DSL Talk

Wife had second ultrasound yesterday... its a girl! Fascinating watching the hi-res ultrasound images. Its amazing that something so unbeliveably complex could be created in such a short time. And, boy is she cute. Time to start thinking about names now. Not long until the big day on May 25 :-)

TrainGUI is turning out to be much better than I expected. Originally I wanted a simple GUI builder that I could use to launch perl and bash scripts, but now Ive got almost a complete IDE. Still trying to figure out if I want it to produce super simple code with globals for all the controls and simple perl subs for callacks or if I want to make all the controls objects that overload the callbacks. Hmmm... do people realy want to define their own controls? Guess I'll do some more thinking. One way or the other I'll probably have a working first version out in a few weeks.

i attended the first dc404 (defcon) of the new year ('05) today and it was great. even got a couple people interested in DSL. Gave some CDs away and attempted to put DSL on some peoples usb-keys but ;p there were networking problems beyond our control.

Since friday people living in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and probably some other European countries will find the magazine LINUX INTERN with a bootable DVD with DSL (0.9.0.1) and other Linux distributions on their newsstand.

There is no sepate article on DSL in this issue, but it is used as an example to demonstrate how SYSLINUX works for booting from USB stick.

As mentioned earlier, the DVD uses Grub as bootloader which is much more comfortable than navigating through F-keys and entering cheatcodes (which is still possible). If the DSL community is interested and there is a chance of convincing the chiefs to make it the default bootloader, I will write (and document) a configuration for german and english and hope that other DSL users will translate keymaps and menu entries to other languages.

haha...my first blog post and i only really have one thing to say, DSL takes up way too much of my free time.

but isn't that a good thing...

the verdict is still out on that one.

didn't the Title sound official! i tricked yewww
everyone should upgrade to 0.9.2 ;\ and tell your friends to upgrade because we still see people with like 0.7.x CRAZY.

I just discovered Podcasts. Not sure if anyone else here's been aware of/listening to them for a while, but in case not, here's some IMHO good ones:

http://www.gdayworld.com/
http://dawnanddrew.com/
http://www.curry.com/
http://radio.weblogs.com/0141212/

In essence podcasts are MP3 radio-style (on average) recordings individuals have done, served up through blogging services alongside standard blogs, and collected in standard aggregators.

Contrary to what the name may suggest, they're not limited to iPods or anything - they're simply MP3 recordings with a new buzzword attached.

In the last few weeks, I have discovered something. Before I tell you this though, let me tell you how I came to this realization.

Over the last month or so, I have dived head first into the world of software documentation. Don't get the wrong idea, I love it! Finally I can help contribute to my favorite project, despite my lack of expert linux knowledge and programming skills. Its great.

Anyways, a lot of the individual documents are simply copied and pasted forum posts, but don't think that all I did was copy the work of others. Everything that is in the Docs I have tried, tested, learned the inner workings of, and now (for the most part) understand. This took up a lot of the time so far of my Christmas vacation.

Well, it's official. I have just completed remastering NCLB Linux to a DSL base. When you start over from scratch, you realize how much tweaking you have done in the past! I hope to wait quite awhile until have to start from scratch again! I used DSL version 0.9.1 as my remaster base so I hope nothing TOO COOL happens to the DSL base in the next several releases. :)

All my installs will be from frugal. I have made alot of little modifications to make the OS specific to my cause so many things are 'hard-coded' into the OS like having to have an /hda1 and /hda5 partition. At first I tried to avoid that but then again I knew I was only using this remaster for one specific purpose so I decided to take that route. Basically the image and backup.tar.gz will reside on hda1 while a data partion will reside on /hda5. I added commands to bootlocal so that a 'MyDocumnents' folder is created in /home/dsl, permissioned to dsl staff and mounted in fstab on /hda5. I also documented all the configuration files from all the apps that are created in /home/dsl and added them to filetool.lst so any personal settings/game scores/etc can be saved and restored. I have tried to automate as much as possible because I know that other NFP's like mine will be interested in this software and I want to try and minimize the learning curve for them to install.

Ok, I'm having fun with this:

I have a squashfs.o that works in DSL 0.9.1, and will continue to work until DSL runs under a new kernel. It DOES NOT REQUIRE A NEW KERNEL. That's right. It's just a module, and you can plug it in just like any other module.

mksquashfs seems to work just fine with no extra libs.

I'm working on an experimental proof-of-concept design for a SquashFS DSL module. It will have all the benefits of both .dsl and .uci extensions, along with a feature stolen from .deb packages, but will not occupy much RAM at all.

Essentially, it gets mounted like a uci. Since the package for this is (and has to be) a dsl, mkwriteable is already run. Once the module is mounted, it is linked into the root filesystem, its user.tar extracted into your home dir, and /sdmrc run (the feature stolen from .deb packages - controlscripts). It also has /etc/init.d/sdm-config and /etc/rc5.d/S02sdm-config linking to that - ensuring that you can have .sdm - type modules on a liveCD.

Funding is a problem that plagues many small Linux projects which are not catering to the mass First World markets. This is a universal struggle, for any software project that doesn't have a proverbial pot of gold payoff. Greed is a much stronger motivator than generosity -- this isn't meant to be a knock on humanity, I believe it is part of human instinct. We are wired for self-preservation.

As far as funding goes, the DSL project couldn't even afford its own hosting on the amount pulled in the 'damn small donation fund' -- that's despite its enormously popularity. I've really had to think out of the box to keep this thing going and in the black.

Things have been going very well recently, and Ive been having the best Christmas time in ages. My DSL laptop is running pretty smooth now, and Im carrying it about in its nice new slimline laptop bag that I got for Christmas. Only weights a little over 4 lbs all in, not bad for a freebie thinkpad thats 5 or 6 years old.

Ive been continuing to hack away at my 'traingui' perl/FLTK IDE prog during my morning and evening commute and its going pretty good. Hit a couple of fltk bugs where Fl_Text_Editor would hang on resize, but I hacked around them in the end (upgrading FLTK didnt seem to help). I reckon I might have an initial alpha in a couple of weeks once the holiday season is over.