I admit it. I am poweless over technology and my life has become Windowless. I can’t seem to satisfy my urge to install operating systems on my computer. Only another geek would understand.
It started with Red Hat(Fedora Core actually) then moved on to Mandrake. Next I was putting Suse on hda7. Can you imagine? HDA7! We shouldn’t forget that hda6 is the swap partition so maybe that one shouldn’t count.
Last night I downloaded the ISO of Gentoo. Nobody uses Gentoo but I’m thinking about it because I’ve still got about 80 GB free.
After that I’ll probably try Slackware again. They say once you’ve installed Slackware you’ve hit bottom. It doesn’t even boot into X! Command line only. With a BASH shell. And you have to create the initrd.
I realize I’ve got a problem but I think I can handle it. After all, I’m using Grub instead of LILO. You don’t have to rebuild Grub every time you add a /boot like you do with LILO.
But I do draw the line somewhere. I will NOT install FreeBSD!
I wonder if there’s a 12 step?
Huh?
Comment by Donna — Saturday February 4, 2006 @ 7:47 pm
What I mean is, this sounds like Greek to me. Or is that “Geek”?
Comment by Donna — Saturday February 4, 2006 @ 8:05 pm
I’m pretty sure it’s Geek.
Comment by Don — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 12:33 am
I recognize the language and understood most of what he said, but I’m most fluent in another dialect of Geek, not quite so x-nix oriented. Talk to me about deriving classes and overriding private properties in a C++ program and I’m more at home.
Comment by Daryl — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 9:45 am
Where did you people come from? Who were your parents, and what did they do to you in your childhood to make sure that normal people have no idea what you are talking about?
Comment by Mom — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 11:00 am
I installed Slackware successfully finally. I was wrong about the initrd. You don’t need one.
Daryl: I want to write a program in Visual Basic and I would like to use a Bessel Function(besselj to be exact) and I can’t seem to find the code. It looks like Visual C++ has that in it using the math include. Is it possible to call a C++ function from a VB program? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes but I don’t know how to do it. I now have Visual Studio 6.0 on my work machine but I don’t have MSDN yet. That has to be ordered and takes about a week.
Comment by Don — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 11:02 am
Wa? I’m with aunt donna on this one. Maybe Eric can understand… and translate.
Comment by Jocelyn — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 11:28 am
Yikes, I try to stay away from that Microsoft Visual-stuff! I know you can shell an executable from within a VB program, but I’m not sure how you’d get the return back. Calling a VC++ library function from VB sounds like a stretch.
Comment by Daryl — Sunday February 5, 2006 @ 9:14 pm
I wasn’t thinking about calling a C++ library function so much as creating a DLL with C and calling that. I just don’t know how to do it.
Comment by Don — Monday February 6, 2006 @ 8:48 am
For a while I toyed with the idea of responding with a dissertation about AS/400 system internals. I’m sure I would leave you as lost as I am about your flavor of OS. Then I thought better of it.
Comment by Richard — Tuesday February 7, 2006 @ 4:00 pm
We made a 12-step for you. It may or may not work…I hope it does.
Twelve Steps for Geeks
1. We admitted we were powerless over upgrading computers—that our desktops have become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that an OS greater than ourselves could restore our Desktop sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Tech Support as we understood It.
4. Made a searching and fearless backup of our Hard Drives.
5. Admitted to DOS, to ourselves, and to another Tech Services the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have Scan Disk and Defrag remove all these defects of programming.
7. Humbly asked McAfee to remove our Viruses and Spam.
8. Made a list of all programs we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Sent an E-Mail to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would disconnect them or others.
10. Continued to use system clean-up and when we were wrong promptly delete it.
11. Sought through phonecalls and reboots to improve our conscious contact with DOS as we understood It, praying only for knowledge of Its C:\ Prompt and the power to carry out that command.
12. Having had a system reconfiguration as the result of these steps, we tried to e-mail this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our programs.
Comment by Joce and Eric — Sunday February 12, 2006 @ 12:21 pm