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Showing posts from June, 2016

Slackware Linux

One of the first Linux distributions I ever tried was Slackware , some time before the dinosaurs, circa 1995 - it was quite an adventure, since in those days, nothing worked the first time.  Yesterday, I gave the latest Slack a spin and it felt like donning an old frumpy jersey - for that comfy, warm, lived in feeling and nowadays, everything 'Just Works', TM . What hooked me, was that the ethernet port is named eth0, so all my old scripts work.  The boot loader is LILO.  The boot code is in the MBR.  The initialization system is in /etc/rc.d and rc.local works right off the bat.  SELinux is nowhere in sight.  The log files are plain text and I can watch my system with 'tail -f /var/log/messages'.  Systemd?  What is systemd??? Never heard of it, sorry... In short, everything works totally Olde Skool , the way the Fates intended and Slack is Fast . Slackware is the ultimate Long Term Support Linux, since for the better part of the past quarter century, it ha

Conventional Wisdom

Everybody knows that palm trees don't make branches, right? Uhm, yeah, well, no fine? There are many such trees actually.  This one is close to our home. If a palm decides to make branches, then there is no stopping it.  The city workers have to keep cutting the branches off, but sometimes, when it is nice and symmetrical, they let them grow. If this tree was at my old university, then I'm sure we would have used it as a catapult to shoot water balloons at passing cars.  Fortunately here water is hard to come by and it is usually too hot for anyone to do mischief outside. Have fun! Herman