DSL Talk

i bought Adam Bregenzer's Zaurus for a wireless linux terminal, and now im going to sell it @ cost to someone else...because I don't have time to use it. And I thought I would...its an amazing little device. I feel so crappy for letting it go, but it needs to be done. This Army stuff is definitely keeping me busier than I expected with my life and, I just need to get rid of it...

Why do i not always seek to make a profit? :( sometimes it saddens me because occasionally I have money problems...well more often than not....

so im in this ultra-secretive security research group...well its not really ultra secretive, but it is a security research group, and its all well and good...and I'll be utilizing DSL a lot. probably....

As many here have seen, I built a cheap mini-itx box using hardware parts and one of the fanless 5000 boards. I find myself using it all the time these days. You guys know these are not the snappiest systems, but they do run DSL nicely.

I'm using my plexiglass computer most of the time. Just yesterday my Mother-in-Law (actually a very nice lady!) was over her and wanted to check her email. I asked her what she thought when she was done. She said, "That was strange, I am use to being able to hear the computer turning on .... It was almost eerie."

Hello DSL..izens...ians...Users...none the less. ;)

I have been offline for the majority of the past several days taking a much needed break from the whimsical world of...well, the world...I've missed our community and whatnot, so I felt I needed to come back and post regarding my reflective time, at least on DSL.

I realize that we've had several releases in the past and that is wonderful...However much ground *I* feel we have gained, I am always asked by people who use DSL locally (Atlanta) what we are doing to improve DSL and make it better for users...I hear things like "wow, 1.0 really looks cool but, I still can't use it on my machine"...why... No serial ATA Support. So I now that I am back it is my goal to facilitate an easier way of upgrading the kernel in for everyone ;p and still maintain a 50mb limit in DSL...since I have that kind of time right now.

So I got home yesterday, and my wife tells me, "I'm sorry, I washed your thumb drive." My DSL/qemu pendrive was sitting on a shelf in the laundry room in a small puddle.

I managed to pull the ends out of the little aluminum extrusion, let it air dry for a few hours, and after plugging it in, it booted! I dd'ed the contents to an image file in case I suffer a more catastrophic failure (should have done that when I got it.)

Alot is said about getting Linux more accepted among the masses. I have said before that the only way to do that is through the kids. I saw an example of that last night.

I was meeting with 3 families to give them their first PC. For those that don't know, I use a remastered version of DSL for these machines. One family came in with 4 children. These kids had already seen one of my PC's from another family that had received one. The kids ran by their dad and right up to the PC. Immediately they clicked on the wmdrawer button, brought up their favorite games, and went to town!! They were having a ball! The fact that these PC's did not have M$ on them did not matter in the least to these children. They already knew how to navigate the OS and were having fun.

Messing around with cbagger's mkwriteable script, and came up with something that allows the user to specify which directories to open up. I figure this could be useful for someone who is sensitive to RAM usage but also wants to be able to write to a particular directory or directories.

This hasn't been thoroughly tested, but it seems to work.


#!/bin/bash
ARGS=$@
checkfile=/etc/sysconfig/writeable2
grep ^all $checkfile && exit
do_bin() {
cp -srd /KNOPPIX/bin/ /ramdisk
ln -sf /ramdisk/bin /
echo "bin" >> $checkfile
}
do_boot() {
cp -srd /KNOPPIX/boot/ /ramdisk