Securitron Doom/Linux Blog.

 

Suse Linux is better than Mandriva

Just installed OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 and I am using it to type up this post. It is a little faster to load, but still will not work properly with Microsoft Office documents. Even simple ones. But it works very well now and can easily work with documents created with earlier versions. The TV show Alias has an an absurd plot-line where a 500 year old manuscript contains the DNA sequence of a man living today who is a person of interest to the organization. Total crap. I mean how is this even possible? And there was a prophecy of the end of the world in the manuscript as well, but that was forgotten about by the end of the episode. Oh well I guess it was not that important. And one of them is in Tibet meeting with David Carradine and receiving a manuscript from him that has something to do with what is going on, whatever that is. I have no idea.

It is just totally unbelievable programming, they once had a giant rotating red ball of energy and they had to deal with that. What the fuck is that? Even worse than Spiderman 2 where they created a sun in a laboratory experiment. Which would not happen unless you have a nice polished chamber to create the fusion reactions and you have a massively powerful magnetic field to contain it. Which he did not have. And it was only the size of a basketball and had massive gravity. Which is insane even if it was composed of the same matter as a neutron star. But it would be cool if he made it dense enough and it collapsed into a black hole. Now that would be cool. Then the Earth would be sucked into it and everything in the solar system!

15 User: $@witchking.sauron.net:\> ./sysinfo --uname1
System Information Program.

--System name - Linux
--Nodename - witchking.sauron.net
--Release - 2.6.15-Bejiitas_Wrath
--Version - #1 PREEMPT Sat Apr 8 21:38:35 EST 2006
--Machine - i686


This program is distributed with NO warranty
Express or implied. It is free software and
you can do what ever you want with
this program and it's source code.
Thanks saruman.
You are using the /bin/bash shell.
Linux version 2.6.15-Bejiitas_Wrath (saruman@WitchKing) (gcc version 4.0.2 20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 PREEMPT Sat Apr 8 21:38:35 EST 2006



************************** *_* * *_* ************************

Above is the output from my system information program. I have just finished debugging a section of code that prints out the contents of /proc/version. Now it is ready to use. And very functional. Get it here: http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/sysinfo.tar.gz.

Here is the section of code I was talking about. Works very well indeed.

/*
Reading in /proc/version to display kernel
information.
*/
FILE *f;
char Kyo[40];
f = fopen(log, "r");
if(!f) {
printf("Sorry, I cannot open: %s.\n", log);
exit(1);
}
else {
while (feof(f) != 1) {
fgets(Kyo, 2, f);
printf("%s", Kyo);
}
}
fclose(f);
Goku(0x32, "\x2a");
return 0;

This program will build very quickly and is a good way to get information about your linux system. E.g by putting it in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. I am now using mandriva Linux 2006, but I have re-installed the 2.6.15 kernel I built on that system since I had packaged it up in a tarball on my USB drive and so I copied the files onto the Mandriva system and it worked first time. And the tarball package of my kernel with all of the modules is only 7MB. And it loads very quickly. And I used a initrd to do the bootstrap process and load the reiserfs module and other initial modules to get the kernel going.

It even has the kernel driver for mounting mac formatted hard drives, but I only included it because I might want to read MAC formatted CDROM's.

Actually I just re-installed SUSE Linux as I tried very hard to get midi playback on Mandriva 2006 and I installed the timidity patches and the main program. I then loaded up prboom 2.4.0 which uses Timidity and there was no output even after checking and rechecking the configuration. It would run from the console, but not when called by the game. There were no errors but there just was also no music. Now this is not the only problem I had. There is also a problem with the alsamixer setup where you can only set the basic mixer volume up or down and the settings for the line in and cd etc do not seem to work whereas on SUSE they do. Very strange, I am sure that rebuilding ALSA might help, but it is better if it works from the start. Very helpful indeed. Actually, installing SUSE Linux 10.0 did not take too long at all. I did the installing and then it went through adding user accounts and setting the root password and then it finished by writing the configuration and then it loaded up a Graphical GDM login screen and I logged straight into a Gnome 2.12 desktop. Windows Vista requires a re-boot! But everything nowadays will be Windows XP and Windows Media Center and Windows Vista everything will be Windows and they can keep their sometimes sluggish and virus and spyware and trojan prone PC's. And I know about the fedora-redhat thing a while back but hardly anyone would fall for that. You would have to download the packages and then navigate to the directory containing them and run rpm -ivh *.rpm as root to install the packages. Then you would be screwed. But if it was a program you were unsure of you could install it to your home directory, or the home directory of an unprivileged user and test it there. Or just to unpack the RPM files and examine their contents. A little bit of caution goes a long way. But I really do not like Windows XP and Windows 2000, but sometimes I have to use it. But it is quite underwhelming and especially when it keeps running out of virtual memory. But this is a Windows XP machine running with 128MB of RAM. Total crap.

1 User: $@linux:\> top

top - 11:22:52 up 2:29, 2 users, load average: 0.88, 0.65, 0.56
Tasks: 81 total, 1 running, 80 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 44.7% us, 3.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 50.8% id, 1.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 190280k total, 186528k used, 3752k free, 4528k buffers
Swap: 377488k total, 7384k used, 370104k free, 82432k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20464 saruman 15 0 36232 12m 8904 S 36.7 7.0 0:09.58 gnome-terminal
19704 root 15 0 20828 12m 4856 S 7.1 6.6 0:57.66 X
20515 saruman 16 0 2112 992 764 R 1.3 0.5 0:00.20 top
19836 saruman 15 0 46696 8588 6688 S 0.6 4.5 0:02.41 netapplet
19848 saruman 16 0 34872 15m 11m S 0.3 8.3 0:16.38 gnome-panel
19945 saruman 15 0 13152 4392 3656 S 0.3 2.3 0:01.33 gnome-screensav
20085 saruman 15 0 131m 65m 43m S 0.3 35.1 0:39.34 soffice.bin
20223 saruman 15 0 43372 13m 9140 S 0.3 7.0 0:14.49 xmms
1 root 16 0 692 132 88 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.92 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.16 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.43 events/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 khelper
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
251 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kblockd/0
289 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
288 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.87 kswapd0
885 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
1060 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.28 reiserfs/0
1973 root 12 -4 1780 564 492 S 0.0 0.3 0:03.84 udevd
2381 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
4364 messageb 17 0 3520 1248 1124 S 0.0 0.7 0:01.50 dbus-daemon
4412 root 16 0 1492 432 404 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 acpid
4421 root 16 0 4900 3476 1468 S 0.0 1.8 0:07.73 hald
4426 root 18 0 1792 556 484 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 hald-addon-acpi
4597 root 17 0 1796 712 624 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.32 hald-addon-stor
9428 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kgameportd
9895 root 16 0 2204 664 560 S 0.0 0.3 0:02.60 resmgrd
9932 root 15 0 1884 660 520 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.08 syslog-ng
9938 root 16 0 1628 604 408 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.02 klogd
10258 root 16 0 1384 336 284 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 dhcpcd

The above is the output of top running in Suse linux after a fresh installation, with OpenOffice.org 20.1 and Xmms 1.2.10 running. OpenOffice.org is quite fast now, and worth using even though it needs more MS Word support. But there probably is no help from Microsoft on that front. They have the upcoming Vista release to concentrate on. That should keep them busy, I wonder if they will have some Enigma styled music for it like with XP. That could be cool.
¶ 4/18/2006 10:46:00 AM 0 Comments Links to this post