :)
The cryptome page says that the document is based on hardcopy from an anonymous source.
Does anybody else find this strange? Did somebody sit down and type this whole thing out (~45 pages)? I didn't see the sometimes-garbled words and punctuation I'm used to seeing with scanned text. Admittedly I haven't seen this done for awhile so maybe OCR technology really has improved that much. Still, I find it questionable. What about you?
Native Win32 GIMP by Tor Lillqvist is hosted at: http://gimp.org/win32/, current version is Dec 18, 1999.
There (was) also a Cygwin version which uses an X Server, but it's home page has disapeared from GeoCities. The author was Craig Setera. Haven't heard of a Mac port yet. See Netlabs for an OS/2 port.
I've been using Tor's Gimp for 'bout a year and it just keeps getting better (GTK themes even!). Adobe PhotoShop is still more refined and easier to use overall, but the playing field is much closer to level. Can't say much about Corel PhotoPaint. We have it. I use from time to time, but don't like it much.
I use Corel Draw more than Adobe Illustrator, but that's mostly because of familiarity. CD is buggier (on windows anyway). There are a couple of libre vector drawing projects for linux begun, but I haven't had a chance to seriously check them out yet.
nicely put, esp. 4rth para.
"innovation" does not automatically equal "good" and that's certainly not what I meant to imply.
Open Source like any other development model is a tool. The quality of it's products are dependent on the skill of it's participants. In that an OS project is no different from a closed source one. What makes any given OS project potentially superior is that regardless of the skill of the originators, if the central idea is sound or exciting enough, it can be improved by more skillful people further down the road (more easily than w/ CS solution).
This isn't a flame, but like anyone in the Linux community should talk. What amazing innovations have come out of us? It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
... use the flag of your choice) is the development model. It's not what the software does (end results), but how it is produced (how you get there) that's significant.
The biggest "innovation" of the community for which Linux is currently the poster child (Open Source, Free Software,
I put "innovation" in quotes because in the digital world it's a pretty nebulous term and hard to define. Ideas and code and software are extremely promiscuous and incestuous. Pick any "innovation" of the last 5 years and you will find antecedants from the 80s and 70s and 60s.
Linux is a hotbed of "innovation" because it lives in an environment stripped of the rules and taboos forbidding sex. Anybody can screw anybody else, mixing genes and chromosones with glee and abandon, creating offspring similar but not quite the same as anything else. Gene swapping is common in the proprietary world too, but's hampered and restricted.
It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
True, many portions are reimplementations of closed-source tools. But many closed source tools are implementations of open source academic research products.
Hi Technos,
Sure with reparenting on they'll only see my post, but they might also get curious enough to click through to the parent. Since the comment is currently ranked at 5, I think it worked (or at least helped).
I hadn't thought about simply reposting the data with credit though. I'll try that next time and see what happens.
cheers,
-matt
It's probably too late, this story is 1/2 way down the front page and all the moderators have used up their points or moved on to greener pastures (or at least less crowded ones).
In any case, I'm lending my karma whore +1 bonus to the parent of this reply. Go read it, it's informative.
Hi Orson,
Thanks for dropping by to chat with us. It's nice to be able to interact with you personally as well as be transported and carried away by your stories. Are there other forums where you do this as well?
[And before somebody chimes in with 'it's in his own best interests to do so', so what? The same could be said for many other stories/discussions here where the people concerned can't be bothered to participate or don't want to weather the inevitable flames and snide digs. I don't blame them, and when somebody does decide to enter the fray anyway, I think they deserve recognition.]
cheers,
-matt
>Or do you just not trust the production team?
I think this is probably the sticking point for most people. It certainly is for me.
>But has Card any screenplay experience?
Abyss. The book is worth the read too. It was written at the same time the movie was being filmed and written. The book was necessary for the movie, and the movie formed the book. A very interesting synergy. I'd like to see more projects of this nature. BTW, after the book, the movie ending actually makes sense.
-matt
I like a snappy search engine response time as much as the next guy, especially when I'm looking for something fairly current or mainstream. But how can you tell a search engine to tread farther off the beaten path?
For example, a few days ago I was looking for the dip switch settings on an old 14.4k modem. Now I *knew* the info was out there on the web somewhere. I also thought it was highly unlikely to be in any of the major search engines in-ram indexes. I would have been quite happy to submit a boolean or reg-ex query to a search engine and then check back an hour later to get the results.
In my mind, instant gratification search engines are useful and have their place, but I see a whole segment which just doesn't seem to be addressed. Is anybody even thinking about working on this?
-matt
Since most companies seem incapable of releasing a product as open source without building their own personalized license plate, I propose the following guideline:
3 or 4 licenses are chosen as "definitive". Seems to me these would be Artistic, BSD, GPL, MPL.
ABC Company chooses which of the 3|4 most closely aligns with their needs, and then writes a license which contains only the differences from the definitive license.
Then those of us trying to understand the new license and choose whether we want to work within it or not can focus straight in the new/changed areas.
Comments?
I read about an experiment (sorry, no references - too long ago) that studied these mental states. It involved three groups, on of untranced subjects, one of Zen-tranced subjects and one of yoga-tranced subjects.
... And they too did not acclimate to the stimuli.
:)
Hmm. I heard about the same (or a similar) experiment except that it involved 4 groups - the three you mentioned plus vipissana, or insight, meditators. With the insight meditators there was an EEG spike at the beginning of the noise, then baseline, then another spike at the end of the noise. mmm Arising.... mmm Passing Away
The humorous part according to the meditation teacher who related the story to me was the study organizers concluded the trancendental meditators were the "most advanced" because they showed no reaction at all.
As for "...altered states DO happen. Mystical? Bullshit!". Well what's in a name? Anything is mystical when you don't understand how it comes about. (btw, I'm not arguing with your sentiment, I agree, just casting a different shade on it).
-matt
I have wondered about this very idea many times, and my conclusion is the earlier in life the implant, the more 'natural' it could be. I think it would be hard work to train yourself to use your brain differently once most of your habits are well developed, like using your off-hand to write.
+++
I wonder what it would be like to be able to patch in to a live weather satellite feed? Could you train yourself to interpret the data stream as images? Would that be even meaningful? Perhaps some sort of inner 'feeling' or 'thought' would be more appropriate (what do thoughts look like?). What would it do to your self image/conciousness to experience viewpoints totally divorced from your body? Would you even be able to relate to someone who couldn't experience the same things?
I'm reminded of the Flatland story.
... not keeping up to date. Think about it, is it even possible to stay up to date unless you are actively working in the field? Even then I'm not so sure it's possible.
As many other people have noted, but I feel should be emphasized, the real thing which school can teach but seems to happen more by accident than design, is how to learn. Critical and analitcal thinking. Experimentation. Figure it out for yourself. Creativity. Sound familiar? All the hallmarks of hackerdom right?
Beyond that, what school is good for is (broad) exposure to fields of thought and ideas you might not otherwise encounter on your own. This one area where the internet is poor, because people, in general, surf to reinforce their biases not extend them.
My 2c.
-matt
[paraphrased]
The Coral Castle originally called "Rock Gate Park", was built by one man, working alone. It took him 20 years to build - from 1920 to 1940. His name is Edward Leedskalnin.
Ed was 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. He worked by himself using only handtools. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, 3 foot thick, and weighs approximately 13,000 pounds.
When asked how he was able to move the blocks of coral, Ed would say only that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. This from a man who only had a fourth grade education."
I don't know about you, but the thought of having to lift a hand up from a keyboard to touch some spot or other on a 17"+ monitor and then back down to the keyboard make me cringe. I get annoyed enough just having to move over to the 6" mouse pad. Or worse yet, having to hold my arm up to the monitor for successive movement. Blechh.
Of course if the display was flat roll up touchscreen which could be laid down flat on a desk or drafting table or something, that could be something.
Now that I think about it, an artist at an easel (sp?) is holding their arms up all the time... I think the difference there is that the output device and the input device are one and the same. It's the idea switching back and forth between a keyboard and some other pointing method which chills me.
Ooooh. I like it. A lot. You should forward this to chooseyourmail.com.
Overall it works, but there are a couple of problems to beware of:
l s.tar.gz /etc/{passwd,group}files in the tarball were very useful though. Heed this note from the mini-howto's author: Trouble! convert passwd and group first, before ever installing anything debian related using dpkg. Otherwise the ownerships will be almost irrecoverably incorrect.
/usr' or something). /var/cache/apt/archives/
:)
.debian.org/debian/project/dpkg/
::
/usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf.gz /usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf /etc/apt/apt.conf
// Proxy::http.us.debian.org "DIRECT";
/usr in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"
/usr to be it's own partition, which it isn't on my machine. Anyhow, at this point dselect is effectively dead in the water.
/var/cache/apt/archives, it should have all of your downloaded .deb packages. Then run:
/var/cache/apt/archives
.deb's didn't install because of failed dependencies and 8 packages unpacked but didn't finish installing. From here it was a fairly simple matter of running
;-)
passwd / group file automagic rollover http://www.g eocities.com/ResearchTriangle/3328/conversion-too
I didn't end up using the script since I only had two users to worry about. I did look it over, but I don't know enough perl to make it sing. The
dselect|apt-get don't work completely
-probably because my partition setup is unexpected, they always crash at the install phase ('unable to remount
That's okay, use apt-get or dselect to download the packages, then cd to
and use 'dpkg --install *.deb'. Keep an eye on the console for the 20-30 packages you will have to reinstall because of broken dependencies (here's where it is useful to do this over a telnet session so you can log all the screen output).
Here are my notes left over from doing my RH6.0 to Deb2.1 conversion:
-----[snip]------
>If you would, could you let me know how the conversion goes?
Well, I think I'm done, but I'm not sure if I broke anything or not. I imagine there will be few toys on the floor to trip over.
(btw, I completely ignored version numbers for everything)
I did not take any safety precautions. The computer I'm playing with has no important information on it. I use solely for experimenting with and learning Linux. I fully expect it to blow it up non-recoverably at some point.
Step (1)
- no problem except for the passwd/group thing (not having a debian version available); I just skipped that and came back to it later
(2) libstdc++ was already installed
(4) took me awhile, but I eventually found a nondebbin version of dpkg at
ftp://ftp. [mirror]
(8) This is the order that worked for me, but I had to try it a bunch of times so it shouldn' be considered definitive:
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libldso*
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libncurses*
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libstdc++
$ dpkg --force-depends --install ldso
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libc6
; core dumped after a segmentation fault at this point almost any command will segfault, even ls and rm. Don't worry All-Is-Not-Lost! (but I sure thought I was!!!)
$ ldconfig
; *wait* for ldconfig to exit, it really is busy doing something
$ dpkg --force-depends --install libc6
$ dpkg --force-depends --install dpkg
$ dpkg --configure dpkg
* these files are new (not mentioned in the HowTo). The best way to make sure you get what you need is to go to
http://debian.org/distrib/packages
and search for the package you are looking for. It will also give the dependencies, download them too.
(10) Skip this step for an http/ftp install
(11.2) ---==---
$ dselect
- choost Apt for access method, see bottom description panel for firewall/proxy setup
:: Proxy Setup (skip if you don't have one)
- if you have to setup proxies, *exit* not suspend dselect otherwise your changes will have no effect.
First try:
$ http_proxy="http://your.firewall.here:port/"
This is important for us MS weenies: don't use the command:
$ set http_proxy=bklah blah blah
because it's not the same as the previous one. I don't want to talk about how long it took me to figure this out.
- rerun dselect and try and Update, if the main menu returns too quickly your proxy is probably not working. Exit again and try this:
$ gunzip
$ cp
and edit apt.conf for your particular firewall setup. Hopefully you know a bit about how proxies work. I only had to change one line:
Proxy "http://firewall.gov.yk.ca:80/";
and comment out the following one (the 2 '//'):
- run deselect again and [U]pdate. This is where it started working for me.
(11.3)
- dselect > Update downloaded about 40mb and then I ran into my next problem:
"mount: can't find
I presume because the script is expecting
Look for
$ cd
$ dpkg --install *
and go get a coffee. But keep an eye on the machine because you'll have to answer a few prompts.
On my box, 5
$ dpkg --install some.pack.age.0.10.deb
and figuring out from the error messages what it needs to be installed first (for the 5). And then running
$ dpkg --configure
for the 8 incomplete installs.
that's all folks.
=========================
do you know where the dselect/dpkg logs are kept?
A few messages scrolled by of things to do and programs to run at a later date, but I don't remember them all...
Oh yeah, there's one more juicy tidbit: I never once layed a finger on my computer. I did all of this from remote using telnet/ssh and VNC.
thanks for your help Brock,
-matt
-----[snip]------
I wasn't really intending to be critical or sounding like I thought you were 'wrong'. It was more a case of a nicely wrapped concept popping into mind and I just had to spit it out. Your first paragraph was a good launch pad. :-)
And like you, I'm an amateur (for the love of it) science (to know) follower.
Cheers,
-matt
Agreed. This a very important concern. However it doesn't negate the usefulness struggling against orthodoxy. The two themes are mutually interdependent on each other. Iconoclasts need something strong, slow and stable to rebel against. The status quo needs heretics and crackpots dangerously running about in order to justify the walls. The walls are important, they hold everything inside. Or outside, depending on where you sit.
What's arguably the one of the most important characteristics about the style of development found in free software/open source world?
Seperate, and yet joined, Stable and Unstable source code trees, which are recognized as equally important and valuable.
Academia could learn from programming. I think the real issue is that we do not seem to have formally identified the absolute necessity of keeping both modes prevalent and balanced. We want one or the other to reign supreme.
I don't know what scripting facility GRASS has...
;-) GRASS follows the unix paradigm of being modular and command line oriented, so you can use perl, or python, or tcl, or whatever you like.
Any kind you want.
I cross posted your message to the GRASS mailing list. [Majordomo@cecer.army.mil]
Grass Documentation Project: /
w .pdf
.e00 to GRASS: . html
http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/gdp
From Grass to ArcView:
http://www.geo g.uni-hannover.de/grass/gdp/tutorial/grass_arcvie
From
http://www.geo g.uni-hannover.de/grass/projects/m.in.e00/welcome