(no subject)

[der.hans]

Am 31. May, 2006 schwätzte FoulDragon at aol.com so:

> In a message dated 5/30/2006 11:50:06 PM US Mountain Standard Time,
> PLUGd at LuftHans.com writes:
>
>> Are these the ones you want?
>
>> libx11-dev - X11 client-side library (development headers)
>
>> Distros[1] shouldn't have GCC by default. Available? Yes. Installed? No.
>> Most people don't need it. It's yet something else to remove for a secure
>> environment. Dependency checking makes it easy to install via APT :).
>> There's also the "Which GCC?" issue :(.
>
> o.O
>
> Man, things have changed a LOT.  In my day, a lot of the interesting stuff
> had to be compiled.  No "pre-assembled binaries for 12 different distributions".
> We had installpkg, never ran it again after the install was done, and LIKED
> it!  You needed gcc unless you wanted obsolete versions which probably were
> designed for a version of Red Hat (no Fedora back then either) you didn't have!
>
> Of course, in my day, there was no "x86-64" except as papers in AMD's
> offices, NTFS writes were a recipie for disaster, and XFree86 was the standard.

I remember those days, but I'm feeling much better now :).

Wanting to compile everything yourself has gotten much easier. See Gentoo
or LinuxFromScratch for that particular itch. You can actually do it with
debian/Ubuntu as well, but it seems a shame to ignore such nice packages
:).

> My primary question was actually "is the -dev package not on the CD?"  I

Wouldn't surprise me if they aren't. Only so much room on a CD. debian had
7 CDs for a full distro last I looked.

> didn't see it, frankly I didn't see a lot of -dev packages at all, and all the
> apt-gets in the world don't do anything on a machine which can't reach the
> Internet itself.

Ah, well we need to fix it not being able to access the Internet :).

You mention a dialer below. Dunno about getting it to work under
GNU/Linux. Maybe you can get GNU/Linux working in xen or something on the
m$ side and allow GNU/Linux to access the Net.

The simpler method is to get the package lists from apt, download the
packages on the m$ side, then let apt install from the m$ partition.

apt-zip - Update a non-networked computer using apt and removable media

Or acquire an Ubuntu DVD.

> The development tools are what sold me on Unix.  I put Minix 2.0.0 on a 16MHz
> 286 because I had a C class coming up the following autumn, and it just went
> from there.  It's a shame to see them disappear, like how the ROM BASICs of
> 6502-based home computers turned to the disc-loaded GWBASIC of the IBM clone,
> and finally the no-free-BASIC-whatsoever Windows system.

dev tools haven't disappeared. You just can't fit everything on one CD.
I'm amazed by how much does come on one CD.

>> Was grub able to boot Linux?
>
>> Was the m$ partition still labelled as bootable for the disk?
>
> Yes to both.  The Win2000 boot actually starts, and gets pretty far through.
> I'd suspect it might be terrified by a partition table full of references
> beyond the 132Gb limit.  I wonder if doing the registry hack to let it see to
> 160Gb will fix it.  But that means I'll never be able to clean-install 2000 to
> the drive, cos then I'll restore to a pre-patched state, the boot will hang, and
> we're stuck again, with no resource short of blasting the partition table and
> MBR.

Installing a bigger bug to get rid of a bug? There was a lady who
swallowed a fly...

How about shrinking the m$ side down to less than the limit, then at least
the start of the new partition will be in space it can see?

I'd think it would just ignore the extra partitions in a Schulzian "I see
nothing" way. That's how it normally treats ext?, reisers, ufs, etc.
partitions.

>> Wanting to keep m$ isn't obvious to me :).
>
> Well, it's a matter of sunken effort in configuring it how I like, plus that
> damned propriatery-dialer ISP (which another family member will not give up
> just yet), which mean I have to stick with Windows.  If it buys me any
> respectability points, I have OpenOffice, Gimp and Opera installed :D

:)

Run m$ from within a virtual machine on GNU/Linux :).

ciao,

der.hans
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