Category: Uncategorized

All right! I finally got Fedora accessing the Internet properly through my wireless card, and it did so without using the RPM packages that were required for Redhat 8 and Redhat 9. It’s got all of the necessary drivers built in, and it turned out that it was detecting the card all along. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure what I did, other than to avoid going through a firewall on the installation. The thing is, I wasn’t using it before and I still get a message during the boot process that orinco.cs device is not present – that’s the wireless card, even though it clearly is there since everything is working fine. That is troublesome.

I’m good to go, for the most part, but I’m still not sure I want to upgrade my work machine since my grokking is incomplete. I suppose I’ll probably back up all my important files and have a go at it sometime next week. I can always drop back to RH9 if it doesn’t work out since I understand how that setup works. Well, actually, I don’t understand it, but I can make it perform dependably. That’s the difference between the Power User and the Hacker. The former can make things work, they just don’t know why. Or, as the above example shows, sometimes how.

I like what I’ve seen of Fedora. It’s a little snappier, and it seems as if the programs run a bit more quickly than RH8. In particular, Evolution doesn’t spin its wheels while shutting down. I also just DL’d the latest version of WINE and was able to run my Windows Palm Reader, which was pretty cool. If I can do the same with the hotsync software – not an option on that machine thanks to its broken USB – I’ll be very psyched.

I touched on this in my column for next week. But the raw breakdown is even more astounding than the overall numbers. You’d think that only 62 years after the Final Solution was put into action, Germans and Austrians might be a little more circumspect about their judenhassen.

A European Union poll of 7500 found that 59 percent deemed Israel “a threat to peace in the world” with figures rising to 60 percent in Britain, 65 in Germany, 69 in Austria and 74 in Holland.

I’m telling you, this War on Terror is no such thing. It is rather the beginning of World War III, which is in the process of spreading to Europe – most likely in France or Holland – long before it comes to an end in the Middle East. The sooner that our opinion elites begin to understand this, the sooner the West can go about winning it. This is a continuation of the long Western struggle against the Saracen, and its difficulty is compounded by the fact that Europe no longer consists of fractious states with the common bond of Christian culture, but is divided into three. The West now has the huge benefit of America, but America is divided into three as well. At this point, only Christian America can be counted on to support the war once its true nature becomes apparent to everyone, while Neutral and Godless America will likely still hope to avoid taking sides.

Of course, they can’t. If the jihadis are willing to kill Saudi Muslims they consider insufficiently enthusiastic about the cause, why would anyone think that an atheist American isn’t fair game for them, no matter how keen he is on understanding why they hate him?

I was wondering how on Earth Walmart could be offering Linux computers for $200. Then I saw the retail prices on what passes for standard software these days and it began to make sense. Not that you’re going to pay full retail for a new computer bundle, but still… I’m not even sure I like MS Word better than OpenOffice Writer. While the one feature that I miss since my migration is the ability to do a Word Count on a selected portion of text, I quite like the ability to save directly as a PDF.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional 2002 – retail: $270.99

Microsoft Office XP Professional 2002 – retail: $579.99

Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition 2003 – retail: $69.99

OpenOffice 1.1.0 – download time for ~ 200 megs

So maybe the MS solution makes sense if you’re still on a 28.8 modem or something, paying by the minute for your download time.

Well, the upgrade from Redhat 9 killed my Internet access. From doing some searching on the Internet, it looks like I’m not alone in this. While I’m sure there’s a workaround, this does prove that Linux remains firmly in power user territory. In the meantime, since it’s only a test machine, I’m doing a full install that will wipe out everything and let me put the Internet access together from scratch. This may not work, since the key RPM is for an older kernel – I think – but we’ll have a whack at it and see what happens. There’s certainly some research to do before I’ll dare to put it on my current work machine, which is staying with Redhat for now.

Disappointing, to say the least, but not entirely unexpected.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said of Gibson, “I think he’s infected — seriously infected — with some very, very serious anti-Semitic views.”

Mr. Foxman is a stunningly myopic man. Since he can’t seem to get it through his thick skull, let me point out that the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ IS NOT ABOUT JEWS! Except in that Jesus, a Jew, died for Jews just like he did for everyone else. It is inexcusable and incredibly short-sighted to attempt to accuse a good man of anti-Semitism who is guilty of doing nothing more than articulating the Gospels in a visual medium. Forget the very valid argument about artistic freedom – where is Mr. Foxman when Christians are defamed in what passes for art these days – if believing in the truth of the New Testament makes me an anti-Semite, well, then I’m an irredeemable anti-Semite, all my defenses of Jews and Israel notwithstanding. Do the Jews have so many friends in the world today that it makes sense to alienate their only consistent defenders? Without evangelical American Christians, who do they expect to come to their defense, French existentialists? Lesbian neo-pagan Wiccans from San Francisco?

Guess what, Mr. Foxman. Only Christian fundamentalists who take the Bible literally give a damn about Israel. Because if you don’t believe that there is a God who made a binding promise to Abraham, a God whose only son died to save the souls of men, a God who gave John a prophecy in which the Jews’ return to Israel is an integral part, then Israel is nothing but another “s—– little country”. European guilt over the Holocaust is dying with the WWII generation and in another fifty years, a Muslim-dominated Old World will be about as friendly to Israel as Syria is now. Atheist America doesn’t care about Jews anymore than it cares about Rwandans, Tibetans or Sudanese – and why should it?

Furthermore, if it is acceptable to blame Christians today for the actions of Christians 500 years ago, guess what? It’s perfectly reasonable to blame Jews for the actions of Jews 2000 years ago. Michael Medved, who is himself Jewish, understands this. “My concern is that the campaign against The Passion is provoking far more anti-Semitism than the movie itself ever could.”

Holy cats! 43 MORE minutes in the extended play version of The Two Towers. Definitely going on the Christmas list.

Tim Graham of NRO writes: This caught my ear last night on C-SPAN radio during the commute. In the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Janice Rogers Brown, the Democrats took turns denouncing Brown for her shocking statement that the New Deal marked a “socialist revolution”! This is where you show them what Milton Friedman put in “Free to Choose,” that the 1928 Socialist Party platform under candidate Norman Thomas is pretty much all government reality now (and was 20 years ago).

Of course they’re denouncing her. She’s onto them and is willing to call them out on it. There’s nothing shocking about what she is saying – although if she points out that Herbert Hoover, far from being a champion of business and the free market, was also more than a bit of a socialist, I would be surprised.

Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson, urging our leaders to tell the truth about the war that is being waged against America. I think he hits it almost perfectly, except that the form of violent expansionist Islam that has declared war on the West is not only in the Middle East. It is also present in America, and is very strong and vocal in Europe, especially in the UK.

My biggest concern is that our leadership cannot tell the truth that will set us free, because doing so would reveal the depths to which our government is also involved in its own war against the American people. I hope this is not the case, but there are some troubling signs that indicate it is possible.

It’s somewhat intriguing to follow Ruby’s ongoing dating disaster. Needless to say, it’s not hard to see why she’s still single. But speaking as a guy who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the world of the young, upwardly mobile male and his pretentious imitators, let me point out a few things:

1) If a guy initiates talk about his flashy car, but isn’t driving it that night for whatever reason, he’s probably full of it. If, however, you ask him what kind of car he drives out of the blue and he simply answers Porsche 911 or whatever, he’s probably telling the truth. Caveat – up North, no one drives their sports car in the winter. If he uses the phrase “winter car”, then he may well have cool summer car.

2) No one who actually wears Armani tells you about it. And if you can’t tell, what do you care anyhow? Besides, there’s six or seven different types of Armani. Emporio ain’t Alta Moda.

3) People who actually work for secret government agencies don’t ever tell you that, especially not in a bar. They’re more likely to tell you that they’re computer salesmen. Or accountants.

4) Guys who talk about money but don’t actually have much tend to carry a lot of cash around. The wealthiest guy I ever knew never had a dime on him.

5) There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a gold-digger, anymore than preferring to date handsome or intelligent men. But don’t be shocked when you get worked yourself by someone you were trying to work. Rich guys can spot your kind a mile away, and so can their imitators. Remember, if Daddy was smart enough to earn millions, Junior probably isn’t as dumb as he likes to act.

Reader FZ agrees that Linux is not yet ready for the casual computer user and writes:

“OK, I decided that I needed a way to easily copy files between Windows XP and Red Hat 9 for the occasions when I couldn’t do something on Linux. My WinXP was partitioned as FAT32. Should be easy, right? Solution was simple, given 2.5 hours of head scratching. However, it was not documented in any of the books. None of the books documents the User-accessable System Tools–>Disk Management tool that would allow me to mount/unmount the Windows C: disk partition from my non-admin (in other words, not the root) account. None of the books documented the syntax of the command that I would have to add to the /etc/fstab file.

OK, since I have a little experience, I could puzzle this all out. Now, as a non-admin (non-root) user, I can go to the Disk Management GUI, select the “/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk” choice, click the mount button, and have a new clickable “c_disk” icon show on my desktop. Double-click on it and the Nautilus file manager lets me read/write to my WinXP C: disk. Something that you really need when you are migrating, right? Should be simple, right?

Sigh…Here’s the change I had to make –Following stanza was added to etc/fstab to allow user mounting/umounting of the Windows C: Disk to permit interchange of files from Win to Lin and vice-versa:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk vfat noauto,user 0 0

Right – the Disk Management program that shows up on the Start (Red Hat)/System Tools menu is useless. What you have to do is edit the text file fstab, which is found in the /etc directory. To do this:

1. Run System Tools/Terminal. Type “su”. Then type in your password.

2. Type “gedit /etc/fstab”

3. Add the line beginning /dev/hda…. Use one of the examples below, depending on whether your Windows file system is NTFS or VFAT. You should know which you’ve got from having run the Disk Druid partitioning program during your installation.

4. Restart. There may be a better way to run fstab, but I don’t know how.

5. /mnt/windows (assuming you went with the /dev/hda2 approach below) will be where your old drive C is found.

I have three partitions, since my Windows disk was originally formatted as NTFS – unlike VFAT, you can only read the files there, you can’t write/save onto it from Linux – which looks as follows:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/winntfs ntfs ro,users,exec,uid=500,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

/dev/hda2 /mnt/windows vfat auto,umask=0 0 0

Really bloody intuitive, isn’t it! Notice that I’ve got my hard drives mounting automatically, whereas FZ does not. Mounting means that they’re available for Linux to read from and write to, unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t mount all possible hard drives, CD-Rom drives and floppy drives unless you tell it to do so. It’s not hard, but you do have to know two things. First that you have to do it, and second, how to go about doing it.

Another thing that people may find useful, in case you’re upgrading your Linux kernel, is learning how to get rid of the old one. Or, in my case, the new one, since I’m switching over to Fedora this weekend.

Run “rpm –erase kernel-2.[kernel # here]” while logged in as the “root” user. This will remove the unwanted kernel as well as eliminating it from the boot options.