I created that Howto because while a lot of people said you could, no one ever had a step-by-step for newbies. I chose Fedora because it was well-known and had the ability to load an ISO over FTP without a CD-ROM (if you notice, the system I used in that example had no CD-ROM).
When I was researching this, I got a lot of, "Buy a CD-ROM" or "Who would use a system with no CD-ROM?" To major replies spring to mind: Not everyone has unlimited income to just buy, yes, even a $30 CD-ROM drive, especially in countries where nothing technical is cheap or reliable at the same time, and two, many older laptops had floppy/cdrom ability... just not at the same time. I have two, for example. Yes, they are old.
And all the FAQ's I found said something like, "No CD-ROM? Okay, step 1, some distros have floppies, and you can use those. Step 2, download the Stage tarball..." I mean, no real examples on how to achieve that. It wasn't as easy as just putting in floppies. Most Busybox-based floppies had too old of a kernel, so they failed at chroot, or they had the right kernel, but no networking ability.
And Gentoo had given me so much in learning about Linux, I wanted to give something back. And I totally agree that Gentoo is awesome, and recommend it to anyone who wants to really get under the hood of a Linux machine.
Good idea about "Using Knoppix WHILE Gentoo is compiling," BTW... never thought of that. Thanks!:)
I once read Slashdot off an DT/80 dumb terminal connected to a 28.8 modem over Capaccess (which was then a free ISP).
More recently, on an Atari 520 STFM, using Flash!, a terminal package, connected to a Linux box via mgetty. I think it was vt52 trying to interpret Lynx. Just because I could.
Formatting hilarity ensued.
You don't even need the Gentoo CD...
on
Gentoo 2004.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I figured out a way to just use two Fedora Core 1 floppies and a live Internet connection...
I had a shop teacher who had a pair of saftey goggles hung on the wall. In the left eye, there was a nail. He used it to demonstrate that safety goggles were essential, and this pair came from a guy planing (with one of those huge machine planers) a piece of wood that somehow had a nail in it. As the board went into the slot, the nail was kicked back and shot right into his eyepiece and came within a milimeter of his eyeball, but the glasses saved him (although the impact on the goggles gave him two huge black eyes).
I was always skeptical of this model, mostly because I thought I saw some hot glue holding the nail in the hole, but the message was received.
Sadly, I am considering LASIK because of the safety glasses thing. When I wear safety goggles AND a dust mask, in inveribly fog up my glasses and can't see a thing. For some reason, the moisture from my nose travels up the mask, under the goggles, and across the lenses, making it very hard to see, especially in cold situations where the fog just stays.
It's a shame, really. I mean, the last build was pretty much a "me too" distro of OpenBSD, but if you are going to be a "me too" distro, OpenBSD is really not a bad place to start. I mean, Knoppix is one of several "me too" distros of Debian, for instance.
I did a review of EkkoBSD right after its latest release, and was a bit disappointed because their main project goal, "to make it easy to install," was completly not met... but I forgave it a little because it was a beta. But now that's moot.
I lost a computer once after upgrading memory. I installed another SIMM and upon boot, zzzzzt*BAP! The CPU actually sparked and smoked. Unplugged system. The CPU was coated with some white powder. How the hell could I fry the CPU after a memory upgrade?
Later, I found that when I had put the memory in, one of the plastic pegs that separated the mobo from the metal case fell off and the half the mobo was touching the metal case. I am not sure which short circuited first, but... game over, man. Lost everything but the hard drives, CD-ROM, and floppy drive.
I was repairing a friend's computer, a 286, back in the early 1990s. I had another 286 he gave me that I was using for parts to try and repair and "upgrade" what I could. I encountered a lot of problems, but when I was done, I had taken one old computer, one broken computer, and made the best out of parts with them. By the time I was done, it was late, and I left everything open on the kitchen table at the DOS prompt.
The next day, I went to work, discussed my success with my friend, and he was really happy about it. When I got home, I found that both systems were totally shredded. My son, age 4, had taken my power screwdriver to both machines, and all day, in the presence of the in-home daycare sitter, removed everything, and I mean everything. Diodes, chips, transistors... if it was 3-D on a board, my son had pried or ripped it off. The kitchen was littered with broken ISA cards and my son had sorted everything according to color and shape (roughly... he was 4). He proudly showed me the "bowl of chips" he saved for me.
I was livid. My son did not expect this reaction of horror and anger. I asked the babysitter why she didn't stop him.
She faced my enraged face with a classic, "Who me?" look and said (I am not kidding) "He told me you said it was okay..."
Screaming, "HE'S FOUR!!!!" didn't bring my computers back. Asking, "If he said I told him he could play with the f**king blender, would you let him do that?" gained me no fixed systems. She was so totally calm about it, and wondered what the big deal was. "You're a computer guy, you can fix it..." She even offered to buy the glue herself.
She was so fired (there were other issues as well, and this was the last straw).
I was terrified to tell my friend. I spent hours rehearsing how I would break the news to him. I initially said, "Your new machine died, and I am not sure how to bring it back." Luckily, my friend took it really well. He said after he went home, he reconsidered and decided to buy one of those new Pentium machines. I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when he added, "Oh, and you can throw away those other machines. I don't need anything off of them..."
[later I told him what really happened, and we had a good laugh]
I also got the 2gb plan this morning. I love Yahoo because I can get my e-mail anywhere that has a browser, and in my line of work, with more than three times as many features are Hotmail or AOLMail.
Yeah, and I bet you are very similar to many Slashdotters in this. I am exactly like you describe; easily bored in topics I hate, and intensely focused on stuff I love.
In school, I was always considered bright and gifted, but got a lot of comments that I never applied myself, or "reached potential." I despised that kind of comment, because how the hell would you know what my "potential" was? But I grew up in an abusive home, and to make a long and complex story short, by 18, I was living on my own.
This was my true test, and I did pretty good. I went from being essentially homeless to living with friends to getting a job, making friends with cool people, and while I can't say it's been an easy or the best life, I'd say for me it turned out pretty well. Looking back on it, college and I would have never gotten along. I have always hated structured and abstract learning (meaning "learn this way, and we won't tell you why, or how anything relates to the real world cases!"), and I got accused of daydreaming by some teachers and "asks too many irrelevant questions" by others. Guess which classes interested me?
My "self-education" led me to computers, and the drive to learn how things worked made me a better and better tech. Soon I worked at a call center, and kissed my retail days good-bye. Then I was doing QA. Then I was programming call centers. Then I was working an International help desk for a large ISP. Now I'm managing proactive QA Testing solutions that keep the Internet going for millions of people. Never had a college degree, but I have certifications and company awards on my walls. I love what I am doing.
I didn't gain anything by being an office backstabber, either. I found you gain more opportunities with friends, so I make friends wherever I go. And I have found that is the key to being successful in any career is the connections between people.
My advice to all young people of any career or life path is to make friends, be friendly and polite as much as you can, learn people's names, and never look down on anyone, no matter how "insignificant" or "a jerk" they seem. Learn from them. That may be "just the janitor" but he has keys to rooms, you know what I mean? Humans are social beings. They love attention. If you give them attention, they seek you out. And never forget those who have helped you in the past, either.
As the saying goes, "It's not what you know, but who you know."
Usually food. Usually someone takes me out to dinner, but once in a while, I get a home cooked meal. Once I got a huge pot roast for saying, "Your phone line's dead, hense, AOL cannot connect to the Internet. You say you had 5 techs tell you it was your modem string?"
Sometimes undying gratitude as well. That can go a long way. Oddly enough, a lot of time when the computer is totally hosed, I get better results. "Okay, the OS is hosed, the hard drive has 5 errors, you only have 16mb RAM on a Win98 machine, and the CD-ROM won't work. Not a lot I can do here." "Oh, I am so sorry to drag you all the way up here..."
Oh, and I have gotten a LOT of free stuff, like old computer hardware or stuff I find around the hardware.
Me: Oh, wow... an old Lava Lamp!
Him: You want it? It's yours. The bulb broke and I don't know how to get a replacement.
Me: You do know it's a normal 40 watt appliance bulb, right?
Him: Yeah... but then that's so much work...
Me: Huh...? Okay.... OMG! Is that an original Speak-n'Spell...???
I did International Help Desk for about two years with a large ISP. While I couldn't honestly say all the people in Europe were better techs than the US, with a European tech, I never had to:
Explain the concept of time zones. Mail went down in the UK at 10am. EST was 4am, and I call UUNet. The guy goes, "What do these people in the YOOKAY want mail at 4am?" It's 10am there, sir. "But it's so early in the frickin' morning! We always do our maintenance between 4 and 6." Yes, and that's 10 to noon in England. "But it's still dark out there, right?" The supervisor I demanded to speak to later told me she had to explain the concept of time zones with a flashlight and an orange.
Confused Sweden and Switzerland. Austria and Australia. "I am am sorry, sir," said the snooty tech to the head of our Australian Division on a conference call, "I show no 'Sydney' in Australia, maybe you meant Salzberg?" His response, "What are you, kid, TWELVE???"
One tech said on the conference call, "My boss said to tell the frogs to sip their wine and just wait." On the call? Two techs from Transpac. Merde.
I also got boldfaced lied to, like "Our routers don't keep logs," or "I'll call you right back." Of course, not all was rosy overseas.
We have test machines in a 3rd party data center in Frankfurt. The machine tests web cacheing, so the browser cache is measured preceisely. One day, tons of pr0n (which we were NOT testing for) started to show up in our cache, horribly skewing results. Frankfurt says, "Impossible, no one is allowed in that room! It is locked, and all entrances and exits are monitored!" But while using PCAnywhere, we watch some guy surfing pr0n. They still say that's impossible. We threaten to install a webcam. Problem ceases. Later, we find that "Locked and monitored" meant "everyone has a key, and are required to sign in and out on a clipboard hanging by the door if they access the room." Riiight!
We had a series of outages in Austria with French GlobalOne that were delayed for days because, and I quote, "The guy with the van is unavailable." You only have one van in the whole fleet? Their answer was a kind of shrug. The French tend to do this a lot. I loved them anyway.
Production servers that end up as MP3 server mirrors. Hard to do network testing metrics when half of Canberra and Brisbane are downloading pop music over supposedly restricted bandwidth.
The city: Hong Kong. The data center: leaky basement. The server racks: machines stacked atop one another, leaning against wet masonry wall. The servers: Machines that end up missing parts (RAM, hard drives, modems) after going through Chinese customs. The company branch: Out of business in less than two years.
Learning that when the Japanese say they understand, moral code forces them to say that whether they actually understand or not; apparently, it would be incredibly rude to say, "I am sorry, sir, I don't understand." This was averted by walking people though everything. This was not averted when things went down. It was like that office was terrified to reporting anything going wrong, even with normal, understandable issues.
American education has made science so boring, that the only thing that will wake people up is sensationalist garbage. Honestly, if I were to say, "Hey, we found a watery brine on Mars," to my coworkers, I'd probably get some dumb stares, a few "Uh huh..." and maybe a "That's nice."
But if I said we found evidence of Martian civilization that killed themselves because of high-carb diets? I might end up on Oprah.
The problem is the American public wants exciting news so much, they'll believe anything. I mean, look at your local news. Then look at BBC. BBC would put most people to sleep in America. Our news quality is done in Europe, but there they call it "The Sun."
A friend of mine at NASA shares this story that was going around the labs in the early 1990s.
Apparently, one of the research scientists working at a secured site. When he came to the gate and was inspected, they saw his beeper, and asked if it was a radio device. Now, on this site, beepers were allowed, and by "radio device," they really meant any kind of broadcasting or recording device. But being a scientist, he said, "Yes." And it got confiscated. He tried to reason with them, and explained how a beeper worked, but they said it was not allowed on site.
So after he passed through the gate, he took out his ballpoint pen and said into it with a stage whisper, "They got the radio device!"
The guards were not amused and detained him for several hours until some supervisors and management got it sorted out.
This reminds me of a colo we had in the Southwest where it turns out this major switching hub was actually in the basement of an old (~100 years) manor. They had all the major networks going through there. One of the exits was literally the old basement door that opened at a slant like a storm cellar. To say the place was underventilated was an understatement.
Security was a HUGE problem, too, because often techs working on the site would leave that cellar door open, and stuff would "wander." There was a series of attempted thefts that were done by someone who probably didn't know what the equipment actually was, because cables and live power cords would be cut by what we think were shears or boltcutters. $50 CRT terminals would be stolen, and the $30,000 router it was connected to would be left behind, the serial cable just dangling from a cut cord.
Honestly, how much video power do you need? I still use an NVidia 16mb card on most of my games. I only got a new FX5200 for my newest computer because it was the "most bang for under $80" that I saw. 128mb! Far out! But UT2K4 is running fine on my 64mb NVidia GForce4, which I see I can now get for about $39. Do I need to run it at 1600 x 1200? No. 1024 x 768 is fine. How finely graned do I need to see the wall, anyway? I just need to see my attackers! I don't stand around and watch the face of my assailant and marvel at the rendering detail of the nose and mustache, because if I'm that close, I think I'm already pwn3d! No no, I am a class A cowards, and I prefer to shoot at them far away, thank you, and as long as I can see them well enought to aim and fire with decent accuracy, I don't care if it's an attacker with the pixelation of a 1970s Bally Midway style Space Invader.
I'd love to see some program that does "reverse VRAM reclaiming" so those of us who don't need 128mb of video RAM power can get some of that ram back for compiling or something.
Having just had my first real taste of Gentoo, I'd like to comment on your post:
Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistakes, and so on) for a base install. Okay, it took me several days on two machines. The last (5th attempt) only took 5 hours to compile because I went from Stage 1 to Stage 3 to save lots of time. The stage 1 attempts I ran at work, went home, came back the next day, and it was done compiling in about 22 hours on a P2/Dual450/512mb RAM. KDE 3.2.1 took 44 hours to install, not including xfree86. Mozilla took 5 hours.
If you don't have a handle on the situation, it might require outside help and research to solve the problem. Which I used. Luckily, Gentoo-loving people seemingly are both educated and friendly. I had a "Gentoo buddy," and he was very helpful with good cheer once he heard I was having problems. "Oh, I know what the problem is! Nano sucks! Do this, emerge vim..."
Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones. This also includes just installing the base system. I had a problem when a package was labeled missing from the ftp mirrors (due to a misspelling. But again, Gentoo forums came to the rescue
You will be using the command line for most administration.The first thing I launch in a GUI is an xterm or something, so this wasn't a problem. What was a problem was nano saved my files only half the time, and it took an emerge vim to get an editor that worked and got my fstab fixed (actually, I used vim from a Slack-LiveCD first to get Gentoo bootable). For a hard core distro like Gentoo, I was a bit surprised vi was not part of the LiveCD, but nano was. I don't mind nano, I was used to pico because I use pine, but the random "not saving" part was irrirtating.
Community is there. Almost any problem can be found in the Gentoo Forums, and most all of them have solutions. A-men! Thank god for those comprehensive, flame-resistant forums. I got my Stage 1 attempt fixed in less than an hour.
Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices. I'd change that to "step-by-step commands for people who know what 90% of these commands mean." So when they go wrong, you can go, "Ah... all I have to do is repeat step 15a."
Because of the way you install Gentoo, you become much more familiar with the way Linux works under the hood. Ater my hassle, I may not use Gentoo. I just don't have the time for all those compiles. But you are so right on your point, and that's why I considered my install process with Gentoo, hassles and all, to be well worth my time simply because even though I knew a lot of this stuff already, I still learned a whole lot. Very educational, very forward, and support's there when you need it.
Some points I'd like to add from a newbie's POV:
Once all the fixing was done, my 2.6.5-r1 kernel on this box ran very fast. KDE was as fast as Windows 98 was on this box. Not to rag on Linux, but the GUIs are awfully slow and overhead-intensive. I am not sure if it was Gentoo or the 2.6, but KDE "feels" faster on this old box than my P4/3.0ghz with 1GB RAM does on Fedora Core 1.
As step-by step as this install was, it left out some things, l
My wife did this. She manages the IT of a small shipping company in Baltimore (25 employees). Hell, she IS the IT. And HR. And accountant... but she's the president's right-hand "man" (so to speak). She gets to telecommute a few days a week, too.
Re: Borrowed very, very heavily
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In the Chainmail supplement, you have "Hobbit," whereas in later supplements, they were called "Halflings." The best spoof I enjoyed was Phil and Dixie showing a tour through the TSR building. At one point, they stop by the "TSR legal office," and they see:
One girl saying, "Look at this circular-metal-band my fiancee gave me!" Another guy going, "How do you get circular-metal-band around the collar out?" and then lastly, someone screaming, "Hey, the phone is circular-metal-banding, anyone want to get that?"
/is still 12
D&D gave me a way out
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was one of those kids that came from a bad home, etc etc...I started playing D&D in the mid 1970s with the "Chainmail Supplement," and continued until 1990, probably about 15 years, and part way into the second edition of AD&D. People always stereotype the gamers, and I do it myself in jest, but here's what D&D really gave me:
A social life (excuses to have friends and be at their house)
A hobby (kept me out of trouble)
Statistical analysis (charts and stats)
Writing skills (campaigns)
Management skills (being a DM)
Bartering skills (Then=> "No no, the rules specifically state rust monsters only dissolve ferrous metal!" Now=> "No no, according to this contract, you have to provide us with the on site hardware!")
It also led me to gaming conventions, where I made lifelong friends who later got me jobs, helped me out of tough times, etc... And yeah, sure, I might have gotten the same thing out of being a Rotary Club member, but I didn't have the grades, and besides, they never give you a +5 dancing vorpal blade to fight that 15d8 monster... at least, anymore.
I met Gary Gyagax at Imaginecon 2000, and despite all the stuff said about him over the years, I found him personable and approachable.
I still have all my D&D stuff. It's worth over $3000 in cover price, but I think in actual current value, maybe $600 (and only because I have some first edition stuff, like the "Deities and Demigods" with Melnebonie and Cthulhu mythos in it). I can't bear to part with it because I feel I owe it so much, it's like an old friend... in several boxes... in a closet.
Man, I felt like Dahmer there, for a second.
I started gaming when churches actually allowed it in their function rooms, along with the civil war gamers and chess players. Then in the 1980s, they connected the game to some poor sucker who got lost in university tunnels or something, then it got this Satanic cult label, and then it was fun to play it because you were an outsider! Woo hoo!
I stopped gaming when I got married. I just didn't need it anymore. I now had a steady job, social life, and the game was just too time-consuming. I have run a game or two here and there for old times sake (mainly to show my teen son what it was like). Recently, I was with my son's school group at a Science Olympiad, and a girl there had a bunch of the 3rd Edition rules. I thumbed through them, and thought, "Jesus, this is even more complicated than the Slackware manual! How EVER did I memorize all those rules and terms?" She was just impressed I knew 90% of the monsters.
I can't count how many times I have been helping out people with computers and they just blurt out their passwords to me. Even if I don't ask.
Punk: Okay, you say you can't get the NVidia card to work in Red Hat. Let's go to the NVidia site and download--
Dude: My root password is money45!
Punk: [dope smack] NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!
Even back in the days I did call support for an ISP, sometimes I'd just ask their login name and they'd just blurt out, "My login is sueray22 and my password is newyork!"
Slashdot Mirror
When I was researching this, I got a lot of, "Buy a CD-ROM" or "Who would use a system with no CD-ROM?" To major replies spring to mind: Not everyone has unlimited income to just buy, yes, even a $30 CD-ROM drive, especially in countries where nothing technical is cheap or reliable at the same time, and two, many older laptops had floppy/cdrom ability... just not at the same time. I have two, for example. Yes, they are old.
And all the FAQ's I found said something like, "No CD-ROM? Okay, step 1, some distros have floppies, and you can use those. Step 2, download the Stage tarball..." I mean, no real examples on how to achieve that. It wasn't as easy as just putting in floppies. Most Busybox-based floppies had too old of a kernel, so they failed at chroot, or they had the right kernel, but no networking ability.
And Gentoo had given me so much in learning about Linux, I wanted to give something back. And I totally agree that Gentoo is awesome, and recommend it to anyone who wants to really get under the hood of a Linux machine.
Good idea about "Using Knoppix WHILE Gentoo is compiling," BTW... never thought of that. Thanks! :)
More recently, on an Atari 520 STFM, using Flash!, a terminal package, connected to a Linux box via mgetty. I think it was vt52 trying to interpret Lynx. Just because I could.
Formatting hilarity ensued.
Linux - How to Install Gentoo via Floppies and Network Only Using Fedora Floppies
Hope this eases some download woes for someone...
I was always skeptical of this model, mostly because I thought I saw some hot glue holding the nail in the hole, but the message was received.
Sadly, I am considering LASIK because of the safety glasses thing. When I wear safety goggles AND a dust mask, in inveribly fog up my glasses and can't see a thing. For some reason, the moisture from my nose travels up the mask, under the goggles, and across the lenses, making it very hard to see, especially in cold situations where the fog just stays.
I did a review of EkkoBSD right after its latest release, and was a bit disappointed because their main project goal, "to make it easy to install," was completly not met... but I forgave it a little because it was a beta. But now that's moot.
Oh well...
That's all I can think of now. I'll think of others later.
Only as root... and then you created them, so hush! :)
Later, I found that when I had put the memory in, one of the plastic pegs that separated the mobo from the metal case fell off and the half the mobo was touching the metal case. I am not sure which short circuited first, but... game over, man. Lost everything but the hard drives, CD-ROM, and floppy drive.
The next day, I went to work, discussed my success with my friend, and he was really happy about it. When I got home, I found that both systems were totally shredded. My son, age 4, had taken my power screwdriver to both machines, and all day, in the presence of the in-home daycare sitter, removed everything, and I mean everything. Diodes, chips, transistors... if it was 3-D on a board, my son had pried or ripped it off. The kitchen was littered with broken ISA cards and my son had sorted everything according to color and shape (roughly... he was 4). He proudly showed me the "bowl of chips" he saved for me.
I was livid. My son did not expect this reaction of horror and anger. I asked the babysitter why she didn't stop him.
She faced my enraged face with a classic, "Who me?" look and said (I am not kidding) "He told me you said it was okay..."
Screaming, "HE'S FOUR!!!!" didn't bring my computers back. Asking, "If he said I told him he could play with the f**king blender, would you let him do that?" gained me no fixed systems. She was so totally calm about it, and wondered what the big deal was. "You're a computer guy, you can fix it..." She even offered to buy the glue herself.
She was so fired (there were other issues as well, and this was the last straw).
I was terrified to tell my friend. I spent hours rehearsing how I would break the news to him. I initially said, "Your new machine died, and I am not sure how to bring it back." Luckily, my friend took it really well. He said after he went home, he reconsidered and decided to buy one of those new Pentium machines. I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when he added, "Oh, and you can throw away those other machines. I don't need anything off of them..."
[later I told him what really happened, and we had a good laugh]
I also got the 2gb plan this morning. I love Yahoo because I can get my e-mail anywhere that has a browser, and in my line of work, with more than three times as many features are Hotmail or AOLMail.
In school, I was always considered bright and gifted, but got a lot of comments that I never applied myself, or "reached potential." I despised that kind of comment, because how the hell would you know what my "potential" was? But I grew up in an abusive home, and to make a long and complex story short, by 18, I was living on my own.
This was my true test, and I did pretty good. I went from being essentially homeless to living with friends to getting a job, making friends with cool people, and while I can't say it's been an easy or the best life, I'd say for me it turned out pretty well. Looking back on it, college and I would have never gotten along. I have always hated structured and abstract learning (meaning "learn this way, and we won't tell you why, or how anything relates to the real world cases!"), and I got accused of daydreaming by some teachers and "asks too many irrelevant questions" by others. Guess which classes interested me?
My "self-education" led me to computers, and the drive to learn how things worked made me a better and better tech. Soon I worked at a call center, and kissed my retail days good-bye. Then I was doing QA. Then I was programming call centers. Then I was working an International help desk for a large ISP. Now I'm managing proactive QA Testing solutions that keep the Internet going for millions of people. Never had a college degree, but I have certifications and company awards on my walls. I love what I am doing.
I didn't gain anything by being an office backstabber, either. I found you gain more opportunities with friends, so I make friends wherever I go. And I have found that is the key to being successful in any career is the connections between people.
My advice to all young people of any career or life path is to make friends, be friendly and polite as much as you can, learn people's names, and never look down on anyone, no matter how "insignificant" or "a jerk" they seem. Learn from them. That may be "just the janitor" but he has keys to rooms, you know what I mean? Humans are social beings. They love attention. If you give them attention, they seek you out. And never forget those who have helped you in the past, either.
As the saying goes, "It's not what you know, but who you know."
Hasn't that base been officially declared as real, and that it has been unused for some time?
Sometimes undying gratitude as well. That can go a long way. Oddly enough, a lot of time when the computer is totally hosed, I get better results. "Okay, the OS is hosed, the hard drive has 5 errors, you only have 16mb RAM on a Win98 machine, and the CD-ROM won't work. Not a lot I can do here." "Oh, I am so sorry to drag you all the way up here..."
Oh, and I have gotten a LOT of free stuff, like old computer hardware or stuff I find around the hardware.
God, I am such a geek...- Explain the concept of time zones. Mail went down in the UK at 10am. EST was 4am, and I call UUNet. The guy goes, "What do these people in the YOOKAY want mail at 4am?" It's 10am there, sir. "But it's so early in the frickin' morning! We always do our maintenance between 4 and 6." Yes, and that's 10 to noon in England. "But it's still dark out there, right?" The supervisor I demanded to speak to later told me she had to explain the concept of time zones with a flashlight and an orange.
- Confused Sweden and Switzerland. Austria and Australia. "I am am sorry, sir," said the snooty tech to the head of our Australian Division on a conference call, "I show no 'Sydney' in Australia, maybe you meant Salzberg?" His response, "What are you, kid, TWELVE???"
- One tech said on the conference call, "My boss said to tell the frogs to sip their wine and just wait." On the call? Two techs from Transpac. Merde.
I also got boldfaced lied to, like "Our routers don't keep logs," or "I'll call you right back." Of course, not all was rosy overseas.But all in all, I loved working International.
Worst story:
My friend Jim said he had a roomate steal his $4500 Custom Fender Stratocaster for $500 worth of drugs that he blew with his friends in one weekend.
Jim said it wasn't so much that his roommate had stolen the guitar, but only got $500 for it, and then only wasted it on drugs.
And that he didn't even share.
But if I said we found evidence of Martian civilization that killed themselves because of high-carb diets? I might end up on Oprah.
The problem is the American public wants exciting news so much, they'll believe anything. I mean, look at your local news. Then look at BBC. BBC would put most people to sleep in America. Our news quality is done in Europe, but there they call it "The Sun."
What science needs is more Page 3 girls.
Apparently, one of the research scientists working at a secured site. When he came to the gate and was inspected, they saw his beeper, and asked if it was a radio device. Now, on this site, beepers were allowed, and by "radio device," they really meant any kind of broadcasting or recording device. But being a scientist, he said, "Yes." And it got confiscated. He tried to reason with them, and explained how a beeper worked, but they said it was not allowed on site.
So after he passed through the gate, he took out his ballpoint pen and said into it with a stage whisper, "They got the radio device!"
The guards were not amused and detained him for several hours until some supervisors and management got it sorted out.
Security was a HUGE problem, too, because often techs working on the site would leave that cellar door open, and stuff would "wander." There was a series of attempted thefts that were done by someone who probably didn't know what the equipment actually was, because cables and live power cords would be cut by what we think were shears or boltcutters. $50 CRT terminals would be stolen, and the $30,000 router it was connected to would be left behind, the serial cable just dangling from a cut cord.
I'd love to see some program that does "reverse VRAM reclaiming" so those of us who don't need 128mb of video RAM power can get some of that ram back for compiling or something.
Okay... that WAS geeky.
Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistakes, and so on) for a base install. Okay, it took me several days on two machines. The last (5th attempt) only took 5 hours to compile because I went from Stage 1 to Stage 3 to save lots of time. The stage 1 attempts I ran at work, went home, came back the next day, and it was done compiling in about 22 hours on a P2/Dual450/512mb RAM. KDE 3.2.1 took 44 hours to install, not including xfree86. Mozilla took 5 hours.
If you don't have a handle on the situation, it might require outside help and research to solve the problem. Which I used. Luckily, Gentoo-loving people seemingly are both educated and friendly. I had a "Gentoo buddy," and he was very helpful with good cheer once he heard I was having problems. "Oh, I know what the problem is! Nano sucks! Do this, emerge vim..."
Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones. This also includes just installing the base system. I had a problem when a package was labeled missing from the ftp mirrors (due to a misspelling. But again, Gentoo forums came to the rescue
You will be using the command line for most administration.The first thing I launch in a GUI is an xterm or something, so this wasn't a problem. What was a problem was nano saved my files only half the time, and it took an emerge vim to get an editor that worked and got my fstab fixed (actually, I used vim from a Slack-LiveCD first to get Gentoo bootable). For a hard core distro like Gentoo, I was a bit surprised vi was not part of the LiveCD, but nano was. I don't mind nano, I was used to pico because I use pine, but the random "not saving" part was irrirtating.
Community is there. Almost any problem can be found in the Gentoo Forums, and most all of them have solutions. A-men! Thank god for those comprehensive, flame-resistant forums. I got my Stage 1 attempt fixed in less than an hour.
Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices. I'd change that to "step-by-step commands for people who know what 90% of these commands mean." So when they go wrong, you can go, "Ah... all I have to do is repeat step 15a."
Because of the way you install Gentoo, you become much more familiar with the way Linux works under the hood. Ater my hassle, I may not use Gentoo. I just don't have the time for all those compiles. But you are so right on your point, and that's why I considered my install process with Gentoo, hassles and all, to be well worth my time simply because even though I knew a lot of this stuff already, I still learned a whole lot. Very educational, very forward, and support's there when you need it.
Some points I'd like to add from a newbie's POV:
My wife did this. She manages the IT of a small shipping company in Baltimore (25 employees). Hell, she IS the IT. And HR. And accountant... but she's the president's right-hand "man" (so to speak). She gets to telecommute a few days a week, too.
One girl saying, "Look at this circular-metal-band my fiancee gave me!" Another guy going, "How do you get circular-metal-band around the collar out?" and then lastly, someone screaming, "Hey, the phone is circular-metal-banding, anyone want to get that?"
It also led me to gaming conventions, where I made lifelong friends who later got me jobs, helped me out of tough times, etc... And yeah, sure, I might have gotten the same thing out of being a Rotary Club member, but I didn't have the grades, and besides, they never give you a +5 dancing vorpal blade to fight that 15d8 monster ... at least, anymore.
I met Gary Gyagax at Imaginecon 2000, and despite all the stuff said about him over the years, I found him personable and approachable.
I still have all my D&D stuff. It's worth over $3000 in cover price, but I think in actual current value, maybe $600 (and only because I have some first edition stuff, like the "Deities and Demigods" with Melnebonie and Cthulhu mythos in it). I can't bear to part with it because I feel I owe it so much, it's like an old friend ... in several boxes ... in a closet.
Man, I felt like Dahmer there, for a second.
I started gaming when churches actually allowed it in their function rooms, along with the civil war gamers and chess players. Then in the 1980s, they connected the game to some poor sucker who got lost in university tunnels or something, then it got this Satanic cult label, and then it was fun to play it because you were an outsider! Woo hoo!
I stopped gaming when I got married. I just didn't need it anymore. I now had a steady job, social life, and the game was just too time-consuming. I have run a game or two here and there for old times sake (mainly to show my teen son what it was like). Recently, I was with my son's school group at a Science Olympiad, and a girl there had a bunch of the 3rd Edition rules. I thumbed through them, and thought, "Jesus, this is even more complicated than the Slackware manual! How EVER did I memorize all those rules and terms?" She was just impressed I knew 90% of the monsters.
Punk: Okay, you say you can't get the NVidia card to work in Red Hat. Let's go to the NVidia site and download--
Dude: My root password is money45!
Punk: [dope smack] NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!
Even back in the days I did call support for an ISP, sometimes I'd just ask their login name and they'd just blurt out, "My login is sueray22 and my password is newyork!"