Linux Sucks #1,932,453

[loosechanj]

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1110

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=29434&page=2

What an ab-so-fucking-lutely craptastic saga of pain and tears to find that answer too. The question? Baby Jesus wants to read his ntfs drives. That's all. It's not that world shaking a request I don't think. But you think I'd be having multiple orgasms for all the trouble it took me.

[EDIT: But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, the fecking thing broke with the same "no aix module found" that the sources I d/l'ed from kernel.org did. Fucking shite.[1]

And while we're on the subject, just what in the fudge fucktory's manual o' fuckedness is the point of "Ok. Uncompressing linux"? Maybe I just haven't found that clue basket yet, but don't executables generally make pretty bad fodder for compression? And wouldn't compression just take time?

Also, wtf is the point of "redhat nash", other than making your boot take 10x as long?

And oh yeah, freebsd needs to support bigger fat32 drives, 'k?

/*Takes a half bottle of fuckitall and reboots into windows*/

[1] In contrast, getting openbsd to see my 200 gig fat32 partition (which freebsd chokes on as well!) was all of maybe 4 or 5 commands, including "mount". OpenBSD > *.

Comments

[travisd.livejournal.com]

You're starting to sound like grumpy_sysadmin

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Flattery'll getcha everywhere big boy.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Hey now... NetBSD > OpenBSD.

I hate Theo. He's a bigger dick than I am.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Hey now... NetBSD > OpenBSD.

Yeah, if you need something to run on your toaster. But anyway, while you're here...where the fuck does netbsd hide its binary packages anymore?

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

For someone using the (adopted, and now dropped) NetBSD logo as his user icon...

Is this a post-2.0 question? Because, if it changed, I dunno: I've had very little time/patience for my own computers around Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, big iron, large tape libraries, StorageTek... oops, I mean, "Sun" ACSLS, and Symantec NetBackup. Given the files, pkg_add(1) should still install them (because we like being like Solaris, but with underscores). If you're looking for the files, Mr. Internet recommends http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packages.html#binarydist"

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like to pkg_add off ftp when I can, and there don't seem to be packages out there. ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$VERSION might be a logical place, but the only arch there is alpha. ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/$VERSION might also make sense, but again the only packages available for 2.1 are for the alpha arch. Unless nothing's changed, and packages for 2.0 are intended to be used with 2.1; I don't believe that would be the case.

And that icon is my "all things *BSD" icon, really just Free (since it arguably features Beastie) and Net since I have this one for Open.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Huh. I guess I didn't actually look very closely at the text after that link, which is pretty useless if you're actually, you know, using NetBSD. Honestly, the most common case, on NetBSD, is to just grab the pkgsrc tarball, uncompress it, and build/update from that. The build files account for differences between major/minor versions, as long as you're willing to do a bit of bug reporting now and then. Really, I don't go around prescribing NetBSD's use to anybody else in a "production" sense: it's really an OS developer/researcher's world. I like OpenBSD less partly because Theo's a jackhole and partly because it pretends to be more production-ready but, when it comes down to it, is even less so, and its users more likely to be dicks when you ask for help.

I'd say that the reason only "alpha" is there is that nobody's gotten around to building the full packages set for 2.1 yet, which (because everybody I know just build out of pkgsrc anyway, and most of them use -current not a release version, isn't very surprising). The fact that support is better outside of NetBSD isn't very surprising: the pkgsrc project has gotten a lot more life than it had by way of being an easily extensible, internally-coherent, software build structure that operates the same way on a decent variety of operating systems, something you can only even pretend to get from Debian elsewhere, and they adhere to a complete kernel/userland separation that NetBSD never has... that is, Debian, having its roots in Linux, believes that the kernel (Linux) and even the most basic userland utilities like cd(1), ls(1), and sh(1) (GNU) are separate, whereas NetBSD (in historical Unix style) believes that the OS implies an intrinsically-linked kernel and base set of utilities, while still allowing for the subjective expansion of that userland with even relatively simple applications that are not universally applicable.

I happen to subscribe to the second opinion, especially since I'm someone whose employment depends heavily on device interaction by way of userland utilities but through a specific kernel, and I expect those utilities to work the best way possible for my local kernel, rather than be obnoxiously bloated to support a bunch, but fail to cover some features that I'd really want to be able to measure and tune for some specific kernel that does certain things better than others. (Examples... I used to think that Solaris's iostat(1M) was the best one running anywhere until I saw Mac OS X's, which is my current favorite, not that I'll see it in a data center any time soon. The command line flags and output formats for each are wildly different, never mind the internal sampling code which is, inherently, wildly different: each of these are very solid implementations, appropriate to their environment, that Do the Right Thing in context; I wouldn't want either one on the other OS.) This is one of the many reasons my personal preferences run against using any Linux distribution, despite my accepting its presence, and its usefulness from a getting-things-done point of view. I do believe that it's hamstrung by some unnecessary politics, though.

Before the rebranding with 2.0, to just the flag itself, that daemons-planting-the-flag (cast aside because of its once whimsical but, in the current political climate, potentially questionable military references, never mind its less than simple/clear presentation), with the lettering altered to include the "Net", was the official logo of the NetBSD Foundation (TNF, whose entire directorial board I believe I've drunk with... at the least, Perry and Christos; not sure if Luke or anybody else is actually on the roster these days).

But I've been so out of things for, like, three years now, hating, instead, commercial Unices.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

packages for 2.1 yet, which ([blah blah]) isn't a shock.

Also, another kernel/userland linkage example... device management under Solaris (prtconf(1), devfsadm(1M), add_drv(1M), drvconfig(1M)), AIX (cfgmgr(1), lsdev(1)), and HP-UX (lsdev(1M), insf(1M)) are different, including (mostly) in the command line tools' names, but are all appropriate to the device recognition structure under each OS. The same is true under NetBSD (and Mac OS X, for that matter). But what's different here is that all of those do the same thing on all of their processor architectures (admittedly, Solaris is the only one with anything that even a two-fingered, zero-toed man would call "many" besides NetBSD, but ignore that for now). Linux distributions pretend that this is true... but they use different things on the same damn piece of hardware, never mind different architectures. I view this with distaste and disdain.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

See, I just hate being told to give up the use of my machine for however long it'll take to build something. Not entirely of course, I can still play irc all weekend. But why should I, when there are other people with much better/faster/more hardware to it?

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

But with nice(1) (or renice(8)) you can continue to use your computer, but wait a week instead!

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's not that. It's leaving the system on the same OS all that time. There's a reason this box is named "sybil".

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

That's what you get for using shit from Red-hat-mond.

Just use Debilian, like a sane person.
(Creating a 300 GB FAT32 partition took all the magic of cfdisk and mkfs.vfat -F 32. Dealings with ntfs are best handled via booting Knoppix.)

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be using it at all if it weren't for this insane quest for knowledge I'm on.

I'm getting frustrated by that, too.

[naruki-oni.livejournal.com]

I tried Ubuntu and Knoppix, and they won't boot or install correctly on my PC. So I have Fedora Core 4. It installed slick as can be.

But now I can't access my NTFS partitions where all the goodies live, and that sucks.

It would help if I knew more about my system's specs, I suppose. But the OS that came with it is Japanese XP Home with tons of crap pre-loaded. Can't understand a thing.

Lately I've begun to suspect I might have dual processors, which seems a bit surprising.

Ah, well. Some day Linux will be made simple for people like me.

Re: I'm getting frustrated by that, too.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, centos is built from the redhat sources. Like I said tho', damn crazy quest for knowledge.

[crypticreign.livejournal.com]

Again, I had no problem doing this 3 years ago... I can't imagine that it got any harder.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Doing this on deadrat, or just linux? I can muddle my way through a kernel rebuild on most anything sane these days, but this is a totally different piece of asscake.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

You sure? I haven't heard anyone claiming anything NTFS support that was not one or both of read-only or fragile. FAT32, sure. This isn't, really, all that hard a problem to solve in theory, but, so far as I know, MS hasn't bothered to publish, publicly, FS standards externally (at least, without giving them a lot of money for "certification").

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

It's not the support itself that's making me want to drive my car into a brick wall at 100mph. It's getting it into a working install of a redhat derivative.

[crypticreign.livejournal.com]

Yeppers. I remember someone made a wonderful little rpm that allowed one to read ntfs partitions in Fedora Core 1 back.. oh.. 3 years ago.

[crypticreign.livejournal.com]

Also, with Kernel 2.6.14 both READ and WRITE are fully supported in the kernel.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

So far all the rpms I've seen have been kernel specific, and nothing for 2.6.9.