The psychotic rage of the long-distance sysadmin.

[reddragdiva]

Yesterday I beat my head against Debian. The testing netinst is a locked-room mystery (if your CPU is too old for the newly default 686-pae kernel, there is not actually any way to install the 486 kernel), but #debian assures me that "the testing installer is not there for installing debian." How foolish of me. (Though the netinst maintainer was interested and helpful. Actual problem was failure to detect a Geode, possibly the last pre-686 likely to be found in the wild.) Stable worked. autofs is entirely made of cocks, as is udev. This page misleads — you probably want subsystem=="block" rather than "scsi". Worked out the magickal incantations to make Samba behave. And now its hostname works on the intranet too. Fucksake. I hate computers so much.

arkady offered to glare at it — she has the BOFH superpower of glaring at machinery to make it work, probably from being a mother — but the trouble with Debian is that it glares back. Self-assured little shit.

(Installing Debian with a nonfree network card is like having a little RMS on your shoulder, lecturing you while smelling bad.)

Thanks to gmh for the spare 2GB CF cards. Though it turns out they didn't fit after all. Argh. I could yakshave my way to a CF/2.5"IDE adapter from eBay, or I could ... just ... leave it. Yeah.

Freda is utterly delighted by home-made YouTube wooden railway Thomas videos. "They're telling their OWN stories!" Four years old and she's discovered fanfic.

This has been a ridiculously exhausting "holiday." I look forward to being back at work so I can relax a bit in a CBeebies-free environment.

Comments

[hirez]

Automounters? I've never seen that working, even on real currant-bun kit.

[reddragdiva]

It "works" if you go to stupid amounts of faff to set it up by hand to work. It doesn't "work" in the sense of "plug it in and it works" unless you install an entire fucking desktop environment to do the apparently impossible bit for you.

[ideological_cuddle]

Dunno about Debian, but autofs on Solaris has been working sanely for at least the past decade. Can't help if it's not sexy enough to get it right in the open sauce world.

[reddragdiva]

How much configuration does it need for USB disks? I mostly know it as working well for automounting homes over NFS ...

[ideological_cuddle]

Different tools (autofs does remote mounts, vold does removable media), but vold has also worked Just Fine for at least a decade. In fact, I remember that when I was having difficulties with autofs at the end of last century, vold was behaving perfectly.

Mind, I haven't tried USB disks on it, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be okay so long as the filesystem were supported. This is workstation stuff rather than server stuff though, and I haven't dealt with Solaris workstations in... rather a long time.

[reddragdiva]

Yesss.

On Linux, the usual handler for this stuff is the desktop environment: you plug in a disk and it shows up at /media/[LABEL] and all is well.

I am guessing that the reason there isn't a good command-line handler is that edge cases mean it can't theoretically be handled perfectly - therefore it is better to make people write four config files to configure two daemons. But people who write DEs understand that desktop users aren't going to put up with that shit.

[redcountess]

So when are you going to buy Freda her own wooden railway set and video her stories? :-)

[reddragdiva]

She has one, which is why she's so delighted by the videos! No Thomas-specific kit though :-)

[redcountess]

Cool :-)

BTW, I've posted to LJ, forgot I had to do it here first and crosspost there.

[sidhedmento]

Where are these videos? who is the uploader?

[reddragdiva]

This sort of thing. Lots of people do them. They're ridiculously bad. But Freda was delighted by the idea that there were other people who liked doing this sort of thing.

[greylock]

That would be more enjoyable if the American kid put on Ringo Starr's accent.

Man, what kids can do today. Younger me is jealous.

[sidhedmento]

Shit yeah. William wants to do YouTube shows because he's really into iCarly. I'm trying to fob him off when he asks me to upload videos though, because I think we all know how nasty people on YT can be. He's still having trouble with the boundaries between real, really real, and suspended disbelief too. There are all these shows on Nickelodeon that are all about teenagers being famous and I think it's hugely unhealthy but William loves them :\

These train videos are cute though and not all "look at me, look at me" if you know what I mean.

I wish there was a youtube specifically just for kids.

[greylock]

I'm trying to fob him off when he asks me to upload videos though, because I think we all know how nasty people on YT can be.

I have said before, and will say it again: I am so glad the Internet did not exist when I was a kid. Seriously glad.

I wish there was a youtube specifically just for kids.

There is... YouPornKids. But it's a black marketing thing. Probably. *ugh*

[gths]

Debian is pretty much what gave me up on installing Linux on any of my own non-server kind of things.

"You should use Debian! It's the best distribution!"
"OK, I'll try it"
*Spends a week trying to get it to do the most basic of things like use the graphics card*

To be fair stuff like Ubuntu's come out since then which seems to be have less inherent sperg, plus however many other distros, but I really haven't been game to try afresh in the wake of other distractions.

[reddragdiva]

I have used Ubuntu on my laptop since 5.04 and mostly been happy, though 11.04 contains way too much interface fuckery and instability even in "classic" mode. Debian does have a live CD which also works as live USB and I know works, modulo fuckery with the nonfree wifi driver.

[pseudomonas]

Re 11.04, I find Xubuntu still reasonably clean, avoiding as it does the unity/gnome interface about which I've heard nothing but bad things. (Do feel free to delete this comment if it's getting too close to distro wars.)

[reddragdiva]

I considered it in passing. As long as I can avoid the GNOME 3 shell or Unity, I'll be sticking with that. The Debian version will be closer to stock, at which point I get to appreciate the paper cuts that Ubuntu saves me from. All software sucks.

[mstevens]

You can get Debian to use the graphics card with no software hassle, but you have to be insanely careful to pick the right one in the first place.

[reddragdiva]

Like network cards, graphics cards on Debian have a similar "little RMS on your shoulder lecturing you" effect.

[mstevens]

Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.

Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

When we have enough free software
At our call, hackers, at our call,
We'll kick out those dirty licenses
Ever more, hackers, ever more.

Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.

Lets upgrade to Nimble Nyarlathotep

[hairyears]

It needs more than glaring, even arkady's glaring: it needs cursing.

Try "Nile will use you as a Visual Basic for Applications Dev box if you don't behave" and sprinkle liberally with "Ya! Iya! La fthag'n C'thulhu" while waving an unexorcised installer disk for Office 97.

Re: Lets upgrade to Nimble Nyarlathotep

[reddragdiva]

It did occur to me in passing that Windows 2000 would have done the job without fuss ... for the moment. Pain later, though. Once Debian is working, it stays working; the painful part is getting there.

Re: Lets upgrade to Nimble Nyarlathotep

[heliumbreath]

I've found that a recalcitrant Linux install considers FreeBSD install media to be more of a genuine threat.

[sidhedmento]

btw how did you and the family fair in the End of the World riots last week?

[reddragdiva]

In Walthamstow, the "riots" were a small number of dickheads coming from elsewhere and going to the high street smashing windows and attempting to loot things. The police dealt with them reasonably efficiently and with the full support of everyone living in E17 who wasn't a dickhead.