Bolt-Bus lets me have all my toys

Be sure to use secure connections when working on an open network, kids!

OpenBSD lives

Looks like I got it working-on x86_64, not ppc64, but whatever. It's all pretty much the same anyway.

To BSD? Not to BSD.

What a disaster.

I thought I was hardcore, and I wanted to try BSD, the better-than-Linux Ur-Open-Source alternative, but I failed. (More accurately, the fact that I have an iMac G5 test machine failed me.)

FreeBSD is the most popular BSD, and therefore lies beneath my consideration. Turns out that FreeBSD does not support this computer anyway, so my elitism was accidentally justified.

NetBSD prides itself on being endlessly portable to a wide variety of processors, and such flexibility appeals to me a lot. In zanier times, I even tried to get a Slackware laptop running with the NetBSD package management, but that configuration was approximately as painful as Gentoo Linux. So I stuck with Slackware on that machine.

Ha ha! Despite running on a wide assortment of pocket watches, NetBSD does not run on this particular PowerPC (i.e., non-Intel) Macintosh. Fine. Everyone says that the truly hardcore only use ...

OpenBSD, noted for impressively oppressive security and for being the only BSD to support this computer! So I have an excuse to use "the difficult one" after all, since the other BSDs can't run on this machine. Grand.

The installation went smoothly enough, although the software mirrors tend to call these machines macppc for installation, but then label all the auxilliarly sofware in the ports system as powerpc. I was pleased how quickly packages installed over the network, and how compact even all of GNOME was.

Oh, except for two gigantic problems: OpenBSD ran slower than OS X (or Debian 5.0), and the fan made horrible noises. Online documentation hinted that OpenBSD developers new about the fan control noise in the G5, but apparently they figured that cranking the fan to the maximum speed was the safest-cum-easiest solution.

Debian it is, then. At least until Slackintosh ships with a 64-bit kernel that supports the JFS file system.

iTunes stares into the abyss

I had to quit iTunes months ago, because some update had rendered it completely unusable. Of late, a subsequent update has mostly fixed things, but it's come too late for me: I have abandoned iTunes (which I never much liked) for Vox, which at least supports the Ogg Vorbis format.

Vox does not allow playlists, though. The website promises real playlists soon, but there is a simple solution: create a new folder and fill it with symbolic links to your music.

localhost:~/Music/Voxlinks daWreck$ for file in
~/Music/*/*.{wmv,ogg,mp3} ; do ln -s "$file" $(basename $file | sed
's/ /_/g'); done

I needed several different layers of /*/ to make all the needed links, but it worked just fine, and OS X politely declined to make any links that already existed because of duplicate files or whatever. Die, iTunes, die.

Props to Debian 5.0

Yeah, sure, I love the Slackware, but the sad fact is that the Slackintosh port to powerpc (nee ppc) does not deal well with 64-bit machines. I wanted JFS support in a 64-bit kernel, and Slackintosh did not deliver. The boot setup failed, too.

Now that I have a working boot sequence, I suppose I could re-attempt Slackintosh, but Debian 5.0 is working pretty well for me so far. In the last year or so, then, I've infected 3 computers with Slackware, two with Slamd64 (64-bit biarch Slackware port-good stuff), one with Ubuntu (it was a request), and one with Debian 5.0.

Good times.

Slackware Linux and baroque partitioning

I like Linux. For my computers I especially like Slackware Linux. I have also used Puppy Linux, PCLinuxOS (from 0.92), Ubuntu (from 5.10), OpenSuSE (10.1 and 10.2), and Ututo/Gentoo (with paludis). I wandered a bit before settling on Slackware.

I learned a lot while wandering, and I concluded that to become comfortable in Linux requires a fast internet connection and the option of trying different flavors. To have Windows or a Mac OS to fall back on is also helpful.

Here is the problem: simply installing Linux requires . . . experimentation. Becoming a proficient user needs even more research and more trial-and-error. A bumpy installation can be terribly demoralizing, and a naive partitioning scheme complicates trying anything new.

So, I can only recommend a new plunge Linux to two people:

1. The victim of a Linux zealot, who will watch as said zealot performs the installation and setup
2. The patient tinkerer with a fast connection for the main computer and an extra deskop box to try Linux

Anyone else ought at least to read the rest of this post, but you have been warned.

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Slackware Linux is somewhat daunting to install. The process is aggressively text-only, and the hard drive must be partitioned (with fdisk or cfdisk) before running the setup script. To make up for these minor challenges, the Slackware installer provides more control and transparency than Ubuntu or OpenSuSE. I easily installed Slackware 12.2 onto a Pentium IV with 512 MB memory that resisted the other two distributions.

Two issues complicated the last few times I've installed Linux (Slackware or Ubuntu) for people: one because of Windows, and another related (I think) to the manufacturers of the computers.

First, impatient users get into the habit of shutting down Windows "the hard way," by holding the power button. Windows duly flags the native NTFS file system on the hard disk, and repartitioning programs then choke. The solution to this problem is to reboot Windows and shutdown nicely, and perhaps to run CHKDSK if prompted.

The second issue is related to Windows, but has more to do with manufacturers' "Recovery" partitions, which are usually invisible to Windows. I do not understand how these work, so I never mess with them. However, installing a new operating system requires new partitions, and there are constraints on where those partitions can go. For example, Windows XP must be on a primary partition on the main boot device, and only three primary partitions are allowed on each physical disk.

The point is that the presence or absence of a recovery partition affects where everything else will go, and graphical partitioners are not the most reliable. I have tried to write a serious set of rules for partitioning the way I like it, but some guidelines are the best I can do:

• On machines that also run Windows, put a medium-large partition for data right after the Windows partition - I format this partition FAT32 (vfat), and usually mount it at /data on the Linux side with the options user,users,rw. Users can read from or write to this partition from any OS. It's not very secure, but extremely helpful while switching from Windows to Linux. If you require more security, encrypt the partition with Truecrypt
• The entire Linux installation on one partition is the simplest solution, but not the best - Simplify future upgrades or reinstallations by partitioning intelligently
• In general, I like to format partitions as JFS - No deep reasons. The performance of JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS are all excellent (I'm told), but ReiserFS has an uncertain future, and XFS seems slighly less reliable than JFS.
• Always put /home on its own partition, or as a symlink to /usr/local/home -
• Make separate partitions for / and /usr/local - Upgrades are then much easier
• 10 GB is plenty for the / partition, and 20 GB can fit the kitchen sink - This computer (no KDE, GNOME, or Xfce) uses less than 4 GB of 5.5 GB on the / partition. For my parents, I barely filled 10 GB with all of Slackware 12.1 and all of GnomeSlackBuild
• If the hard disk is truly gigantic, you might as well keep /home and /usr/local on separate partitions
• Make /usr/src and /opt symlinks to /usr/local/src and /usr/local/opt - As ever, for easier upgrades and reinstallations without losing data or compiled programs
• Make /boot a separate partition of 50-100 MB - For extra security, format this partition ext2 and put the option noauto in the /etc/fstab file
• Modern computers probably require no swap partition, but put one next to a partition like / or /usr/local, so you can delete it and expand into it if desired
• Servers probably deserve separate /tmp and /var partitions - Perhaps of 100-1000 MB is size, and also for security reasons, but I have not worked seriously on a server

I have rarely partitioned two disks the same way, and I am often uncomfortable recommending Linux as a result. Generic solutions break and are difficult to upgrade; complicated schemes are painful to explain to a new user. Unless you are vert patient or willing to get a lot of help, Linux is probably not worth it.

Upgrade misery

I have learned my lesson.

After many happy months with Slackware 12.0, I grew jealous of the pretty bootscreen (idiot) with 12.1, and I tried to upgrade my hand-me down Toshiba P4 via Slackpkg. It was a disaster---the internet and (especially) Emacs were hopelessly slow, and several GTK-based programs did not work.

On the bright side, I resurrected the computer with a fresh install of 12.1, and everything is running quickly again (except Xe, but I might be better off that way). The best part about the new regime is my new partitioning scheme:

/dev/hda1 (not mounted; /usr/local from the old install) (12 GB)
/dev/hda2 /usr/local jfs  defaults 1 2 (10 GB)
#/dev/hda3 /boot      ext2 defaults 1 2 (not mounted) (50 MB)
/dev/hda5 swap       swap defaults 0 0 (1 GB)
/dev/hda6 /          jfs  defaults 1 1 (6 GB)

For one thing, I am now using JFS filesystem instead of ReiserFS, which is no longer cool. More importantly, the next time I break everything, all I need to do is reinstall to the sixth partition without touching anything else. All programs and files for this computer are on /usr/local. The directories /home, /opt, and /usr/src symbolically link to /usr/local/home, /usr/local/opt, and /usr/local/src, and only official Slackware packages install to /usr (via ./configure). Everything I compile gets installed to /usr/local, although I've kept a fair amount of extra space on the root (/) partition, just in case.