My httpd.conf is built, like practically every other configuration file ever built, from the NCSA http.conf that came with Apache. It doesn't look much like it did when it came out of the box, and I use my own template now on new systems, but the point is the same -- the example config files are used as a template in practically every distro. I have serious doubts that you opened up your text editor on a totally blank file and started typing directives.
LFS Doesn't just make you run some scripts, and more often then you'd think, it just doesn't work they way its supposed to.
I know, I built a few LFS systems to get the feel of it. I didn't say that LFS was just some scripts, but it is very much so a "cut and paste from the book" experience for most people. So long as you use the versions they give you end up needing to do little else. As soon as you start juggling software versions you start to hit the curve, and from my experience in the IRC channel and mailing lists, most people just don't even try to learn, hence my "Wuhh x broke, what do I do now?" comment.
Like Gentoo, LFS doesn't do much to teach you what's going on -- it's a set of instructions to follow, while Gentoo is a... well, set of instructions to follow. How many people actually step beyond these directions when something breaks? Not a good lot of them if the Gentoo/LFS forums and IRC channels are any indication. "Wuhh x broke, what do I do now?" is all too common, much like Ask Slashdot postings where the answer is found by plugging the question into Google.
I've always seen an inherent problem with source-based distros that don't actually make you get down in the muck and bugger with the source -- They give you a little more insight but really it's just a package-based distro which happens to use the source tarballs and prefab patches and Makefiles to make the build tool happy and consistent. You're really no further ahead with Gentoo or LFS than you are with Mandrake or Debian or SuSE.
If you want to learn the internals stop using a hand-holding distro, grab Slack, cut your teeth building stuff that wasn't on the CD (or try remaking something from the CD!)... Then realize that it's a royal waste of time and a security risk requiring a compiler on every system and making your first few packages... Learn the intracasies of trying to make Perl module packages or Apache shared libs that can be used on several systems. Now grab something like CheckInstall to make your life just a tad easier and learn all its weirdnesses. Break things and try to fix them, and then realize that you now have some really solid foundations to truly learn how Linux works.
Now that the foundations are laid, go build some small i386-based systems using nothing more than a dev environment and chroot. Don't cheat by grabbing a buildroot. LFS helps give some direction here, as do the busybox and uclibc mailing lists. When you can build these and understand what's going on, you've actually learned how Linux works and how the pieces fit together. Go tweak a kernel or write a driver for some nifty piece of hardware to round out your knowlege. You've now got enough of an education to get a decently-paying job in the embedded systems industry. Round it out with some good networking experience from packet dumps and screwing around with raw sockets and such and you have got a really solid technical background for practically anything Linux.
Now I didn't say the process was for everyone, and I certainly didn't say that this is how everyone should learn it. I'm just getting sick to the teeth of people claiming they know how Linux works and how to build programs when all they've learned how to do was run "emerge someprogram" and give dumb looks if it doesn't go right.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
so it's all about the quickness, right? ie, you can take the picture and *immediately* have it available on your computer for scrutinizing, etc...
Is there some reason you're so emotional about this?
It is more about being able to see exactly what is on the "film" rather than the quickness -- I can instantly tell if I have to retake a picture. Handy for people such as myself who aren't all that photographically inclined.
Incidentally, it's also why I give the pictures I want printed to a photographer -- He can make them look far better for far less cost to me than I could do myself.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have a Canon PowerShot A60 -- I chose it over other brands because I really like how my Canon Rebel EOS works and the A60 is very similar. 2.2MP isn't a hell of a lot, but it's enough to get 5x7 prints and have a chance in hell of it looking close to what I can get with a regular camera.
I completely disagree with your statement that digital cameras aren't used for prints -- I take a bazillion pictures, throw them up in 720x480 for the web for grandma and grandpa and then they tell me specifically which pictures they'd like prints of. I take the original 2.2MP JPEGs and give them to my film guy -- he touches them up and makes real 4x6 or 5x7 prints for me. They look fantastic and everyone's happy.
True, the bulk of my pictures stay in 720x480 but it's really nice to be able to get a 5x7 out of it should I want it. The amount of time I want 8x10s is next to nil; I go to the same photographer and get really good digital pictures taken in that case. (He's all but completely moved to a full digital studio.)
Actually I think solar energy is far more efficient if you use guided reflectors (mirrors) and aim the sunlight at a water column, turning it into steam.
I never understood what was so hard about seeding the RNG from the audio stream -- combine that with a shuffle algo such that you won't hit a song you've already played if there are still unplayed songs and I belive you'd be pretty damned random.
I agree with you, and in fact that is how I generate my own passwords and recommend others to do the same. I was, however, responding to the parent and the example passwords they used, which were none of these things.:-)
I am using Asterisk right now to offload our high-volume long distance calls over to Nufone. $0.0295/min anywhere in the continental US and Canada. Great service but not offically open for business yet. Talk to Jerjer in #asterisk on OPN.
Anyway -- Asterisk for the most part works great -- I currently have our Norstar system with four trunk lines going into an Adit600 channel bank to Asterisk. We also have 8 regular PSTN lines which go directly into the KSU. Speed dials are set to pick up a VOIP trunk line. When we move to the new building we will have a PRI going directly into the asterisk box, and a channelized T1 connection between the Norstar system and the Asterisk box. We're only going to have one "real" phone line in the building, with everything else going over VOIP to a colocation place downtown.
Biggest problems with Asterisk (for us) seem to be with VOIP phones, not VOIP calls. Since we're using our regular Norstar system we avoid most of these issues but we are slowly moving to VOIP phones to replace the KSU since we want (much) tighter integration of the phones and computers. You pretty much require end-to-end QoS though for guaranteed reliability and clarity of calls. We do pretty go with having QoS working on both ends of the data T1 such that it's not possible to fill the pipe and cause havoc.
Asterisk is really becoming VERY stable over the past few weeks -- I think there are under 8 bugs open in the bugtracker which are preventing 1.0 stable. (yes I realize how funny that sounds)
I prefer Psi to GAIM or Kopete or anything else so far. Yes it's Jabber but it works the way the old ICQ client worked before they went hog-wild with "features". And it's multiplatform: Win32/Linux/Mac.
Ahh yes that is right... you could label them your choice of data, stack and/or code. Now I suppose my question is -- why would you have a code page you don't want to execute? Wouldn't it just be a data page then?
Actually knoppix would be a bad idea for day to day use -- it's quite slow.
Why not just install normally, don't alter the boot record and create a boot CD that boots the partition as/? My experience is with Slackware and this would be trivial to do -- instead of coming up with a prompt just mount the partition and run with it. I imagine it would be easy for other distro as well, and then at least you'd be running at top speed once booted.
You could do it with existing tools today -- with the slackware boot disk you would have to type "linux root=/dev/hda2 noinitrd ro" every boot -- that's where the custom boot would fix that.:-) Hell you could have it scan and select the right partition automatically.
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My httpd.conf is built, like practically every other configuration file ever built, from the NCSA http.conf that came with Apache. It doesn't look much like it did when it came out of the box, and I use my own template now on new systems, but the point is the same -- the example config files are used as a template in practically every distro. I have serious doubts that you opened up your text editor on a totally blank file and started typing directives.
If something was wrong with RH, google had the answer. Gentoo, on the otherhand, requires you to configure almost everything by hand.
Um, what part of "emerge foo" is configuring by hand? IIRC the default configuration settings and whatnot were emerged as well.
LFS Doesn't just make you run some scripts, and more often then you'd think, it just doesn't work they way its supposed to.
I know, I built a few LFS systems to get the feel of it. I didn't say that LFS was just some scripts, but it is very much so a "cut and paste from the book" experience for most people. So long as you use the versions they give you end up needing to do little else. As soon as you start juggling software versions you start to hit the curve, and from my experience in the IRC channel and mailing lists, most people just don't even try to learn, hence my "Wuhh x broke, what do I do now?" comment.
Like Gentoo, LFS doesn't do much to teach you what's going on -- it's a set of instructions to follow, while Gentoo is a ... well, set of instructions to follow. How many people actually step beyond these directions when something breaks? Not a good lot of them if the Gentoo/LFS forums and IRC channels are any indication. "Wuhh x broke, what do I do now?" is all too common, much like Ask Slashdot postings where the answer is found by plugging the question into Google.
I've always seen an inherent problem with source-based distros that don't actually make you get down in the muck and bugger with the source -- They give you a little more insight but really it's just a package-based distro which happens to use the source tarballs and prefab patches and Makefiles to make the build tool happy and consistent. You're really no further ahead with Gentoo or LFS than you are with Mandrake or Debian or SuSE.
If you want to learn the internals stop using a hand-holding distro, grab Slack, cut your teeth building stuff that wasn't on the CD (or try remaking something from the CD!)... Then realize that it's a royal waste of time and a security risk requiring a compiler on every system and making your first few packages... Learn the intracasies of trying to make Perl module packages or Apache shared libs that can be used on several systems. Now grab something like CheckInstall to make your life just a tad easier and learn all its weirdnesses. Break things and try to fix them, and then realize that you now have some really solid foundations to truly learn how Linux works.
Now that the foundations are laid, go build some small i386-based systems using nothing more than a dev environment and chroot. Don't cheat by grabbing a buildroot. LFS helps give some direction here, as do the busybox and uclibc mailing lists. When you can build these and understand what's going on, you've actually learned how Linux works and how the pieces fit together. Go tweak a kernel or write a driver for some nifty piece of hardware to round out your knowlege. You've now got enough of an education to get a decently-paying job in the embedded systems industry. Round it out with some good networking experience from packet dumps and screwing around with raw sockets and such and you have got a really solid technical background for practically anything Linux.
Now I didn't say the process was for everyone, and I certainly didn't say that this is how everyone should learn it. I'm just getting sick to the teeth of people claiming they know how Linux works and how to build programs when all they've learned how to do was run "emerge someprogram" and give dumb looks if it doesn't go right.
I always liked calling C# coctothorpe, myself.
so it's all about the quickness, right? ie, you can take the picture and *immediately* have it available on your computer for scrutinizing, etc...
Is there some reason you're so emotional about this?
It is more about being able to see exactly what is on the "film" rather than the quickness -- I can instantly tell if I have to retake a picture. Handy for people such as myself who aren't all that photographically inclined.
Incidentally, it's also why I give the pictures I want printed to a photographer -- He can make them look far better for far less cost to me than I could do myself.
I have a Canon PowerShot A60 -- I chose it over other brands because I really like how my Canon Rebel EOS works and the A60 is very similar. 2.2MP isn't a hell of a lot, but it's enough to get 5x7 prints and have a chance in hell of it looking close to what I can get with a regular camera.
I completely disagree with your statement that digital cameras aren't used for prints -- I take a bazillion pictures, throw them up in 720x480 for the web for grandma and grandpa and then they tell me specifically which pictures they'd like prints of. I take the original 2.2MP JPEGs and give them to my film guy -- he touches them up and makes real 4x6 or 5x7 prints for me. They look fantastic and everyone's happy.
True, the bulk of my pictures stay in 720x480 but it's really nice to be able to get a 5x7 out of it should I want it. The amount of time I want 8x10s is next to nil; I go to the same photographer and get really good digital pictures taken in that case. (He's all but completely moved to a full digital studio.)
I used to believe that until I met my sweetie Tara... Wowza. Now I believe the correct equation is beauty*brains=constant*modifier :-)
"But if I become a warrior, I'll lose my pantyhose!"
I damn near spit coffee on the screen -- where is that from?
Actually I think solar energy is far more efficient if you use guided reflectors (mirrors) and aim the sunlight at a water column, turning it into steam.
I never understood what was so hard about seeding the RNG from the audio stream -- combine that with a shuffle algo such that you won't hit a song you've already played if there are still unplayed songs and I belive you'd be pretty damned random.
reductio ad absurdum. 'nuff said.
The quoted text says nothing about relational databases.
I agree with you, and in fact that is how I generate my own passwords and recommend others to do the same. I was, however, responding to the parent and the example passwords they used, which were none of these things. :-)
yeah right... and watch all the users leave the fucking cryptic and non-memorable passwords written down all over the place...
I second that.
I am using Asterisk right now to offload our high-volume long distance calls over to Nufone. $0.0295/min anywhere in the continental US and Canada. Great service but not offically open for business yet. Talk to Jerjer in #asterisk on OPN.
Anyway -- Asterisk for the most part works great -- I currently have our Norstar system with four trunk lines going into an Adit600 channel bank to Asterisk. We also have 8 regular PSTN lines which go directly into the KSU. Speed dials are set to pick up a VOIP trunk line. When we move to the new building we will have a PRI going directly into the asterisk box, and a channelized T1 connection between the Norstar system and the Asterisk box. We're only going to have one "real" phone line in the building, with everything else going over VOIP to a colocation place downtown.
Biggest problems with Asterisk (for us) seem to be with VOIP phones, not VOIP calls. Since we're using our regular Norstar system we avoid most of these issues but we are slowly moving to VOIP phones to replace the KSU since we want (much) tighter integration of the phones and computers. You pretty much require end-to-end QoS though for guaranteed reliability and clarity of calls. We do pretty go with having QoS working on both ends of the data T1 such that it's not possible to fill the pipe and cause havoc.
Asterisk is really becoming VERY stable over the past few weeks -- I think there are under 8 bugs open in the bugtracker which are preventing 1.0 stable. (yes I realize how funny that sounds)
I prefer Psi to GAIM or Kopete or anything else so far. Yes it's Jabber but it works the way the old ICQ client worked before they went hog-wild with "features". And it's multiplatform: Win32/Linux/Mac.
And I thought I had problems dropping a normal jigsaw puzzle piece on the carpet before...
CompactFlash has a couple of access modes. ATA is just one of them. There are electrical connections to allow it to be accessed as "raw" memory too.
Ahh yes that is right... you could label them your choice of data, stack and/or code. Now I suppose my question is -- why would you have a code page you don't want to execute? Wouldn't it just be a data page then?
I thought you could already set pages as nonexecutable since the 80386 -- did they remove this?
Actually knoppix would be a bad idea for day to day use -- it's quite slow.
Why not just install normally, don't alter the boot record and create a boot CD that boots the partition as /? My experience is with Slackware and this would be trivial to do -- instead of coming up with a prompt just mount the partition and run with it. I imagine it would be easy for other distro as well, and then at least you'd be running at top speed once booted.
You could do it with existing tools today -- with the slackware boot disk you would have to type "linux root=/dev/hda2 noinitrd ro" every boot -- that's where the custom boot would fix that. :-) Hell you could have it scan and select the right partition automatically.
I for one welcome our rum-running overlords.
Wow. I stand corrected. Thank you for pointing that out!
Try getting more than a couple hundred microAmps out of an ultrapacitor. The ESR on those buggers is horrendous.