Today I decided to try out knoppix. A couple of day ago my son told me he could not install the Age of Mythology game I got him for Christmas because he did not have enough disk space. He had already installed another Christmas present, Medieval Total War, and it requires 1.7 GB of disk space. A couple of weeks ago I bought the fedora core 1, openoffice, and knoppix cds from www.cheapbytes.com. I bought Knoppix because I heard you can boot from the cd and you can use it as a rescue disk. I booted from the cd and everything came up. Some of the plethora of open source packages that comes with knoppix is a partition magic clone and a Ghost clone. This is really cool! My plan is to buy a new disk drive and use the utilities that come with the drive to move the stuff to the new drive. Plan B is to try and fix the problem with these utilities. Plan C is to re-install.
Month: January 2004
Environmentalism as religion
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.
I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
Michael Crichton
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
15 September 2003
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Developer Toolbars. Wouldn't it be nice to have one-click access to the validators? And surely there's an easier way to snap your… [Web Standards Project BUZZ]
The article leads you to a very nice toolbar for the web developer who is interested in validating web pages.
Samba mounting to SBS
I reconfigured my Fedora1 box to use a static address and hostname that is different than the one that is used when it boots as a W2K workstation. This should keep my son and my active directory happy. By using a different IP address I can limit when I expose open ports to the internet.
I mounted a shared directory on my SBS server using the instructions in www.sbslinks.com/Linux.htm. I am working through an article by Vitor Feitosa, Authenticating Windows 2000 users on a Linux Workstation. Once I get all of this to work I will have a single signon for my network. I will wait until I get my copy of Microsoft Services for Unix. I picked up a copy last week for the cost of shipping. I could use a copy of schema extension I got off the Internet but I have opted to wait.
SourceForge Updates
I just finished downloading the new version of TortoiseCVS. A little earlier in the week I downloaded Filezilla. They are both bug fixes that I may update. I do not use either program actively.
I downloaded Eraser from Sourceforge last week to check it out. The problem is how to clean the hard drive on a PC being donated. Killdisk is a fine program that works from a bootdisk. I tested it on my son's PC when I installed W2K/Fedora(dual boot). The free version will rewrite the disk partition with a single pass. The Professional version gives you DoD and Guttman rewriting options. Eraser gives you an Explorer extension that will rewrite a selected file with the DoD and Guttman options. Using just free programs you can use Eraser to selectively erase sensitive files and the killdisk bootdisk to rewrite the partition.
I am hoping to finally download and install phpwebsite on Fedora next week. I think this software has a lot of potential for non-profits and small businesses. I would like to use it for my consulting website.
Mary Pickford. “You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.” [Quotes of the Day]
Kerberos, Samba, and screwing up my son's computer
Today I got the Fedora computer to talk to my Active Directory. I used Scott Lowe's article(Techrepublic and elsewhere) as the guide. The biggest problem I initially had was trying to find kinit. I figured out that it is not part of the standard Fedora distribution. Once I confirmed that Kerberos was properly configured, I joined the computer to the active directory. My test with smbclient was successful so I rebooted the machine since my son had gotten home from school. I promptly got a logon message complaining about “the system's computer account in its primary domain is missing…”. I tried to fix it on the server without success. Finally I logged into the local machine as an administrator and joined it back to the domain. I think the problem occured because I used the same computer name for Linux and W2K but I will have to research the problem more.
Fedora is up to date
I finally got Fedora up to date. The kernel update was my last update for awhile. Openoffice and Ximian are very nice and strong competitors to Office and Outlook. I will start reading the Samba documentation tommorrow. I would like to authenticate with my W2K server.
Fedora, Up2date, and YUM
I installed Fedora on my son's computer on Sunday and for the last two days I have been trying to update the files. I have not gotten the up2date program to work consistently for me. It appears to hang up while trying to download the first 30~50KB. It was giving me gpg errors yesterday. I have had more success with yum. It gets an occasional bad header and restarts but it typically will run to completion if I am upgrading only one package. Fedora is very nice but not quite ready for prime time.
The Last Word on the Ten Commandment display
The Ten Commandments display was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court building. And, there was a good reason for the move. You can't post Thou Shalt Not Steal, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, and Thou Shall Not Lie, in a building full of lawyers and Politicians without creating a hostile work environment.
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