Vacation, day 3
I woke up a few times overnight and was finally dragged out of bed at the inhumane hour of 8 so our new windows could be installed. Also, we got new windows. Triple-paned and etched glass and generally gorgeous, especially compared to the single-pane aluminum garbage we had before.
Anyway, with my desktop unavailable for several hours due to men in overalls climbing all over my desk, I set about finally restoring rukushio (my netbook/laptop/something) to working order. I'd previously tried a few times to install Debian on it, with little success. The attempts were thus:
1. Got a working system, except the X it used got stuck in an endless loop of setting my screen resolution, deciding it didn't support the resolution it just set, and setting my screen resolution. So the screen flickered every four seconds, and the thing was unusable 2/3 of the time. Not a good start.
2. Got a working system, with no bootloader-GRUB, GRUB2, and LILO all mysteriously failed to install.
3. Got a working system, with a bootloader. But no GUI. And no wifi drivers. And no ethernet drivers. I don't even know how this happened. Christ.
So, inspired by magical's lofty praise and lured by the promise of a permanently bleeding edge, I decided to try out Arch Linux.
Let me preface this by saying: Do not use Arch Linux. If you want to know why I say that, the statement stands. If you want to argue with me, then nevermind; use what you want.
What a pain in the ass. To be fair to Arch, I was for some reason under the impression that installing an operating system shouldn't actually require reading the manual, unless it's stage1 Gentoo (where you started with a blank system and had to format drives, copy a skeleton system, chroot, compile your own compiler, and go from there). After a failed attempt that I blame entirely on unetbootin, I got my hands on an Arch system.
It also had no GUI. Okay, well, no problem.
It also had no wireless drivers. Okayyy.
It also had no dhclient, and doesn't autodetect DHCP when you plug it into a network. Fabulous. Luckily there's dhcpcd which I'd temporarily forgotten about, and the interface "remembered" it was DHCP after that. So I sat next to our media center with some stolen cat5, installed elinks, and got to reading some instructions.
The Beginners' Guide walked me through manually choosing and installing the following:
- X.
- An X video driver.
- X mouse/keyboard drivers.
- GNOME.
- The thing that actually starts GNOME. I'd tried installing the "gnome" group of packages before reading the guide, and found out that this neither installs X (which actually draws pretty graphics on the screen) nor gdm (which effectively starts GNOME, and without which GNOME is useless). This is like installing World of Warcraft and getting everything but wow.exe. What on Earth.
- Wireless drivers. (I already knew which, thankfully, after some runaround with Ubuntu before there were drivers for my card in the kernel.)
- Wireless firmware.
- wireless_tools, which contained the iwconfig I'd been desperately looking for.
- ALSA, the sound system, which I don't think actually works yet.
And that's sort of fine and dandy, I guess, except for the package manager, which is also impossible to use without reading installation instructions.
First, the package manager (pacman) comes with a mirror list by default. Except the mirror list has every mirror commented out by default, and pacman itself isn't quite forthcoming that this is the case. So you have to figure this out, find the mirror list, and arbitrarily pick some mirrors to enable.
Now you go to actually use the thing. Here's the manpage. Notice how (a) there are damn switches instead of subcommands, and (b) none of them are named anything remotely similar to "install". To install software you actually use -S, short for "synchronize", which I guess synchronizes the state of your software with the state of some server. I can't think of a less helpful but still technically correct word to use here.
Well whatever let's type pacman -S qt. That'll install QT, right? Whoops, no, that'll actually do absolutely nothing, even though I copied that line directly from the manpage. Can you guess what the problem is?
No, really, go read the manpage. I'll wait.
...
That's right! The first time you use pacman, you have to also use the -y flag, which somehow means "refresh", which actually downloads the list of packages. Without it, pacman doesn't think any (well, many) packages exist at all. (To be fair this is somewhat like apt's "update" command, but I don't know what apt does if you try to install something without doing an "update" first, because this situation has never happened to me or even crossed my mind as a thing that can happen.)
BUT, all told, the idea is pretty cool and executed reasonably well. I'd gotten the impression that Arch's target audience was "people who use Linux because they like and know Linux", so I'm a wee bit annoyed that a decent knowledge of Linux is actually of little help for getting a working Arch desktop. Still, everything really is as transparent as they say it is.
My biggest disappointment so far is that there's not even a third-party binary build of Firefox 4 available. I have to compile it myself? Really? We can't do PPAs?
So that was my day until noon...
After that I finally defeated my long-time nemesis, floof commenting. It now works as beautifully as I'd wanted it to, and hopefully a co-conspirator will give it a thumbs up at some point-we're trying to do this whole code review thing. I may give floof a break for a day or two, too, so I can work on these other things that have been collecting dust.
I fixed veekun's page caching woes once and for all (I think!), by combining memcached and zlib. I only pushed the fix an hour ago, but I've completely stopped getting timeout error emails, which is fantastic. This problem has been haunting me for ages and I really hope it's over with now argh.
I went over the listening part of the last JLPT practice test I took, with answer key in hand, trying to make sense of it. Some of it is better, but an alarming amount is not, no matter how many times I listen. The worst part about this is definitely not being able to copy/paste into a dictionary, or even know if I'm mishearing a word. I'm not done with this yet, and I have a bunch of Japanese Pokémon episodes to try listening to for practice, but I'm a wee bit concerned about how well I'll do on the real test.
And, last but not least, mel has begun Every Single Pokémon 2, and is taking sponsorships for individual Pokémon to help pay for the absurd amount of time it'll take. (I wrote the little tracker app and have been paranoid all day that it'll break and screw up money for everyone, but it seems fine so far, hooray.)
HERE IS AN AD
Anyway, with my desktop unavailable for several hours due to men in overalls climbing all over my desk, I set about finally restoring rukushio (my netbook/laptop/something) to working order. I'd previously tried a few times to install Debian on it, with little success. The attempts were thus:
1. Got a working system, except the X it used got stuck in an endless loop of setting my screen resolution, deciding it didn't support the resolution it just set, and setting my screen resolution. So the screen flickered every four seconds, and the thing was unusable 2/3 of the time. Not a good start.
2. Got a working system, with no bootloader-GRUB, GRUB2, and LILO all mysteriously failed to install.
3. Got a working system, with a bootloader. But no GUI. And no wifi drivers. And no ethernet drivers. I don't even know how this happened. Christ.
So, inspired by magical's lofty praise and lured by the promise of a permanently bleeding edge, I decided to try out Arch Linux.
Let me preface this by saying: Do not use Arch Linux. If you want to know why I say that, the statement stands. If you want to argue with me, then nevermind; use what you want.
What a pain in the ass. To be fair to Arch, I was for some reason under the impression that installing an operating system shouldn't actually require reading the manual, unless it's stage1 Gentoo (where you started with a blank system and had to format drives, copy a skeleton system, chroot, compile your own compiler, and go from there). After a failed attempt that I blame entirely on unetbootin, I got my hands on an Arch system.
It also had no GUI. Okay, well, no problem.
It also had no wireless drivers. Okayyy.
It also had no dhclient, and doesn't autodetect DHCP when you plug it into a network. Fabulous. Luckily there's dhcpcd which I'd temporarily forgotten about, and the interface "remembered" it was DHCP after that. So I sat next to our media center with some stolen cat5, installed elinks, and got to reading some instructions.
The Beginners' Guide walked me through manually choosing and installing the following:
- X.
- An X video driver.
- X mouse/keyboard drivers.
- GNOME.
- The thing that actually starts GNOME. I'd tried installing the "gnome" group of packages before reading the guide, and found out that this neither installs X (which actually draws pretty graphics on the screen) nor gdm (which effectively starts GNOME, and without which GNOME is useless). This is like installing World of Warcraft and getting everything but wow.exe. What on Earth.
- Wireless drivers. (I already knew which, thankfully, after some runaround with Ubuntu before there were drivers for my card in the kernel.)
- Wireless firmware.
- wireless_tools, which contained the iwconfig I'd been desperately looking for.
- ALSA, the sound system, which I don't think actually works yet.
And that's sort of fine and dandy, I guess, except for the package manager, which is also impossible to use without reading installation instructions.
First, the package manager (pacman) comes with a mirror list by default. Except the mirror list has every mirror commented out by default, and pacman itself isn't quite forthcoming that this is the case. So you have to figure this out, find the mirror list, and arbitrarily pick some mirrors to enable.
Now you go to actually use the thing. Here's the manpage. Notice how (a) there are damn switches instead of subcommands, and (b) none of them are named anything remotely similar to "install". To install software you actually use -S, short for "synchronize", which I guess synchronizes the state of your software with the state of some server. I can't think of a less helpful but still technically correct word to use here.
Well whatever let's type pacman -S qt. That'll install QT, right? Whoops, no, that'll actually do absolutely nothing, even though I copied that line directly from the manpage. Can you guess what the problem is?
No, really, go read the manpage. I'll wait.
...
That's right! The first time you use pacman, you have to also use the -y flag, which somehow means "refresh", which actually downloads the list of packages. Without it, pacman doesn't think any (well, many) packages exist at all. (To be fair this is somewhat like apt's "update" command, but I don't know what apt does if you try to install something without doing an "update" first, because this situation has never happened to me or even crossed my mind as a thing that can happen.)
BUT, all told, the idea is pretty cool and executed reasonably well. I'd gotten the impression that Arch's target audience was "people who use Linux because they like and know Linux", so I'm a wee bit annoyed that a decent knowledge of Linux is actually of little help for getting a working Arch desktop. Still, everything really is as transparent as they say it is.
My biggest disappointment so far is that there's not even a third-party binary build of Firefox 4 available. I have to compile it myself? Really? We can't do PPAs?
So that was my day until noon...
After that I finally defeated my long-time nemesis, floof commenting. It now works as beautifully as I'd wanted it to, and hopefully a co-conspirator will give it a thumbs up at some point-we're trying to do this whole code review thing. I may give floof a break for a day or two, too, so I can work on these other things that have been collecting dust.
I fixed veekun's page caching woes once and for all (I think!), by combining memcached and zlib. I only pushed the fix an hour ago, but I've completely stopped getting timeout error emails, which is fantastic. This problem has been haunting me for ages and I really hope it's over with now argh.
I went over the listening part of the last JLPT practice test I took, with answer key in hand, trying to make sense of it. Some of it is better, but an alarming amount is not, no matter how many times I listen. The worst part about this is definitely not being able to copy/paste into a dictionary, or even know if I'm mishearing a word. I'm not done with this yet, and I have a bunch of Japanese Pokémon episodes to try listening to for practice, but I'm a wee bit concerned about how well I'll do on the real test.
And, last but not least, mel has begun Every Single Pokémon 2, and is taking sponsorships for individual Pokémon to help pay for the absurd amount of time it'll take. (I wrote the little tracker app and have been paranoid all day that it'll break and screw up money for everyone, but it seems fine so far, hooray.)
HERE IS AN AD