Modify the algorithm that allocates a file descriptor for the open() and socket() calls. Implement a per-process variable availableFileDescriptor whose value is always the number of the first available file descriptor. Make sure that when a process closes a file descriptor and or a socket, availableFileDescriptor is properly updated. Use your driver harness to compare the performance of your modified kernel with the original kernel, both for situations in which the original algorithm should work fast and situations in which the original algorithm should not work fast. You might want to remove the restrictions in the kernel on the setrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE,...) call.

I banged around on that thing for almost two weeks, variously getting a modified kernel that would a) segfault immediately, b) fail to reach the login prompt and just kind of hang out, or c) reach the login prompt but fail to allow me to log in. Turned out one of my main problems was that the sorting function I was using, an implementation of merge sort that I had found posted on a Linux kernel mailing list, was eating my nodes instead of just sorting them. It would delete one at a time in a sneaky fashion. I thought I had checked the thing, and who knows, maybe it worked it at first and then I changed something that caused it to grow an appetite for my struct type. At any rate, I replaced the function with my own implementation of selection sort since it was quick and easy to implement. Upon doing that, things started to behave as I expected, and it was a short road to getting my modified kernel to work properly then.

Poor Jon was sick this past weekend and so he did a lot of sleeping and sniffling. This actually worked out okay for me because, while he slept, I worked on my Linux project. He still has to go to work this week, which sucks for him, and his job is in Cincinnati, which sucks even more because of the traffic. I’m hoping he’ll be well by this weekend so he’ll be back to his usual self, plus the two of us could then go to Carly’s birthday party.

The Setup

I have Ubuntu Linux installed on one hard drive which fdisk calls /dev/hda and Windows XP installed on a second hard drive called /dev/hdb. To Grub, the mapping is as follows:

• /dev/hda1 = (hd0, 0)
• /dev/hdb1 = (hd1, 0)

This works because my BIOS agrees on this mapping.

The Mistake

After shutting down my computer, I unplugged only my Linux drive, which both my BIOS and Grub agreed was the main/first/primary drive, hoping I would somehow still be able to boot into Windows even though Grub is on my Linux drive. Alas, that didn’t work and I got some kind of “Grub configuration error” screen without seeing my Grub boot menu. I figured “oh well, I’ll just plug my Linux drive back in and boot into Windows”.

I shut down my computer, plugged my Linux drive back in, and powered on the computer. The Grub boot menu loaded again, as expected. When I tried to boot into Windows, however, it gave me a Grub Error 13. This was weird, since I hadn’t done anything to the Grub configuration. Exiting back to the Grub boot menu, I tried to load Linux. No luck, but this time it gave me a Grub Error 17. I tried following my own tutorial about error 17, but fdisk reported that /dev/hda1 was a Linux partition, as it should. What was going on?

The Explanation

Reading on the Ubuntu Forums, mbwardle wrote the following:

The error usually happens because Linux and your BIOS detect your hard disks in different orders. GRUB tries to translate between the two using the device.map file in /boot/grub/device.map, which is automatically generated. Chances are, it guessed wrong.

In my case, I have three SATA hard disks.

My BIOS sees them as:
HDD1 – 80 GB – Windows
HDD2 – 80 GB – Linux
HDD3 – 250 GB – Media

Linux sees them as:
/dev/sda – 80 GB – Windows
/dev/sdb – 250 GB – Media
/dev/sdc – 80 GB – Linux
— mbwardle

Aha, your BIOS and Grub are not necessarily talking about the same thing! This was what happened in my case. When I unplugged the Linux drive (which Grub and my BIOS thought of as the first drive) and left only the Windows drive (which Grub and my BIOS thought of as the second drive), I was left with only the second drive, but my BIOS started thinking of that as the first drive since that was the only drive plugged in. Then when I plugged the Linux drive back in, it was thought of as the second drive. Just because my BIOS changed the order, though, doesn’t mean Grub did: it still thought of Linux as #1 and Windows as #2.

The Solution

I shut down my computer, unplugged the Windows drive (the one Grub thinks of as #2), and left the Linux drive (the one Grub thinks of as #1) plugged in. I started my computer, thus making my BIOS think of the Linux drive as #1 again. I was able to boot Linux just fine from the Grub boot screen, though of course Windows was inaccessible because the drive was unplugged.

I shut down my computer again, plugged the Windows drive back in, and kept the Linux drive plugged in too. I started my computer, and then the BIOS saw the Windows drive and began thinking of it as #2, just like Grub does. Now I can boot both Windows and Linux because, once again, Grub and my BIOS agree about what order the drives are in.

Also!  I got high speed internet yesterday and now I can connect Animal Crossing City Folk to the intarwebz, so all y’all with a friend code can add me to your friend register.  Here’s my info:

My name: Sarah
City: Daplo
Code: 3051-4270-0430

I start at Hewlett Packard on May 18, so I’ll have a nice week off between graduation and working.  That’s the week I’ll be visiting families, but also I hope to hang around the apartment and play Wii games, haha.  Tonight I’ll be going over to Kathy’s to mow her yard in exchange for doing a couple loads of laundry (the new place has no on-site laundry, bleh).

Last night after I got the snazzy ‘net connection, I got my PC install of Jaunty all upgraded and now I’m using KDE 4 instead of stupid old Gnome.  I’m quite tickled with it because things work nicely and it’s all pretty and customizable.  Here’s a screenshot for you:

This goes through all the files and directories within the directory from which you run the script and chmods non-executable files to 644 (read+write on User, read on Group and Other) and executable files to 755 (read+write+execute on User, read+execute on Group and Other). If you're unfamiliar with the chmod command, you might want to read my beginning Linux guide.

There was an open-house IBM meeting today on campus to which I went. They catered Moe’s for us and students got to talk with IBM employees (managers and programmers alike) about their mentoring program, which I signed up for. I talked to several people about the idea of a summer internship, and it turns out my friend Mark works for IBM currently, doing Javascript and web stuff, and he’s going to put in a good word for me with his manager. I think it’d be hella cool to work for IBM because they seem very pro-open source and pro-Linux, which of course excites me. They gave us little tote bags filled with all kinds of neat IBM swag, too, including a beer cozy (I guess it could be used for non-alcoholic drinks as well, but no one calls them ‘Diet Rite cozies’ or the like), little notepads with ‘THINK’ on one side and the IBM logo on the other, a transparent watch that clips onto your keys and has a light, a digital clock about 1"x3.5"x1", some kind of light-up wand thingy that looks like it should be used for waving in jets, and a tape measure that goes on a keyring. I tell you, I love the little gidgets companies pass out in career fairs and similar events; they make great idle toys.

I got my first pedicure ever today; if I remember later, I’ll post photos. All you feet haters run screaming now; you’ve been warned! I’m hopelessly ticklish on my feet, I think because as a child I got glass in them after stepping on a broken light bulb. I remember laying (lying?) on my stomach on the couch, my dad holding my feet still and warning me not to move as he dug the fragments out with his pocketknife. How’s that for a pleasant picture? Yeah, so that left me with extremely sensitive feet, or so goes my theory. Anyway, when the tiny Vietnamese man (I had to ask; I can kind of tell Chinese and Koreans by appearance, but I’m unfamiliar with Vietnamese looks) was buffing the bottom of my feet, I had Jessica’s hand in a death grip as I struggled not to kick him in the face; I laughed the entire time, to the amusement of the other employees.

On a side note, I just smashed a good-sized roach crawling across the wall with my bare hand. Does that make me brave or just incredibly gross? Ssh, don’t tell Todd, or he might not find me attractive anymore.

I generated the pretty HTML version shown above with the command highlight -u utf-8 --syntax sh .bash_profile | vim -, and then saved the file that was opened in vim. Thanks to Neil for the majority of this file.

This site is dedicated to helping IT professionals compare Windows and Linux on key platform considerations such as reliability, security, and total cost of ownership.

Honestly, do you really expect a company (any company, and any kind of company) to give an impartial, unbiased comparison of itself with one of its competitors? Would you trust a comparative review of Cingular’s cell phone service with T-Mobile’s if Cingular were the author, for example? What about a printer comparison, written by Hewlett Packard, of Hewlett Packard’s printers versus Lexmark’s? Even someone whose head is completely filled and accepting of Microsoft propaganda has got to admit that this sort of thing is likely to carry a heavy slant in favor of Microsoft’s products. Any reviews or articles quoted on this site will have been hand selected for their Microsoft-favoring attitudes.

If you want a comparison between how Linux and Windows will work for your situation, there is plenty of data out there by people with less bias than Microsoft itself. In the best-case scenario, you could educate yourself about the ins and outs of both systems and then give them both a try. But for the love of pizza, don’t go basing your decision to drop Linux or take up Windows as a result of something the creators and marketers of Windows said.

As Todd put it, “There’s some dumbasses out there that would believe that [the site]. It’s worth it to them [Microsoft] somehow, honey, or they wouldn’t have done it.” That’s got to be true. Either Microsoft has seen benefits from this site, directly or indirectly, or it’s being real hopeful. My guess is that the former is true because, as Albert Einstein said, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

So what’s my view on this interview in Fortune—in which one of Sun’s business partners claims the open source community is trampling their patent portfolio?

You would be wise to listen to the customers you’re threatening to sue—they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn’t be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark.

All of which is to say—no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities—or the Fortune 500—that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet—creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

— Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog

It’s nice to see the CEO of Sun Microsystems advising Microsoft not to be a little pussy-bitch about this whole patent infringement claim.

This is, to me, Darl II: “Our precious IP is worth beeelions, and you must honor our sacred intellectual property, which is behind this curtain. We can’t exactly show you or identify it with specificity, but trust me, it’s worth oodles and boodles, and you are violating it. We just can’t show you precisely where and how. But we don’t want to sue you, so we will let you use Linux anyway, if you just sign on the dotted line and pay us for code we didn’t write but we’d like to tax because it’s winning in the marketplace and we don’t know how to make money fair and square against it.”

— Groklaw

The author of the study that Microsoft cited, Dan Ravicher, says:

“Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”
…
“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

— eWeek

Linus Torvalds responded to the claim:

“Naming them would make it either clear that Linux isn’t infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim,” he said.

“So the whole, ‘We have a list and we’re not telling you,’ itself should tell you something,” Torvalds said of Microsoft’s stance in the Fortune story. And for good measure, he added: “Don’t you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they’d just tell us and go, ‘nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!’”

— Information Week

Of course, even if Microsoft doesn’t sue anybody over these mysterious patent infringements, this kind of talk still tarnishes the name of Linux and open source software in general, which is what’s so damn frustrating to me. Pointy-haired bosses may be starting to explore outside their current Microsoft cage, catch wind of legal troubles with this hippie Linux stuff, and bail out before they’ve even begun. What does it take to constitute slander or libel, anyway?

Wait, what? What is this I’m eating? Am I eating shit?? Ugh!

No, no wait. It just needs salt.

Honestly, though, I can’t stand most unsalted foods. I like plenty of salt and black pepper on most everything I eat, thanks. I do like unsalted potato chips and pretzels, though. Heck, taking the salt off of pretzels makes them like a godsend: there’s no fat, there’s no salt, and if you aren’t on some stupid Atkins diet, there’s nothing wrong with eating pretzels mindlessly while you veg out on TV.

I used to never read blogs except for a select few belonging to people I knew because I didn’t want their feeds taking up prime real estate in my Netvibes page. However, I’ve recently discovered Google Reader and have been using the bejeezus out of it. It keeps all my feeds in a sidebar and their data shows up in the main column, as opposed to Netvibes’s setup of having little individual boxes of recent posts for each feed, with them all showing up at once. I’ve subscribed to my usual tech sites, but I’ve also been actively looking for personal blogs that sound interesting. These are the ones I have so far:

• Aneesah
• Becky
• Bubs
• Carina
• Claire
• Denise
• Han
• Jacky
• Jem
• Jordan
• Kat
• Meggan
• Melissa
• Nikki
• Roni
• Tish
• Todd
• Tracy
• Trin

I’ve been looking for pretty sites with humorous blog entries about the author’s daily life. If you have any to suggest to me, by all means, leave a comment! I’ve got it set up so that updates show up on my Google homepage so I get a mix of new entries each day from various people. Keeps things interesting.

I created a new page on 3till7 today titled What are you here for?, aimed at helping visitors that are only interested in a particular type of blog entry find RSS feeds for just those entries. I know some of my visitors care about what I’m cooking and how my classes are going, that sort of thing, but others just come here for the Linux and programming talk.

I ate at a nice Japanese restaurant tonight with Todd, Bentley, Michael, Angie, Kelly, Eric, Kathy, and Jess, as a kind of belated birthday celebration. I received more gifts, too, which was fun: a whisk from Bentley because he, Todd, and Jess are sick of my lumpy pudding; a plastic coconut bra from Bentley because, well, he’s Bentley; a funny card from Jess and promises of a geeky t-shirt that says “Mac users swear by their computers; Windows users swear at their computers” that she found online; dangly earrings from Angie, which were neat because she made them herself; and various chocolate from Kathy. After dinner, which was paid for by the lovely Todd, he and I went to Joseph Beth to use my gift card and buy 1) a preorder for the new Harry Potter book and 2) Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark. I’ve read three chapters in that so far and have been chuckling a lot.

I was surfing some blogs earlier today, trying to find new ones to read, and got annoyed by one whose author was whining about “making low A’s” in her classes. That kind of attitude just annoys me because I can imagine the person not posting that to vent, but rather to sound all high and mighty and brilliant at being dissatisfied with making a slightly less than perfect grade. Saying something like that makes you come off as an asshole. Beyond that, it annoyed me because it seemed like the person was in high school, and it reminds me of myself when I was that age. I thought it was sooo bad to make less than an A on my report card, and anything less than a B was just unspeakable–I couldn’t do such a thing. Then I got to college and learned that not everything revolves around your grades, nor are B’s and C’s so terrible. C is supposed to represent average, and if me having a social life and actually doing something other than sweating over making perfect scores means that I’m just average when it comes to grades, okay. I still love making A’s and would prefer to make them, sure, but B’s are damn good now, and I don’t want to kill myself over a C.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but the next sites I’m going to review are Amelie’s and Tracy’s. I’ve been having fun with this whole reviewing-on-my-own-time thing. It’s got all the perks of having a WPR but without the huge drawback of the pressure involved in sticking to a deadline.

A neat idea for a web app came to me earlier today, and it sounds like something I would enjoy writing in Rails, especially since I’d benefit from it. There are all kinds of calendar applications out there, but I’m one for not realizing when I need to start preparing for an event. If I had a calendar in which I could enter a deadline along with an approximation of how much time I would need to complete the project, it would be great. The app could then intersperse in my existing schedule little appointments for me to work on the project X amount of time to complete Y percent of it. I’m all the time writing in my schedule book that I have a test on one day, and then for several days in front of it, I write “study for X test!”. This kind of app would do that stuff for me, and I think it’d be pretty useful.

A nifty tool I’ve discovered in the Feisty Fawn Ubuntu update was the Disk Analyzer. It shows a directory listing and you can scan any given directory, your home directory, or the entire filesystem. It then shows a neat little pie chart showing what directories are taking up how much of your space. In mine, my music directory, for example, takes up over 90% of my home directory’s space. I’d post a screenshot but I’m on the Powerbook at Todd’s place right now.

1. Insert your USB drive and let it do its automount thing.
2. In a terminal, do sudo fdisk -l to list your partitions. A list of your partitions will spit out, and your pen drive will probably be in a section like this:
   

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/sda1               1         992      999813+   6  FAT16

   Your pen drive will not necessarily be located at /dev/sda1; if it isn’t, you’ll need to adjust later instructions to point to its location. Be sure you’re working with the right device, because if you use fdisk to delete partitions on, say, your main hard drive, you will delete your hard drive’s contents.

3. Do sudo umount /dev/sda1 (or whatever the location of your pen drive is) to unmount your pen drive so that you can work with its partitions.
4. Do sudo fdisk /dev/sda1 to use fdisk to adjust your pen drive’s partitions.
5. You’ll now be within fdisk. When my drive was scrambled, I was able to type p to show the existing partition and d to delete it. Running through this tutorial to make sure it made sense, I had to type p to show the partition table, a to make a partition active, 1 to choose the first partition, and d to delete it. If your situation is like mine, you’ll be asked to choose between several partitions; start from 1 and work through them all. Fdisk complained about the partition not starting in the right spot until I got all the pen drive’s partitions deleted.
6. Type n to create a new partition.
7. Choose p to make it a primary partition.
8. Type 1 to make this the first partition.
9. Hit enter to choose the suggested first cylinder.
10. Hit enter to choose the suggested last cylinder. This will make the partition take up the maximum space on your pen drive.
11. Type a to make this partition active.
12. Choose 1 to select making the first partition active.
13. Type t to change this partition’s file system type.
14. Type 6 to choose the FAT16 file system.
15. Type w to write this new partition table.
16. You will be dumped back out to your terminal. Type sudo mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n USB /dev/sda1 to format the first partition.

You can now remove and reinsert your USB drive because you’re done! Try going to its mount location (/media/usbdisk on my machine) and doing ls -la. You should see something like the following:

total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2007-04-18 18:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2007-04-19 08:45 ..
-rw------- 1 root root    0 2007-04-18 18:18 .created_by_pmount

Other than that, your pen drive should be empty and ready for use. :) Thanks to Pendrivelinux.com for helping me reformat my drive initially through a tutorial for how to install Ubuntu on your pen drive.

The commentary on both that post and Digg, though, has prompted me to write an article about Linux for people other than big businesses. It was the case, back in the day, that Linux was for the hacker elite, but those days are long gone. Now, you can pop in a live CD and you’re off. Most live CD’s offer an install option, so if you like browsing around the OS, double-click an icon on the desktop and it’ll install to your hard drive. When I got my new computer, to install Ubuntu, I just popped in the CD, let it boot, and chose the install option. I then sat back as it did everything for me. Oh, it asked me a few questions, such as my name, where I was located, etc., but those aren’t exactly questions that computer newbies would have trouble with. The whole thing was easy; I watched TV while I was doing it and just glanced over every now and then to see its progress. It rebooted when it finished and I was presented with a login screen. I typed the user name and password I’d chosen, and boom! I had a pretty desktop with very normal looking menus. If someone is used to Windows, they’re going to feel pretty comfortable with a distribution such as Ubuntu because the layout is easy to work with.

Ubuntu is the distribution I recommend to Linux newbies, too. It’s easy to install and it’s easy to maintain. When there are updates to the system, you see a little orange symbol in the taskbar and it pops up a little message telling you 1) that there are updates and 2) to click the orange symbol to install them. It’s as easy as that. As for applications in Linux, there is usually an alternative available; see The Linux Equivalent Project for a big list of Windows applications and several Linux alternatives.

Installing software in Ubuntu is also typically easy because it’s a Debian derivative, and one fantastic feature of Debian is apt-get:

Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, is a package management system used by Debian GNU/Linux and its derivatives. APT simplifies the process of managing software on Unix-like operating systems, by automating the retrieval, configuration and installation of software packages, either from binary files or by compiling source code.

– Wikipedia

Apt-get does not have a GUI, which may be intimidating for those new to Linux. Fortunately, there’s Synaptic, which is a GUI frontend to apt-get. You open up Synaptic, search for the application or functionality you’re looking for, and it shows a list of possible applications. Choose the one you want and click a button to install it. Some people who tried Linux several years ago, or who tried a distribution without apt-get, will cite the difficulty of installing applications as a drawback to Linux. With a Debian derivative, that’s not a concern. If you’re installing a tarball or an RPM, you might have to go out and download dependencies for whatever you’re trying to install. With apt-get, you don’t have that worry because it calculates the dependencies, gets them, and installs them for you. It’s smart about it, too, installing the dependencies before installing your desired package.

Despite the simplicity I’ve been talking about, I still hear from people that Linux is not meant for total newbs, Joe Sixpacks, average people with no computer know-how. I call shenanigans.

• My mom – Mom is not a computer person, she’s a plant person. She’d love nothing more than to spend all her free time repotting plants in her greenhouse. However, since getting internet access years ago, she has discovered the world of online plant trading. My dad maintains the computers in their house and, rather than deal with the continuous BSODs, viruses, crashes, and random, undecipherable Windows errors, he just installed Debian on my mom’s machine. She doesn’t have to deal with any of that crap now. She just clicks her little Firefox icon to surf plant web sites or her Thunderbird icon to check her mail. This is an example of the usability of Linux for one particular “Joe Sixpack,” after Linux has been set up for said user.
• My dormmates – Back when I lived in the dorm, there were occasionally issues with the residential internet service. Usually they affected everyone regardless of their operating system, but on one occasion, I was doing fine on my Linux box when my roommate on her XP system couldn’t get anything to load. I thought it was an isolated issue before our neighbors came asking if we were having internet troubles. I had a few live CD’s laying around because I enjoy trying out different distributions from time to time. I don’t remember if they were Kororaa, Ubuntu, Knoppix, or a mixture of all three. Nevertheless, I distributed them to the other girls with an explanation to pop them in their CD drive, that it wouldn’t overwrite any of their stuff, but that they would be able to get online with them. I went with one of the girls, Tiffany, to ensure things worked out. She stuck it in her laptop, booted the disc, and got Firefox up and running. Most live CD’s are set up to work with dang near any configuration, so it automatically recognized the internet connection and she was online without any hassle. I introduced her to Gaim so that she could log on to AIM or MSN or whatever and talk to people. I left her with the instructions to reboot and pop the CD out when she was done. A few days later, she brought it back to me, grateful and with her Windows install on her laptop unharmed.

It is also often said to me that getting “basic” features installed in Linux, such as Flash or MP3 support, is difficult. This is another area where Ubuntu shines, in my opinion: if you do a Google search for “ubuntu MY PROBLEM“, you’re probably going to find a solution somewhere on the Ubuntu Forums or elsewhere on the web. Searching for specific problems for other distributions, or for just Linux in general, often lead to good results, too. I’m citing Ubuntu here because I’m more familiar with it and because it’s known for its very friendly user base. There are sites such as Ubuntu Guide for how to install pretty much anything, such as Automatix2, which will let you install things like Flash with one click in a nice GUI. For MP3 support and other restricted formats, Ubuntu has a particular help page addressing that topic.

Even though such things are easy to install, it’s still raised as a complaint that they require installation at all. “Why doesn’t Linux just come with these things? They’re on my Windows machine by default.” To understand this, you have to understand some of the history and reasoning behind Linux and open source software in general. There are different ideals for Linux than there are for Windows; it’s a whole different beast.

Patent and copyright restrictions complicate free operating systems distributing software to support proprietary formats. … Ubuntu’s commitment to only include completely free software by default means that proprietary media formats are not configured ‘out of the box’. … If this seems like unnecessary work, remember that Ubuntu is limited by patents and license restrictions in some countries, which make it illegal for Ubuntu to include them.

– Ubuntu RestrictedFormats page

See also Philosophy of the GNU Project.

The bottom line is that Linux is really not that hard, even for non-geeks. I think a lot of the reports that it’s hard come from the following issues:

• It’s different from Windows. It has a different ideology from Windows and that shapes how things are in the Linux world. It’s all up in that “open source” stuff, a lot of distributions don’t include things like support for the MP3 format, and people just don’t get why that is at first.
• People have had bad experiences in the past. I have a cousin that’s an electrical engineer; he programs embedded systems all day in C. This guy is most definitely a computer geek. However, his first experiences with Linux were back in the 90’s with RedHat. He experienced firsthand RPM dependency hell, as well as a young and green Linux. For years he refused to try Linux again, sticking instead to familiar Windows. He eventually gave it another shot with Mepis and hasn’t gone back since. He and his wife, who isn’t a computer geek, happily use Linux exclusively on their home machine. Mepis worked with his wireless configuration, KDE suits him, and Linux is no longer a confusing hassle–it just works.
• Outdated information is spread. Yeah, Linux was not as sleek and user-friendly several years ago as it is today, but then again, what was? How pretty was Windows 95 in comparison with Vista? Remember the brick-like phones that Nokia used to sell, and how everyone had one? How about those old web sites with the flashing GIF images, frames, and lack of CSS? The point is, technology just gets prettier and better over time, and Linux is no exception. If you’re talking to someone who tried Linux a few years ago and getting a bad impression, you’re not getting an accurate reflection of how things would be for you, were you to try it today.
• You’re told it won’t work with your particular machine. Now that’s just crazy talk. Linux works with some of the most obscure hardware out there, often out-of-the-box. Support is continually being developed for hardware, too. When the next hot device comes out, you can bet there’s going to be a Linux solution for it. Linux worked on my old machine with its K6-2 500 MHz processor and on my new machine with its AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor. It worked on Todd’s Powerbook, dual booting with OS X. It works on an old 386 at my parents’ house. It works on my Sharp Zaurus. See Linux Drivers.

All right, that’s enough of that! I’m off to read more in Cell and hit the hay. As a side note, I think I’ve had several entries now that have “zombies” in the title.

Ooh, speaking of quizzes, Todd took one the other day that I’ve been meaning to do: “Which file extension are you?“. Très nerdy, eh?

And while I’m at this BBspot site and noticing other potentially fun quizzes…

Beyond exciting quizzes and Ruby shopping, I signed the “Novell-Microsoft deal sucks” petition by Bruce Perens, because I find the deal disgusting. The recent mudslinging by Ballmer about Linux infringing on MS patents is equally disturbing, and just increases my hate of that slimeball company even more. Show us the code, Ballmer, but that would be too reasonable. Instead, he’s probably just going to sling more accusations around and generally play this like the whole SCO fiasco, dragging it out when there is no violation, no patent infringement.

Another thing that bugs me is the talk of including proprietary drivers in Ubuntu’s Feisty Fawn by default. That seems to be contrary to the whole idea of Ubuntu, and as such it upsets and angers me. As I put on the Ubuntu Forums the other day, maybe I left Debian for this easy sell-out of a distribution too early.

While checking my site stats, I discovered I was getting a lot of hits from some MySpace profile. I checked and the little douchebag Joey from Middleboro, MA has a very familiar background image:

Screenshot of Joey’s profile.

A piece of my digital art.

I’m now reading up on preventing image bandwidth theft so that I can foil losers like this.

There are other hotlinkers, too! Mandy is using an image from my old Anita Blake fan site, I am Sofa King We Todd Did is using an image from Junk Drawer, Dan is using the same image, Heretical Johnny is using the same image, @ngle is using the same image as Joey, and there were two other profiles listed whose use of my images I couldn’t even see because their profiles are closed off! Ridiculous. I’m glad I found this, and I’m glad I followed an A List Apart tutorial last night on hotlinking prevention.