Recently in unix Category


Dell and Linux, Sitting in a Tree

[ rakaur on Mon Apr 07 at 11:00 AM // category: hardware, technology, unix // comments: 1 ]

Dell might be stupid, but Linux users aren’t as smart as they think they are.

Seriously, who cares what software Dell offers on their machines when the machines themselves are well below par?

-- rakaur // 2008.04.07 @ 11:00 AM

On Moving Data, Losing Data, a Short Essay on Why Finder Sucks, Deleting Data, and Gaming, Mostly as an Excuse to Use This Ridiculously Long Title

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 26 at 02:27 AM // category: apple, games, software, technology, unix ]

And so it is done. Mostly.

I gave Gentoo a big “fuck you, Gentoo Linux, you suck.” I now have Windows XP on daedalus, and it is now my gaming machine. And I am happy. This was not easy, though.

You see, being my main machine until now, daedalus had the biggest hard drive I had laying around, which is 200GiB, to store all my stuff like video and music. This was on a 160GiB partition under ReiserFS. This was bad. I had to transfer everything off my 200GiB hard drive onto various places on my network (including my mom’s computer proteus, my server cyndane, my laptop praxis, and my iPod ePod). Along the way, my entire collection of Red vs Blue and The Elegant Universe Nova series seems to have up and disappeared. I transferred it back to daedalus under Windows, it was there, and now it’s just gone like it never existed. And I am sad. I think it’s because Finder crashed a few times while relocating stuff.

And—let me digress for a moment—that’s another thing. Why does the Finder suck so bad? So far my experience has gone something like this:

So why does the Finder suck such a multitude of cocks? It sucks just as bad as Explorer, and in just about the same ways. It randomly crashes and disappears and relaunches ten seconds later. It randomly refuses to do things because “the file is in use” until you log out and back in (restarting it is not enough). It randomly refuses to do things over the network that it was doing yesterday just fine. Even if I turn on the “Prevent .DS_Store creation over network” option it STILL shits .DS_Store files in every single directory you view, and as a result my entire media partition on daedalus is infested with these. I’d expect this if I was using 10.0, but this is 10.4.6. Yeah that’s great add stupid and spectacularly useless shit like Dashboard, but completely ignore how much Finder blows.

Anyway, as I was saying.

One of the good things about having to relocate 100+ GiB of data is that it kind of sets your priorities on what you need and what you’ll never ever look at ever again ever. I wound up deleting more than half the stuff I was going to save.

So now, daedalus has XP on it, and I am playing games, and I am happy. My original plan was to install X on cyndane, and I might yet, but not until the need arises. Until then, I’ll be playing some games.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.26 @ 02:27 AM

Not So Dreamy, Apparently

[ rakaur on Sat Apr 22 at 12:01 AM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

Well, that sucked.

DreamHost uses NFS mounts for their mailing system. Because NFS is widely known for being so mind-blowingly slow that it’s nearly useless for anything other than people that get two emails a century it made moving my mail extremely hard.

This was a colossal pain in the ass. At least I can now remove mail from cyndane, which will remove about 80% of the running load and installed packages.

One down, two to go.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.22 @ 12:01 AM

Dreamy Mail

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 20 at 01:45 PM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

So, I’m trying to move my nice and new pretty mail system over to my new host, DreamHost. This makes me think two things:

I’ve been scping my mailbox for over an hour now, and I don’t believe it’s even close to being done. My main goal in all of this is, of course, to get all my stuff off cyndane, and thus off my residential cable. What I’d ultimately like to do, is get all this off cyndane (www, mail, XMPP, etc.) and put X on it so that I can put Windows on daedalus, and be able to KVM between Windows and Unix. As a bonus, I’ll still have my laptop, which doubles as desktop/Unix.

This would make me happy.

I’m almost certainly going to keep FreeBSD 6 on cyndane, though I’ve thought about Linux (only because it’s more desktop-y). I definitely wouldn’t use Gentoo, because I’ve certainly learned that Gentoo’s only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. I’d probably go with Debian if anything. However, almost certainly going to stay with FreeBSD 6.

Sounds like a plan.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.20 @ 01:45 PM

For What it's Worth

[ rakaur on Sun Apr 02 at 08:46 PM // category: apple, hardware, software, technology, unix ]

So, since receiving my MacBook Pro, I’ve touched my Linux desktop about twice. And, in that time frame, two packages stopped working, direct hardware acceleration stopped working, BMPx randomly jumps around in mp3s, Azureus crashes, and forget IM.

So, for what it’s worth, I wish I had the money to just fuck it and buy an iMac. Maybe I should see if anyone wants to buy daedalus for $900. That’s about $300 less than what I paid for it. I’m thinking of saying to hell with Linux and just wipping it and putting XP on it for games, and have my laptop for everything else.

You know how many things I’ve had to fix on OS X because they just stopped working and weren’t a result of my prodding?

Zero.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.02 @ 08:46 PM

Speaking of Mail

[ rakaur on Mon Mar 27 at 06:12 PM // category: apple, hardware, software, technology, unix ]

So, FedEx blows. When they shipped my battery, it took like a week for them to even get it on a truck to my city. From California. It seriously sat there for a week “Arrived at FedEx location, Sacramento, CA.” Then, a day later, “Arrived at local FedEx facility, Earth City, MO.” It never even left! Good job, assholes.

And now, they finally shipped my laptop, but FedEx is going to bork something. It says, all of this for today, mind you:

Look at the times. Yeah, you try figuring that out.

Anyway, in other news I finally bit the bullet and tried to set up my own mail stuff. It wasn’t so bad. I have a pretty nice setup going, using:

With lots of anti-spam, and goodies like virtual accounts, virtual domains, virtual IMAP accounts, TLS, SSL, SASL. Good stuff. Everything seems to be working okay. Now to figure out how to get my mail out of Gmail.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.27 @ 06:12 PM

On Site Issues and Past Bloggage

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 23 at 03:13 PM // category: apple, hardware, life, nikki, relationships, technology, unix ]

Ok, so, apparently there’s a markdown script for Python now. So no more ghetto PHP shit. Yay. Site should be way faster now.

These are posts I wrote in a text file while cyndane was down. Start at the bottom.

I’m so fucking sick of portage. Every time I try to do any updates, I get shit about “ARRRR ALL PACKAGES ARE MASKED!!!!” or retarded stuff like “PLEASE UPGRADE YOUR PACKAGE TO USE TOOLCHAIN.BLAH.BLAH.” What the fuck does that even mean? Seriously? If I ask anyone I get told to go to the forums and RTFM, but why should I have too? Shouldn’t this shit be working by now? How old is Gentoo again? You would think by this time they’d manage to break portage only ever other sync.

I’m sick, sick, sick to death of having to tweak every little thing, every file in /etc/portage/ every time I want to add a new package. I’m sick of hearing people telling me to stop using Gentoo, “switch to Distribution X!” Yeah, because that’ll be any better. I used Red Hat, sucked. I used Mandrake, sucked. I used SuSE, sucked. I used Slackware, sucked. I used Debian, sucked marginally less. Come to think of it, isn’t nVidia making FreeBSD drivers these days? Probably not for AMD64 though. They can’t please everyone, I guess. I refuse to use Windows, and I’m sick and tired of the file-editing-hell that is Linux.

Something tells me I’m going to be using my new laptop for a lot more than school. It makes me want to buy an iMac right now, but alas, I am poor. I’ll be paying off the laptop for two years as it is.

What the hell is wrong with guys? What makes us despise the other men our women have slept with? Why is it that we can sleep with as many girls as we want and it’s not a big deal, but when a girl sleeps with a guy it’s a point against her?

I honestly don’t think this way. I honestly don’t believe in the double standard. It’s stupid. If guys are allowed to fuck every girl they see and get away with it, then girls are allowed to fuck every guy they see and get away with it. In my mind, that’s how it should work.

But then, I don’t really believe that. That’s how I know it should be, but I still get upset when I think about my girlfriend’s past. She’s been with four guys, including me, and she’s 17. One of them was a one night stand with a stranger that got her pregnant. I know, it sounds pretty horrible, but if you knew the whole story it’s not so bad. But I still find myself thinking about it, and finding it hard to accept. When I think about the guys being with her, it just makes me want to kill them. I don’t understand why. Why do I think like this? If it was a 17 year old guy that had done four chicks he’d be famous, but why do I think like this? I know truly that the double standard is bullshit, but I still can’t help thinking this way. I know she was taken advantage of in two of the four situations, and the other two were out of love (even if a bit young to be doing so), but I still find myself having problems accepting it from time to time.

Do women think like this? Is it a turn off when you know a guy has been with a bunch of different women, or is it just something guys do, and that’s it? Does it matter if he’s just having one night stands with all of them or if he was involved with all of them? Is it just the same all around? Is a guy considered “damaged” if he sleeps around? Why are girls? Is it the physical part of being “used” because they get a dick in them? Is it the physical part of being stretched out from having sex or becoming loose or something else? Why is it okay for guys to have sex as often as they want with as many people as they want but when women have sex it’s dirty and they should be ashamed or else they’re skanks?

We have great sex. I mean, it’s really, really good, and we both enjoy it very much. But if I think of her for one second enjoying it with someone else, past present or future, it makes me sick.

I just don’t understand why I still feel like this.

So I’ve gotten in quite a bit of my orders from my loan. Half of my Apple Store order has come in (none of it useful). The iPod and backpack are both here, but obviously neither one is really useful to me until I get the MBP itself. The MBP and the extra battery have gone further into shipping delay hell, but I expected as much. It’s gone from an estimated shipping date of the 17th to the 27th. Good luck, I guess.

My new wireless router from NewEgg also came in. It’s a Netgear, WPN824. I went with Netgear this time because my Linksys turned out to be a giant piece of shit. The DHCP server on the thing never once worked. The wireless cut in and out constantly, and it would just randomly not do anything. That’s why I had cyndane doing my routing and just used the Linksys as a switch and WAP. This thing’s pretty nice though. It supposedly boosts range considerably, but I haven’t noticed anything. It’s about the same on my mom’s computer as it was with the Linksys, and I haven’t had a chance to test the range outside of my house. I’m hoping that it will be good enough so that I can sit in my backyard when it gets warm and do school work, etc. The one thing I’ve always hated about computers is that I have to be inside to use them, and I love being outside.

It’s got some nifty routing things, and you can even reserve IP addresses per MAC with the DHCP server. It has a limit of 20 port fowarding entires. Why? That shit pisses me off. There’s absolutely no reason to have any limit on it whatsoever. The Linksys was worse, it was 10. I don’t think I’ll use 20, but it’ll probably be more than 10. It’s some bullshit. Kind of making it better, it supports UPnP port mapping. So, programs that know about UPnP, like Azureus, can map the ports automatically. I don’t believe there’s a limit on this. However, I doubt seriously there’s a lot of programs supporting UPnP out there. It’s not exactly an easy thing to just toss into a program.

Another thing are the lights. It has seven internal antennas, in a dome on the top. For some ungodly reason, they decided to put LEDs on them so you know when they’re active. Unfortunately, they change configurations a few hundred times per second, and these lights are really bright. Suffice it to say it’s always Christmas at my desk now.

Also, the thing was made out to be a little box by the Netgear pictures. I figured it was no bigger than my cable modem. So I get the thing and open the box, and it’s pretty fucking huge. It’s bigger than the Linksys. It’s nicer to look at, but still massive. Ah well, what can you do.

Now I have to wait another two weeks for my real toy.

Well snap, it wasn’t the PSU. I got another PSU in there and it still made the same sound. So I got a little closer and determined it was the case fan. So I took that out and put the other PSU back in, and it started making the sound again! Somehow it burned out both fans.

Anyway, I turn it on and it won’t boot. After some fscking around, it’s pretty clear the drive is also dead. Jesus Christ, what else on this thing bit the dust? So now I have another hard drive coming, and I’ll have to reinstall FreeBSD before anything’s back up. It was my server/router/firewall, but since its death my new wireless router came in, and it has NAT/SPI, so I don’t have to worry about using cyndane to do that now. So all it’s missing is my server stuff (web, svn, XMPP, mail…). I guess I’ll take this opportunity to throw FreeBSD 6 on it. I never upgraded from 4 to 5 because I never liked 5. Hopefully 6 doesn’t suck.

So, apparently I’m screwed. There was a storm, and it fried cyndane’s PSU. I don’t know why. I have a rather expensive surge protector, and a power regulator, and everything else attached to the strip is fine, but not cyndane! When I turn it on it makes this horrible whirring sound like the fan is stuck.

So, I took it apart. The fan is almost impossible to move with my fingers, so there’s something fucked up with it. Guess I need a new PSU.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.23 @ 03:13 PM

Fuck the Skull of Portage

[ rakaur on Tue Feb 28 at 05:24 PM // category: software, technology, unix ]

What the fuck is this shit?

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "sys-libs/timezone-data" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- sys-libs/timezone-data-2006a (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)
- sys-libs/timezone-data-2006b (masked by: ~amd64 keyword)

Why would fucking timezone data be “unsupported on the amd64 platform”?

I’m going to be so happy when I get a Mac.

Fucking morons.

-- rakaur // 2006.02.28 @ 05:24 PM

Stop the Presses

[ rakaur on Sat May 21 at 11:39 PM // category: technology, unix ]

I just plugged a new USB 2.0 card into my computer. Now, brace yourself for this.

Linux recognized it, and loaded the correct driver, without me doing anything.

I’m serious, I just plugged it in and turned it on. And it worked. In Linux.

Holy Mother of Fuck.

Some other reactions:

<rakaur> i bought a usb2 card
<rakaur> worked as soon as i plugged it in
<rakaur> in linux
<harrimat> WHAT THE FUCK

Steve was just as surprised:

<rakaur> brace yourself now
<rakaur> i bought a usb2 card
<rakaur> shut off linux
<rakaur> plugged it in
<rakaur> turned on linux
<rakaur> and it worked.
<rakaur> immediately.
<sycobuny> ~
<sycobuny> !1!!
<sycobuny> 1!1
<sycobuny> WQHATHATHAT?@!?!
* sycobuny impossible!
<rakaur> with the right driver.
<sycobuny> I was totally expecting “I have discovered a cure for Cancer.” not something impossible

-- rakaur // 2005.05.21 @ 11:39 PM

Oh Portage, You Blow

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 02 at 07:03 AM // category: software, technology, unix ]

It sure would be nice if the Gentoo Portage maintainers only managed to fuck something up every other time they update some random ebuild whose failure to compile fucks over my entire system.

I swear to god I’m so sick of going to update (emerge -Dau world) and having it fail on the first or second build with some nonsensical error that results from the inept assholes over at Gentoo. The latest version of GTK has had a compile error ever since they put it in Portage, but do they fix it, fuck no. A whole shitload of things need GTK to build, and with the -D (—deep) flag on it’ll update the library before it updates the programs that use it.

Just a few minutes ago I was upgrading to the latest Portage revision (that’s bullshit too, but I’ll get to that in a second) of beep-media-player. It gets finished, I load bmp, and it gives me an error about not being able to play the song. Apparently, for some widely unknown reason, they decided to remove mp3 support by default (prententious ogg-using cocksuckers) so now I have to rebuild it AGAIN with USE="mp3". Oh, but wait, there’s a compile error in that! It tries to link to a hard coded version of the standard C++ library in /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.4/. But wait, I have gcc 3.3.5, so there’s no 3.3.4 folder, but that’s where it looks anyway, because it’s apparently HARD FUCKING CODED. The only simple way to fix this was for me to symlink 3.3.4 to 3.3.5, which worked.

And that brings me to the Portage revision numbers (the -rN at the end of version numbers). They up this number when they make a revision to the ebuild itself, while nothing actually happens to the program that would in any way concern me with updating it. It’s always nice when there’s a new Portage revision of, say, OpenOffice, and Portage decides to spend a full 24 hours upgrading it when there’s no fucking point.

It’s pretty damn bad when the maintainers of the OS can’t get something right and I have to put cheap hacks all over the place to get my system to run properly.

This is going to be a rant soon.

-- rakaur // 2005.03.02 @ 07:03 AM

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