Author: VD

Interesting exchange on the DMN Daily blog. I’d link directly to the posts, except that it’s not possible.

John Chamless: Even though home-schooling has become so common as to almost be mainstream here, I am surprised at how defensive some people are about it. I’ve seen the same thing over and over with National Rifle Association members. They assume a stranger is going to judge them negatively. I wonder if they really do get a lot of negative reactions.

Rod Dreher: John, are you serious? Let me count the ways! Are you a religious nut? Aren’t you worried that your child is not going to be socialized? Are you a racist? What, are you too good for the public schools? And so forth. I suspect your in-box is going to be filling up with letters from homeschoolers who talk about the negative comments they receive. It’s funny how when lots of folks find out you’re a homeschooler, they immediately take it upon themselves to tell you what a menace to your child and to society you are. Most of them are too polite to put it so bluntly, but the message is clear. My wife and I even had one woman nearly in tears, whose opinion we had not sought, exhorting us that it was our duty as Christians to put our kids in the public schools. I’m to the point where my stock response is going to be: Who the hell asked you, anyway?

I think it’s time for homeschoolers to turn the tables. There’s certainly enough evidence of the inferiority of the government school option to justify it. Don’t you care what your children are learning? Don’t you want to spend time with them? Aren’t you worried that your child is going to be socialized into an amoral monster? Doesn’t it bother you that Marx, Hitler and Lenin were all big advocates of public schooling? Don’t you love your children enough to want the best for them?

According to Sitemeter, there were 2,000 visits yesterday on only the 12th day of this blog. Thanks for stopping by, everyone! The Truth Laid Bear even had Vox Popoli ranked in the Blogosphere’s top 150, much to my surprise. Another thing that was kind of cool was seeing that both Linux Today and Linux.org provided links to yesterday’s column on their front page; there’s also a number of Talkback responses on Linux Today which are interesting to read. One thing I noticed there that a few people who know a lot more about Linux than I do seem to have misunderstood is that I was not recommending RedHat because I think it is the best distro, I was recommending it because, as a longtime Windows user, I have seen that it works and can be installed by a reasonable Windows user with a bit of a clue.

I assume the same is true of Mandrake and a few other distros, but I don’t know it from my own experience. Nor, as a user and not a hacker, am I going to install various OSs on my system just to see which one is ideal Okay, I am thinking of messing around with Mandrake and Debian on one of my other machines and I’ll certainly offer up a report when I do so, but it’s important to keep in mind that Windows users don’t think in term of distros the way Linux users do. To them, (until a week ago, us), Linux is a single entity, and it’s important to understand that yes, you too can make the migration.

Finally, a surprising number of people don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. From Merriam-Webster:

MONOPOLY

1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

2 : exclusive possession or control

3 : a commodity controlled by one party

Does Microsoft have exclusive ownership of the only OS, desktop or browser? No. Does Microsoft have exclusive possession or control? No. Is the desktop environment a commodity? No. I have said it before and I will say it again. Microsoft is an evil and dangerous corporate empire. It is not, however, a monopoly.

No heat or stone-throwing, but five more experienced Penguin riders have recommended Mandrake 9.2 as being the easiest Linux option for beginners escaping from Windows. Also one vote for Debian, in which I’m already interested. Keep in mind that my recommendation was based on one thing and one thing only: I had it, I installed it and I got it up and running. That is the sum total of my knowledge with regards to the matter.

Among other things, Paul Krugman of the New York Times fantasizes that he’s an economist. Of course, he can’t do simple math, does not have even the most elementary understanding of how the economy works, and, like far too many left-liberals, cannot take the heat of having his words reviewed with a critical eye. His lies, misrepresentations and outright fantasies are exposed on a regular basis by National Review’s excellent Krugman Truth Squad, which has apparently caused the frightened little man to hallucinate that he’s being stalked. Eek!

Clearly the pressure of having his words thrown back in his face has pushed him completely over the edge. And now he is sad… like a little girl. Poor Paul. If he ever got hate mail one-tenth as astringent as the stuff I get on a regular basis, he’d probably cry for weeks.

Oh, I almost forgot… I’m being stalked too! Lawsy, won’t somebody please help me!

1. First, figure out what your primary applications are. For most people, this involves little more than email, surfing and word processing, in which case you’re good. If you have other, more esoteric applications which you regularly use, do a little research to make sure it, or a reasonable equivalent, run under Linux. For example, plenty of Palm devices work with Linux, but my Alphasmart Dana does not, so I’m stuck with ducking my head back into Windows twice a week to hotsync it.

2. Choose your Linux distro. I recommend Redhat 9 for those escaping out of Windows for the first time. Download the ISO files and burn the three CDs, buy it, score it from a friend, whatever suits your style.

3. Investigate support for your internet connection. Confirming specific wireless network card support is particularly important, since Linksys is terrible about identifying the differences between its models and versions. For example, versions 2, 2.5 and 3 of the WPC-11 run with Linux, while version 4 doesn’t. Version 2.5 of the WUSB-11 runs with Linux, version 2.6 does not. This is because the new versions have entirely different chipsets – they’re entirely different products with the same name.

4. Buy the appropriate card/modem, if necessary, and download the specified packages. Read the directions and the readme to determine which three packages to download, and always follow the directions precisely! Linux information is written by programmers, not technical writers, so it is usually maddeningly incomplete, but almost always precise. There is usually a reason for doing things exactly the way they tell you, though they seldom explain why or how to go about doing it. (Example – they will tell you to “install package X”; they will never say “double-click on the RPM file you downloaded to install package X”.)

5. Put the first Linux CD in the drive and restart your computer. Watch the screen closely – you may need to hit F2 during the pre-Windows setup phase in order to tell your machine to boot off the CD instead of the hard drive. Choose the dual-boot option.

6. Follow the install directions. The only real decision involved regards how to divide your hard drive partitions. I think three partitions is a good way to start – have the first (hda1) be NTFS for your Windows boot drive, the second (hda2) EXT3 for Linux, and the third (hda3) FAT for a shared partition that you can access from both Windows and Linux and use to transfer files. Since you’ll be working more in Linux, plan to devote more space to the second and third partitions.

7. Write down your passwords, both for root and your username. Remember that it’s better to be logged on as username most of the time, not root. You can give yourself root permissions whenever you need to – usually you’ll be prompted. If not, open a terminal window, type su, and you will be asked for the root’s password.

8. Restart, choose DOS, then copy the three RPM packages you downloaded for the wireless card drivers onto the third drive. Do NOT reformat the second drive, which Windows can’t read. That’s your Linux drive. Restart and choose Linux this time.

9. Now that you’re into Linux, you still need to mount your third partition so you can read it and write to it. Note that you won’t be thinking of it as D: or whatever anymore, but as /mnt/winlinux or whatever you decide to call it. It’s not too hard, here’s how.

10. Now it’s time to tackle the Internet connection. If you have a Linksys card and you went with Redhat 9, then find those three RPM packages on your WinLinux partition – just double-click on them or right-click and choose Open With, then Install Packages – and let the installer do its thing. Don’t expect any messages or confirmations, just insert your PCMCIA card when it’s done and fire up Internet / Web Browser from the Redhat Start menus. It will start Mozilla, and if it works, you’ll be online.

11. Once you’re up and running on the Internet, download Red Carpet from Ximian. This is a package installation tool that is very helpful in resolving package interdependency problems. Not all software programs are tied in with this very useful tool, but it is so useful that you may find yourself sticking with older versions simply because the new versions aren’t incorporated into Red Carpet yet. To run Red Carpet, select System Tools – Terminal from the Red Hat start menus, type red-carpet at the prompt, and enter your root password. Do your updates through Red Carpet and the Red Hat channel, not the Red Hat update agent.

12. Use Red Carpet to upgrade to the latest version of Evolution. Grab Pan, too, if you’re a newsgroup junkie. (Reader PB points out that there are over 530 Linux Users Groups where you can find help, including 45 on Usenet.)

13. If you need PDF capability, note that there’s some complexity to the installation of Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, although you can create PDF files with OpenOffice, you can’t read them. Download the acroread RPM, and follow the installation instructions. Be careful in vi, it doesn’t operate like Notepad or Word. Press i before inserting any text, then hit ESC to exit insertion mode before typing ZZ to quit and save.

14. Celebrate. You are now driving the tank.

I’m no Linux expert. I still don’t have my Java Run-time Environment working yet and there are a panoply of basic functions of which I remain ignorant. But I’m out, I’m up and I’m running, and if I can do it, you can too.

I hated everything I heard about XP when it first came out, which is why I stubbornly stuck with Windows 2000. After hearing this from reader BB today, I’m sure glad I did. This is pure, corporatist evil – it cannot be considered capitalism as the free market depends on the free flow of information.

“I’ve been building & repairing systems for about 13 years & I’m going to start migrating my customers to Linux. I read an article about the new Windows coming out next year that specified new hardware would have to be purchased in order to run it. That was the extent of the info it provided about the issue. I figured it is probably some sort of copy protection/ snoop thing. Well, about 4 months ago I had a customer come to me with 2 new Dell PC’s they wanted wiped clean & windows 98 SE put on, they came with XP. I did my usual fdisk & format of drive but every time I tried to install Win 98 during the install process it would crash out to black.

This happened every time I tried & I used the latest drive management software to inspect the drives for hidden volumes, nothing. The original Win XP went right back in. I believe Dell has already incorporated this copy protection/snoop system into the motherboard.”

Referencing point (3) below, if you’ve got one of the new high-speed 802.11g wireless cards, it looks as if there may be Penguin possibilities for you too, and sooner than expected. The company that’s leading the charge isn’t exactly an Open Source cheerleader, but the significant thing is that if they’ve figured out how to make Windows drivers work under Linux, it won’t take long for a hacker to do the same. This is potentially huge, I think.

PB writes: “Google runs on Linux… so does each and every Microsoft Server! (Akamai Linux servers are in front of every Microsoft ip address…)!”

You think that’s because NT crashes when it’s bored? Computers need love too.

16/30 157 5.23 1 2

11/26 126 4.85 1 0

09/23 064 2.78 0 1

So, I’m wondering when are all the sportswriters going to start apologizing to Rush Limbaugh? McNabb’s completion rating has now dropped to 45 percent! That’s called bench city, not the Pro Bowl. By way of comparison, another black quarterback, Daunte Culpepper, is throwing 64 percent strikes for the undefeated Purple.

Personally, I suspect that McNabb is injured. But anyone who still insists that Donovan McNabb is a top quarterback is clearly not paying attention.

40-yard completion to my WR. First and goal from the six.

5-yard penalty.

7-yard completion to my WR.

4-yard run by my brother’s RB. TD.

That’s a six-point switch. There is no justice. Not that I’m bitter….