What I did on my vacation from reality

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May 31, 2007

Damn Small Puppies

11:47 pm — Geek, Linux

So, with my new USB memory stick, I decided to throw a bootable minidistribution on it. Doesn’t really help for my Thinkpad, but the other laptops will boot off of it, not to mention it’s just a really freaking handy thing to have.

I started out with Damn Small Linux. Not too shabby, but feels more like a rescue distro than something actually usable. Then I went for DSL-N, which is its “big sister”, and we got a bit closer to the mark. My goal was basically to get Knoppix in under 1G and have some space left over.

Then I found Puppy Linux. It feels the difference between buying generic and name-brand drugs — not much. And it works great. There was a little trickery involved in booting it, though: I used syslinux instead of isolinux, so I did the same stuff you have to do to get DSL to boot off USB — basically, renaming isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. On top of that, syslinux.cfg has “PMEDIA=idecd”. This needed to be changed to “PMEDIA=usbcd”. After that, everything works flawlessly.




May 30, 2007

OMGWTFBROADCOM

I have three laptops right now. An IBM Thinkpad A50m (”crossbone” (or “bones”), which has never steered me wrong — it was unhappy with its hard drive earlier this morning, so I booted with init=/bin/sh, ran e2fsck with badblocks, rebooted, and it’s been chugging along all day per usual), a Compaq Presario V5000 (”widget”, Marie’s laptop, which has some issues), and a Toshiba Satellite which I’m too lazy to put down my cig and go look at to get a model number off of.

The Satellite isn’t actually mine, I’m just fixing it for a corporal of Marines.

Here’s the deal. (more…)




WTFMYSPACE, and fun with USB memory sticks

3:16 pm — Geek, Whining

I just found a new reason to hate Myspace: A big “ARE YOU GAY? Take our quiz to find out!” ad at the bottom. Newsflash: I don’t need an intarweeb quiz to tell me if I’m gay or not. Hell, here you go:

Are you gay?

Yes
No
I’m bisexual, you insensitive clod!
Only for Cowboy Neal

There you go. If you don’t know which one you are, you probably still think girls (or guys?) are ucky.

I know Myspace probably isn’t the only place running the ad, but were it not for Myspace, I never would have seen it.

Anyway.

I bought a 1G USB stick at Fry’s (USD $12.99, when did these things get so F’n cheap?), and I’ve been experimenting with different things to put on it, mostly live distributions. Damn Small Linux and DSL-N are the least painful so far. Eventually, I’d like to reimplement my old system of having the encrypted filesystem on it with all my private keys (SSH, GPG, etcetera)…

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