Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Serial Console "buddy system"

Watchdog daemon

Future in Linux

Dual boot systems made easy

gigabit unhappy

Adding seldom-used directories to your PATH

Experience Installing SuSE Linux 8.0

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hi Mom!

(I couldn't resist)

Hello everyone and once again welcome to the world of The Answer Gang. We had around 500 messages come through, the peeve of the month seems to be a few people overdosing on their sense of humor, and in case anyone was curious... my printer works fine these days.

I'm sure some people are going through Spring Cleaning. In my case I'm cleaning up my hard drive. I got a much, much bigger one and used my new distro installation as an excuse to perform the reorganization at the same time. This effectively turned an afternoon's task into a couple of days of juggling bits and an occasional adventure throughout the month to correct one or another facet of the installation.

At this point all my virtual hosts work, and I've finally gotten over how much easier elm is than mutt because I'm successfully using hooks to make the silly thing much brighter about what folders to save things to. For my style of folder reading this is perfect! Now all I have to do is whap those "elm2mutt" people for writing a converter that doesn't work if elm is already gone and you only have the aliases left. Sigh.

In fact I'm planning to leap feet first into the new development cycle over at LNX-BBC.org. Nick has this cool new build system and when we're done the thing really will be able to make world on itself, I think.

I'm pleased to see that kernels are settling down to some pretty usable stuff. Soon I'll be able to trust it on ultrasparc and maybe update our production server. Meanwhile, a nice solid 2.2.x kernel for us, yes indeed.

That's one of the things I like best about Linux, actually. Nobody holds a gun to your head and says that you have to use the latest and bleed all over that bleeding edge. If your sound or your pcmcia card just doesn't work right under the new stuff - great, stick with what works. Userland is a seperate thing, you can upgrade it by some fairly small parts most of the time. Of course glibc is a tangled mess, but then, it pretty much always was...

Later this month (Memorial Day weekend, for those of you who follow US holidays) I'll be running the Internet Lounge at Baycon, a science fiction convention. It'll be a nice tribute to how well older systems hold up with Linux under the hood. If you happen to be in Northern California around then, feel welcome to drop on by.

See y'all next month, folks!

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Published in issue 78 of Linux Gazette May 2002

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