Zit Seng's Superwall

The Linux kernel admits to being dazed and confused, but tries hard to continue. Unsuccessfully. One of our server died. We looked at the screen, and were amused enough that everyone (who had a decent camera phone) took a picture of the screen. The kernel spat out in its logs: “Dazed and confused, but trying to continue;  Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?” Alright, the server wasn’t really important after all, hence its death was only noticed like over 3  months later.

So, the inevitable question came when I had to re-install Linux on my PC. The PC isn’t new, but I got a new hard disk, and my old Fedora 7 was too old that the current latest Fedora 12 wouldn’t detect as a installation it would upgrade from. I don’t mind a fresh installation of Linux. It seems like a good idea to start afresh rather than let years of upgrades accumulate cruft. So, what will it be: Fedora or Ubuntu?

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I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for newbies. Although I only had a few simple struggles with my latest Fedora 12 installation, I cannot imagine how a computer newbie is going to handle such challenges. Granted, Linux is probably more suited for the “power user”, many people in Linux-land try to evangelize the idea that Linux can be used by just about anybody. To this end, I think Linux might be going in that general direction, but it’s still a long way getting there.

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Obviously this is the kind of joke only for IT people, particularly the Linux people. It’s a case of a post sent to the wrong mailing list which quickly developed into a series of hilarious follow-ups. I myself had a good laugh when I sifted through the email I received from the list this morning. Someone posted to the Fedora mailing list about the worsening mileage he was getting on his Toyota Prius. He realized quite immediately his mistake. But other funny people on the list followed-up with serious-sounding Linux advice.

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I recently attended a gathering of people who have some interests in Linux. I was quite surprised by the big turnout. I believe the organizers themselves did not think there would be such a big interest, because they had booked too small a meeting venue. The room was too small, and in my opinion, their efforts to move aside the tables did little to alleviate the congestion. I guess we all underestimated the level of interest in Linux, unless, perhaps people were there just to check out the level of interest in Linux.

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I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus from Comex last week. The 1TB model was selling at only $239 (was $309 the week before at Sim Lim Square). I had planned to get an external hard disk for my MacBook to put Time Machine backups on. Time Machine requires a separate disk to run on, and I’ve not had the chance to turn on Time Machine because I didn’t have a spare external hard disk available until now.

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Nowadays, it is not enough to just get a “best value” PC. Aesthetics have become an important factor in the overall consideration. Buyers are looking for PCs that look nice, are compact, clean design, blend in with the environment, etc. Now that PCs are so cheap, sometimes the price becomes a lesser important issue.

Here’s the PC I bought last weekend. Two sets of them actually. It was for work related purpose. I didn’t need a fast or powerful PC, I just wanted a compact box that looked nice. It cost just $599 a piece for a lowish Pentium E2160, 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA disk and a DVD writer, packed into a compact shiny black HEC casing.

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Ian Murdock came by in the past week to talk about his open source journey from Linux at Purdue University, founding the Debian project, and now working as the Chief OS Platform Strategist for Sun Microsystems. I suppose he couldn’t help sounding out some of the advantages of Solaris. Things like DTrace, Containers and ZFS are neat.

There was a passing comment about how OpenSolaris and the Indiana project was going to make Solaris more friendly. Such as having a graphical install. Oh how funny. When I installed my first SunOS 4.something over a decade ago, it was already a graphical install.

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Upgrading Linux is always an adventure. Linux distributions have clearly improved tremendously through the years, but user expectations have also increased at the same time. Once upon a time, users had to put up with repeated installations, mucking around configuration files, downloading extra bits of code, and going through all sorts of hoops and hurdles to get their Linux system going. They didn’t complain much. They weren’t the average user either, of course. Today, of course, the average Linux user is not going to tolerate that kind of experience. Users like myself, in fact, would like to draw comparisons with, say, Windows XP and Mac OS X.

Here’s my adventure of upgrading from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7. This wasn’t a fuss-free upgrade… I wasn’t expecting it to be fuss-free anyway. There are probably tons of other much in-depth articles about Fedora 7 installation, so here I’ll just highlight the interesting experiences in my adventure.

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