Mayix.net has an interesting picture showing a family tree of different Linux distributions.

Is it me or is every 'dist-upgrade' of unstable giving back dreadfull results ? There was a time I upgraded my Debian sid almost every week, while now I tend to wait 6 to 8 weeks to upgrade. Yesterday evening, I dist-upgraded with lots of trouble, and found myself without an X-server suddenly. The 'startx' command didn't reported an error, but didn't started an X session either. When looking at the process list, I found the X server process being replaced with the 'true' command, typical when you don't have an X server installed.


Luckily, there's the Debian Wiki page StatusOfUnstable which told me several people had problems with this. The fact that the amd64 repositories were outdated, and that they were integrated in the default repo was also an interesting read.


In the end, everything was sorted out, but it took me one hour and a half to straighten things up, not counting the dist-upgrade process.
So, it seems I have a dilemma :


* Debian sid has really become unstable, since sarge has been released, up to the fact that dist-upgrading is breaking things every time.
* I have become an other computer user, where I don't have the time and energy to dig into problems. And problems allways arise when you have something urgent to do. I just want a stable desktop, though I really like the quick update cycle of sid.


So, my decision has been made : once Ubuntu Dapper will be released, I will make the switch.

Moon dust is a strange substance : we reported previously about the abrasive capabilities of the dust, but there are more strange things about moon dust. The moon's surface material is one of the lousiest imaginable electrical conductors, so the dust normally on the surface picks up and keeps a charge. And what happens to particles carrying like electrical charges? Right : they are repelled from each other. And if a hundred-kilometer circle with a rim a couple of kilometers high is charged all over, what happens to the dust lying on it? The answer, given only by narrative description, is that electrostatic charging caused the dust to levitate, causing fountains of moon dust.
But there's more : the dayside of the moon is mainly positively charged; the nightside is negatively charged. At the interface between night and day electrostatically charged dust would be pushed across the terminator sideways. So, what do you get when miles of electrostatic dust gets attracted ? A long and skinny dust storm, stretching all the way from the north pole to the south pole, swirling across the surface, following the terminator as sunrise ceaselessly sweeps around the moon.
Scientists are increasingly confident that this kind of electrostatic storms are real.

uniq


* The "Crack-smoking Squirrel" release.
* The "I should not have got out of bed yesterday" release
* The "Wohoo-we-are-going-to-main" release.
* The "And I thought IE had security bugs!" release.
* The "I speak better English than this villian Bush" release.
* The "Let's do it cleaner" release.
* The "Fuck Me Harder" release.
* The "What's my name? Say my name, bitch!" release.
* The 'DOH!' release.
* The "Follow the white rabbit" Release.
* The "someone should take my compiler away from me" release
* The "Chainsaw Psycho" release.
* The "Perl Sucks" release.
* The "I fucking hate libtool" release.
* The 'No, I don't use CVS' release.
* The "This Space Intentionally Left Blank" Release
* The "Lesbian Seagull" release.
* The "Oh my God, they killed Python, you bastards!" release.
* The "Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die..." release


Champions of funny release names are the GDM maintainers :
* the "Nose poking" release
* the "George deserves a spanking!" release
* the "SuperLate(tm)" release
* the "Who needs 256 bits" release
* ... etc...

Question : how do you know the company you work in scores way too high on the Dilbert scale ?


Answer : when you change from working team, you loose every privilege you had access-like, and then it takes *two* weeks until everything is normal again. My new PC even didn't contain SSH, for gods sake.
Bah !

Technovelgy.com has a list of 652 devices and concepts which were introduced in science fiction novels, some of which have "come true". The most famous of all is of course the communicator in Star Trek, which was the predecessor of our mobile phone.
Here's a short overview of the most famous ones in this Google answers thread, with several links to the Technovelgy site.

Nothing's more irritating than failing hardware : what's the use of having a RAID 0+1 setup in your dedicated firewall box at home, when the disks refuse to boot from. I could mount them with a Knoppix live CD, but restoring the bootsector gave me the weirdest errors in Grub and Lilo. As I didn't had that much time handy, I finally decided to install Guarddog, a personal firewall, on my desktop and to initiate the ADSL call from that machine.


Time to start looking for a integrated router/firewall/access point.

We have returned from Australia as the target country for our honeymoon trip. 3600 km from Sydney to Port Douglas along the east coast, with a short stop in Hong Kong on the way back :


Sydney, Port Stephens, Lamington Nat. Park, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Surfers' Paradise, Fraser Island, Whitsundays, Eungella Nat. Park, Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Nat. Park were the highlights.


Lots of friendly people, furry animals, and sunshine. Have a look at some of our pictures (mostly landscapes, though).

OpenSolaris has now CPU caps, in keeping with the Unix philosophy of giving you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. The Fair Share Sheduler is in most cases way better CPU control, though in some cases caps may be interesting.

Seems that I don't have any luck with installing OpenSolaris : I reported previously that the Nevada build 27 did have a problem creating a faulty initrd (or boot archive) image. There are workarounds around this, but in a VMware cage, this takes *ages*.


OTOH, there's Nexenta. An OpenSolaris kernel (based on the Solaris Express builds) with a GNU/Debian package management system on top of it. The ultimate goal of Nexenta is to incorporate the OpenSolaris kernel into Debian, but that faces still many problems, of which the OpenSolaris licence incompatibility is one of the largest. I tried to install this one in VMWare, and yes, it is as dog slow as an OpenSolaris build, hell, even slower. But the installer got stuck it seemed on the creation of the boot archive. That's the same error as the Nevada build. As I don't use my laptop and there's no vital information on the disk, I decided to try the native installation on my laptop of Nexenta, but there the OpenSolaris kernel even fails to detect the CDROM :

WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1,1/ide@1 (ata1)

        timeout: reset target, target=0 lun=0

[...]

CD-ROM: discovery failed

The workaround in the Nexenta FAQ doesn't solve this problem, which is weird, because the Nevada build does boot and does start the OpenSolaris installer.


Bummer.


Update : I eventually chose to copy the VMWare image to a faster machine, installed it from there, but hit the boot_archive bug again. However, booting from the install CD, and recreating the ramdisk with

# mkdir /a; mount /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 /a

# /boot/solaris/bin/create_ramdisk -R /a

did the trick.