(no subject)

[FoulDragon at aol.com]

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.

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

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.

>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.

>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