bkil vs. programming

Installing a Huawei E352 HSPA+ dongle took ages under Windows. I had to abort it halfway through because I was running out of time. In retrospective, it was probably caused by a conflict with the previous modem's connection dashboard. I was shocked when I wanted to resume next time. Some time after inserting the device, the system asked for a .sys file from a driver disk. Neither modem worked anymore. As usual for this kind of dongle, no vendor download is available as the device itself contains all drivers on a virtual CD-ROM. However, that is only accessible before it's  switched to modem mode  by the parts already installed. Chicken and egg problem. Puppy Linux to the rescue! Thankfully, I had it on my USB flash along with DSL and SliTaz . The system loaded to RAM rapidly. I copied over the drivers from the modem to another USB flash. As a plaything, I enjoyed the command line and the responsivity, also browsing the web a bit over 3G. After rebooting to Windows, re...

Hugs is a nice little interpreter if you'd like to try out the language Haskell. It has few dependencies and it requires moderate resources to run. The download for a minimal install is less than 1.5MiB in size. If you have an operating system with package management, you can simply install the package 'hugs', or 'hugs98'. For example, on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) this amount to simply running: aptitude install hugs On distributions without a decent package manager (like Puppy Linux), you can install the Debian packages manually (refer to your distribution for details, but it usually involves clicking on each downloaded package or typing dpkg -i name.deb ). You first need to select a Debian major distribution version which matches with the versions of libraries on your system. On the Pupeee (Puppy 4.3) I had been using till now, choosing Lenny seems to work fine. So I've downloaded each i386 version from a mirror close-by of the following packages:...

The first OS I have installed was probably some DOS for a friend or classmate in primary school, I can't remember which. You understand if normal people can't install and configure that properly, as it is considered pretty difficult. I then did winblows a few times, though that's a harder treat. How do you expect a normal user to feel at home with his computer if he can't even install it for himself? It's supposed to be user friendly or so. Also note, that after removing the installer disk and placing it on the shelf does not end your responsibilities. If you install new hardware, software, or just simply switch some setting that change a major part of the system, you will need to get used to handling setup dialogs and wizards. And by the way, if the installation process is usually done by a semi-professional anyway - either in the shop before you buy, or if you ask help from a friend - then that voids the major part of the very common argument against using any unu...

I'm not specialized in doing that, but I had to commence many operating system installs to this day. I plan to write a bit on that next time. Here's how I've installed Debian 5.0 Lenny (qualified as testing as of September of 2008). I did it two times in a row to be exact, because of an unfortunately hardware fault after two days of usage (okay, maybe it was partially mine). The second one should have taken much less time, but I goofed with the settings of apt-move. You see I got it right with Etch before, but I forgot to write it down (I found it in the file anyway). I have been writing down what I customize from the start just because of that. Thankfully, that's a good habit of mine. Some words about the instructions in the file ("almost" a shell script). I tried to be self-explanatory, and have written a little preface to help place things in context. NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND: I am not held liable for anything you do wrong with the text given below, not even...