(no subject)

[bzarcher]

The more that I read In the beginning...was the command line., I think 2 things.

1) I wish I'd read this while I was still a CS major. It might have made me suffer through the problems I was having until I really learned how to program well.

2) I think that I'm finally going to bite the bullet and try Linux, sooner than later.

I think after we get Lisa's PC fixed (again) I might well build a small box to put it on, with a nice Xwindows setup so I don't feel totally lost at the command line.

Comments

[snowspinner.livejournal.com]

Notably, Stephenson has since noted that OS X is his ideal operating system.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Ahh. And I do still want a Mac, but..

1) Financially, the biggest Mac I could get in the near future would be a Mini, which seems a bit silly, given the various compromises in the Mini that not that many people are thrilled with, especially since I'd want to do tweaks and such with it. For the same price as a Mini, I could easily build a small BSD box to learn with, and it'd be using the same major chassis/underarchitecture. (As ardaniel pointed out to me.) Then, once I've learned it well, I could either keep it or give it to someone else, with or without BSD on there.

2) Awhile ago I decided my next Mac will be a laptop. And given my dreams of avarice, I'd rather get a powerbook than an iBook.

3) I want to learn something I've never touched before. I've gotten good experience with OS X, both at Wooster and at Sterling. This will be something new.

[chaoticgoodnik.livejournal.com]

*nods* When I was an undergraduate TA for JCom 140 (Living in the Information Age), the teaching staff (self included) were rather taken with that essay.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

It's a really nice little book.

[dklegman.livejournal.com]

Honestly?

Back in the day, I had a spare machine sitting around. For various periods of time, I ran Red Hat 6.2 and BeOS on it, as this was right when BeOS began to be freely downloadable for personal use.

Red Hat was nifty, and I got to play with UNIX-ish things I hadn't used often. But I was variously annoyed by the process of customizing a sluggish setup of X-Windows and KDE or Gnome, and getting sound to work was a hassle. I used it a bit, and tinkered around to learn stuff. I won't say it wasn't worthwhile. But right around then, I started seeing screenshots of early OS X, and I realized my Linux days were numbered.

That was years ago. I don't doubt that Linux has generally matured, and your experience can vary dramatically across distributions.

I actually enjoyed BeOS more on that same machine. It booted faster, pretty much everything just worked right off the bat, and it wasn't much less functional for day-to-day stuff. It also looked cooler than all the piecemeal, sluggish interfaces I had seen under X-windows.

Having gone through the dabbling-in-Linux phase, OS X will probably do a lot of the Unix-ish stuff you might want. You can install Apple's X11 if you need it. It comes with a raft of useful utilities/gadgets/goodies, and is much less of a pain to configure and play with, in my experience. And while Mac Minis aren't cheap, if you're talking about putting a box together for such a purpose, it might be sufficiently inexpensive. Or you could snag a used G4 somewhere.

[dklegman.livejournal.com]

I was writing this while you typed the above OS X reply. Pardon my cursed, slow fingers. ;-)

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

I pardon nothing.

DEATH FOR YOU.

[dklegman.livejournal.com]

You shall be schooled, as you were schooled within the arcades of Midship, and on the concrete of Foundation.

Your only monument shall be heaped gore, and a disused drill press labelled ABANDON IN PLACE.

[valkyrwench.livejournal.com]

May I recommend Xandros, if you're looking for a linux distro with a GUI?

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

I will keep this well in mind.

[buschap.livejournal.com]

Comments to many:

Yes, OS X is great, and Stephenson has noted it's his OS of choice, but I imagine he'd still refrain from using the word "ideal," cause he's persnickity, too.

Also, the cost of OS X is far greater than Linux when learning is your goal. The adage goes "Linux is only free if your time is worthless," but if you want to experiment, it's negative cost.

And it's come an incredible way. Even the "hard" distros are more or less plug & play, unless you have intentionally esoteric hardware. Even sound.

Also, back stuff up. You will likely erase your entire home directory a couple times before you get the hang of it all :)

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, I'm going to try to avoid rm -r...

[buschap.livejournal.com]

Yeah, especially as root :)

In the library, we had an OS X machine that needed to be reimaged anyway, so we ran "rm -rf /" as root on it. It ran, and the interface stayed up, but we couldn't shut the machine down, because "shutdown" had been erased.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

I remember that one! You called us to come look at it, didn't you?

[buschap.livejournal.com]

Nah, just powered it down and reimaged per normal. It's much harder to toast the firmware, and we wouldn't have done that.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok.

I seem to remember there were a couple really odd ducks you called us just for us to look at it and go, "Wow, what the hell did you do?"

[buschap.livejournal.com]

That there surely were.

I'm keeping up the tradition, too. Dell had to come out and replace a MoBo and all the RAM in a machine, cause they couldn't figure out why the memory bus was failing. All the RAM acted clean. All the slots, too. But all together? Huh uh.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Funny.

Wonder if there was a bad piece of code in the bus that, for some reason, flinched if it hit a one in a billion instruction from that particular RAM?

[tigerfox.livejournal.com]

I can't quite figure out why, but that amuses me a lot.

It's fun to confuse the techie people! And especially when you call for help and you aren't an idiot. ("Try this..." "Already did. It was fine. Would you like me to read the output anyhow?") >:D

[buschap.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we were quite tickled, as well. It's perfectly sensible, when you think about it, but it really stunned us, cause we just hadn't considered that that would happen.

Of course, it was a library, so we had to contain ourselves.

[tigerfox.livejournal.com]

*snickers* Just how successful was the muffling of laughter?

Oh, and did you guys reset it yourselves, or did you leave it for a library tech to puzzle out? >:)

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Considering that Andy was the library tech.... ;D

[buschap.livejournal.com]

Exactly :)

[tigerfox.livejournal.com]

*grumps* How was I supposed to know that? ;>

[parasaurolophus.livejournal.com]

I'm not fond of Linux. I've been having some major troubles with it lately as well.

Our resident Linux guru has told me that Linux is overused. It's too popular and being used for things it wasn't intended to. If you want a customizable OS or want to fiddle around with sourcecode, Linux is for you. Otherwise, steer clear.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

We'll see - I'm planning to do this in a way that I don't lose much, except possibly time. Once I finish teaching myself a bit, I'll probably let things go back, and find something new to play with from there.