no recursive diff?

[Rogelio Serrano]

On 9/3/06, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

>
> Ever heard of linuxbios?  There are people doing fraction of a second boot
> times with Linux all the time.  In the embedded space.  The knoppix guys
> don't bother because your average Dell laptop is wasting ten seconds after
> power on trying to figure out how to say "duh?" before handing control off to
> something competent.
>

yes i just ported linuxbios to my motherboard. i had a problem with
the vga bios. going into vga mode so you can get out of it as fast as
you can just does not make sense to me. im waiting for the open
graphics card to start delivery so i can proceed.

> >
> > well for the system yes its ok but i tend to forget which filenames i
> > used for that small snippet of info that i got over the phone.
>
> And in real life you probably lose the post-it-note you wrote it on.  This is
> not my problem.
>

i dont use post-its. its very expensive here. i turned to computers
because im very wasteful with paper and i barely understand my own
scrawl after after a few weeks.

> > i tend
> > to remember long lines easily but not cryptic super short filenames.
> > most people i asked say the same thing.
>
> The macintosh has "finder" for this.  Linux has nautilus and beagle and
> someday will hopefully have a third attempt that doesn't suck.  (C#?  Are

yes they all suck except for the early finder versions.

> This is, again, not my problem.  It's a question of what you're trying to do
> and what tools you choose to use.  People who type filenames from the command
> line use short names to save typing.  People who work through the gui use
> long filenames and click on them with the mouse.
>

sort of mutually exclusive isnt it? i hate typing very long command
lines and digging through menus with a mouse.

> > > > 3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday
> > >
> > > Mine does.  Software Suspend is fairly cool.
> > >
> >
> > yes i would like to try that as a remedy.
>
> You can also run under QEMU with vnc and use the "snapshot" feature with a
> copy-on-write block device.  There are a number of approaches to this.
>

that sounds very complicated.

> > > > 4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made
> > >
> > > Yes, finite storage space is also a bit of a bother.  However, when I
> wandered
> > > from the Amiga to the PC world in 1990 I bought a 120 megabyte hard drive
> for
> > > my first PC, and my current laptop has 60 gigabytes, which is somewhere
> over
> > > 250 times that.  I have tarballs on here of a half-dozen entire previous
> > > systems, which I've been meaning to go through and clean up (or at least
> get
> > > on a properly indexted series of DVD-ROMs or something).  And yesterday, I
> > > rsynced my entire laptop to another machine because I only needed 60 gigs
> of
> > > free space to image the whole thing and on a desktop system that's not
> that
> > > impressive these days...
> > >
> >
> > well i dont want to do the indexing myself.
>
> I'm not doing it for you.
>

of course. my system will be doing that for me soon.

> > im not good with filenames and tarballs reduce entire volumes to a single
> > filename.
>
> Konqueror used to let you browse the contents of Tarballs.  This worked for me
> right up until the current version of Ubuntu broke it.  I really miss that
> feature.
>

yeah and kde depends on x and so on and so forth...

> > > > 5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself
> > >
> > > Never played with Knoppix, have you?  Modern distros are actually pretty
> good
> > > at this.
> > >
> >
> > no i havent. i have been using debian.
>
> There's your problem then.
>
> I can't figure out what Debian is for anymore.  If you want a technical
> research platform you grab Gentoo, if you want an end user desktop system you
> grab Ubuntu, if you want something flashy and portable to demo you can grab
> Knoppix, and if you're a business being ISO9002 compliant you skip Fedora
> Core entirely and grab Red Hat enterprise.  (And if your ISO9002 procedure
> requires a second source for competitive bidding you grab SuSE.)  And if you
> want to roll your own you grab BuildRoot or Linux From Scratch or one of the
> 8 gazillion other variants out there.
>

yeah. im adding another one.

> There are still a few debian installations on servers, but I've seen servers
> running Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and SuSe all in the same shop.  At work we
> recently got rid of a server running Red Hat 6.
>
> > why cant we just
> > copy the files over and the system can just run it when its needed
> > without me telling it to.
>
> You'd _like_ your computer to be part of a botnet sending spam then?
>

goodness no! system should figure that one out too.

> Trim the sig file please.  It is too long.
>

yeah. i am working on a solution now so i dont need to have that
irritating sig as a reminder anymore...

-- 
the thing i like with my linux pc is that i can sum up my complaints in 5 items.