Monday - 25 September 2000
Shameless Nationalistic Boosterism. This is for the US readers. Everyone else can just skip on down to the next item. USA! USA! USA! Did you folks see Laura Wilkinson win the gold medal for the 10-metre platform diving? From fifth to first. In one round. The fact that others faltered, opening the door for Wilkinson does not detract from her efforts (nor does it belittle the efforts of those who faltered). If she had not been ready, if she had not had the high degree of difficulty, if she had not nailed her dives, even as others were losing their nerve and blowing theirs, she would not have been victorious. Well done!
China Chips. Who said the Clinton administration was soft on communism? As a way of putting China 10 years behind the times, it was recently announced that IBM was named as the prime supplier to China's effort to build out its Internet infrastructure. IBM agreed to supply processors and chips for routers and switches, the key building blocks of the internet. An absolutely brilliant move. The Chinese will never know what hit them.
"Don't Worry, I'm Awake Now." And you would too if you were leading the first US F1 race in 10 years and then you spin out with five laps to go. I guess if you are Michael Schumacher, you just get things sorted out and go on to win. This is Schumacher's seventh win this season and his 42nd career win (one in front of the late Ayrton Senna and nine back of Alain Prost). If he wins the points championship, a high probability, he will be the first Ferrari driver to do so since Jody Scheckter in 1979.
Fly'in High. When you think of helicopters you think of Bell, Boeing, Sikorsky, Eurocopter, and Robinson. Robinson? Yes, Robinson (see the Los Angeles Times story here). Robinson has 80 percent of the US civilian market to call its own. With such domination, it is no wonder that sales should top $100 million USD this year. 18 percent over last year. And yet, to a great extent, it is a mom and pop type company. Started in a garage with one prototype, it is still run by Frank Robinson, wife Barbara, sons Kurt and Lincoln, and daughter Terry.
This Day in History. On Sept. 25, 1957, 300 Army troops, acting as a phalanx, escort nine black children to school at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. See the story here from the New York Times.
Aloha!
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Tuesday - 26 September 2000
Is it only ME? InfoWorld's Brian Livingston has a very interesting item about MS Me (the latest version of Win98). Some option boxes, for example Display Options, have both an "Apply" button as well as an "OK" button. This is not new. What is new is how the two buttons work.
Previously, hitting the "Apply" button executed and saved
the changes you've made but left you on the same option box
so that you could make additional changes. Or roll back the
change you just made. Under Me, hitting the "Apply" button
makes the change, but does not save it.
Only after subsequently hitting "OK" do all of your changes
get saved. In other words, a two stage commit process (or
at least, I think that's what it's called). Apparently,
this behavior is not consistent across different boxes so
sometimes hitting "OK" "APPLY" will work how Win98SE
works and sometimes it won't. Yet Another Reason Not To
Upgrade To Me. YMMV.
Writ of Certiorari Denied. The Supreme Court denied the US Justice Department request to hear, on direct appeal, the Microsoft v. U.S. (00-139) anti-trust case. The case is thus remanded to United States Court of Appeals.
The order can be found here ((note that the text format is pretty screwed up. What I did was copy from the text version into Wordpad. In fact, when I check back this morning, it appears they've temporarily taken the file down, perhaps to correct the problems. In the afternoon, a new version was up. But it still is not html nor text (and the pdf has all kinds of data errors). I guess if you really want to read it you can copy the source and paste it into WordPad like I did.)). The order itself is not helpful in determining the reasoning behind the majority order. However, there is a dissent by Justice Breyer in which the Justice points out the pros and cons of hearing the case now:
A court of appeals proceeding would likely narrow, focus, and initially decide the legal issues now presented here. It would thereby facilitate any later deliberation in this Court. Nonetheless, I believe this Court can consider the issues fully now by taking additional briefs and by granting additional time for oral argument, if necessary. Consequently, I would hear the appeal.
The balance of the order involves the reasoning behind Chief Justice Rehnquist's belief he does not need to recuse himself in this case even though his son is a partner in a firm (Goodwin, Procter & Hoar, in Boston) that Microsoft hired for this case. You be the judge here and decide what the Chief Justice should have done.
Speaking of Microsoft. MS has two products designed to help integrate Unix platforms into the Borg. I mean MS family of products. The two are Services for Unix 2.0 ($149 USD) and Interix ($99) (see them here).
Among other things, Services for Unix includes Active State's ActivePerl 5.6, gateway for Network File System (NFS), and over 60 Unix utilities.
The Interix product is intended to provide a Unix development system within Windows2000. Included in this package are:
Over 300 Unix commands and utilities Shell support for KornShell, Bourne shell and C shell Scripting languages - AWK, Perl, SED, TCL/TK with full shell job control Posix.1, Posix.2 and ANSI C interfaces BSD sockets implemented using Winsock SVID IPC (message queues, semaphores) Shared memory, memory mapped files X11R5 Windowing System clients (xterm, twm, xrdb and xlsclients) and libraries Execution of Win32 applications from Interix Full pseudo terminal tty semantics mapped to console windows and pseudo terminal support telnetd & rlogind services (multi-user login support) Berkeley r-utilities (servers and clients) Full integration with Windows 2000 security model, administration, file systems, networking and printers True case-sensitive file names Daemon and service support including cron and syslogd Support for such Internet clients as ftp, telnet, ping and rsh
Aloha!
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Hump Day Wednesday - 27 September 2000
You decide. The following is NOT aimed at any of the Daynoters. <SOAPBOX>I've used the phrase "You decide" almost as much as YMMV. And I guess I'm not being clear enough when I do. So I will say this now in the hope that everyone will understand.
Understand what?; you say. Understand that I'm not necessarily trying to convert anyone over to anything. That while I'm giving my thoughts and opinions here, you are still a free agent who has the power to decide for yourself what to think and do.
If you don't agree with what I say. Fine. It bothers me not one whit. I'm not going to persuade you to change, and you probably aren't going to change me (YMMV). This is not a popularity contest. So save yourself some time by not sending to me a detailed, point by point email explaining why I'm an ignorant idiot. Get your own web site and post your own thoughts there (again, I'm not referring to any of the Daynoters here). This is my site, and I decide what gets posted here. And please, please. Do not get angry or frustrated because I talk about religion or politics. They are part of who I am. If you don't like it, go away. I'm not forcing you to read this. So don't force me to read your email.
On the other hand, I am always open to amending my thoughts and opinions as significant new information becomes available. I hope you are too. So, if you have something new and significant to say, feel free to send it to me.
But always remember, what I'm trying to get you to do is think, and then decide. If we still differ in opinions after doing that, great. I still respect you and I hope you respect me. And after all, being different is, indeed, the spice of life. But you decide.</SOAPBOX>
"...we just don't know where or how." That from the chair of the state Board of Education referring to how taxpayer money is spent on education. She thinks its being spent legitimately, but she can't say where, how much, and what for. D'oh!
The Office of the State Auditor reviewed the financial practices of the Hawai'i Department of Education two years ago (see the report summary here). What they found was a department without a clue as to where the money was going. This, even after spending millions of dollars on computer systems. Systems which are slow, full of bugs, and do not give the policy makers the management information need to make intelligent decisions.
The Auditor suggested the department purchase a program called In$ite. I couldn't find much about the program (it appears it was once sold by Coopers but now may be under something called Fox River). But I did find this page (see it here) from the South Carolina Department of Education.
The Auditor then did a follow-up audit and found the department had done nothing to increase its management information systems capability. D'oh! Obviously, the department is too big and slow to move quickly on this. So is it no wonder that students can't read?
I am out of time, so I am out'ta here - Aloha!
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Thursday - 28 September 2000
Support? What Support? Over the past year, I've tried various versions of Linux which are configured to co-exist with Windows without having to repartition your drive. You can see a list of them from Linux.org. The list includes DragonLinux, Armed, Phat, and DOS Linux (most are listed at the bottom of the list). Each has problems. And one of them caused me to have to reformat my drive.
So I figured I would give a regular distribution a try. By regular I mean one that dual boots with Windows on it's own partition. So I went to CompUSA and bought a copy of Caldera's OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4. This, for use on my Dell OptiPlex GX1 PII 333 at work. I tend to stay with Caldera because of the install and the fact it has Netware drivers available (which is show stopping critical in our Novell environment).
Long-term readers may remember that I've tried getting this PC to work with Linux before. But was unable to because we have IBM 16/4 PCI token-ring cards here. And prior to kernel version 2.0, support for token-ring was non-existent. Eventually, the Olympic chip set was supported and added into the 2.2 version (which is supposed to be compatible with what we have).
Below are some notes on the installation process itself. They are there to help any other poor souls who give this a try. At the very end are a couple of emails to Caldera support asking for help to get the token-ring card recognized by Linux.
Installation Notes:
Page 31 of the manual states that if you are installing under Windows, you "insert your OpenLinux eDesktop Binaries & Installation CD" [emphasis in the original] to begin installation. Wrong Torvalds breath! You insert the "Installation from Windows and Commercial Packages" CD instead.
Page 32 has a screen shot of what you are supposed to see once the CD autoruns. Only, that's not what you see. But the manual says to install PartionMagic and you can guess it's under the prepare your hard drive for installation button. But once you press the button, there are two more buttons. Once for PartionMagic, and the other for BootMagic. At this point of the installation, there's no word as to what BootMagic is for or when you are supposed to install it.
I figured I might as well as install both at this time. But be aware that as PartionMagic is doing its thing, there will be a period where there is no indication whatsoever that anything is happening. That is, for about three or four minutes, it will just sit there. No disk activity, no progress bar going across the bottom to let you know something is going on. Nothing. It just sits there. I don't know why. Perhaps there was a continue button somewhere and I missed it? And then it just times out? I don't know. But I didn't see anything and was about to reboot when the CD-ROM came to life and continued on.
On page 34 of the manual, it states that after PartionMagic completes, the system will reboot and you will see the install screen again and you should then insert your install CD. Wrong penguin slobber. After you reboot, all you see is your Windows desktop. Probably because you don't have a CD in the tray (since you've been told by PartionMagic to remove any CDs in there before rebooting). Well, duh. Imagine that. So insert the Binaries and Installation CD and start the install.
At some point, you see a display of the boot process that Linux goes through. I noticed that it skipped the PCI scan and that the Olympic module failed. Hmmm. Not good.
The Lizard install begins but seems to be hung. Again, there is a period of several minutes in which nothing seems to be happening. No feedback whatsoever. No disk activity. Nothing. But then, just starts up again.
When the install gets to the point of formatting the partition (see page 42 of the manual), we again get to a point that it appears nothing much is happening. If this is beginning to get repetitious, I'm sorry, but it just points to the lack of feedback this install gives.
So now we are at page 46 of the manual which deals with the Setup Network screen. Only, there's a problem. I have a token-ring card and the screen only refers to Ethernet cards. There's three choices. "No Ethernet." "Ethernet configured using DHCP". And "Ethernet configured statically." No token-ring. Hmmm. Page 310 of the manual states in pertinent part; "Most LAN connections these days are established via an Ethernet card. Other types of connections include ATM and Token Ring, which Linux does support." We'll get back to this in a moment. But for now, let's continue the install.
Okay, so I choose "No Ethernet" and go on. Eventually I get to page 52 where we have Setup Printer. Only, the automatic probe for printers didn't find any. Well, I guess that's to be expected when I have an HP LaserJet 4 Plus (with PS support). So I manually choose the HP and hit the test button to print a test page. After a long period of nothing appearing to happen, the lights on the HP start to blink. But then the printer's display says to load A4 paper? WTF? The OpenLinux setup screen rightly defaults to the US standard 8.5 X 11 inches. And of course, the HP defaults to 8.5 X 11. Why should I load A4 paper (even if I had any)? So I cancel that and move on.
So eventually I boot into Linux. But without network access. I try everything I can find on the KDE desktop but to no avail. COAS is setup for ONLY Ethernet cards. In fact, everything that I find is setup for Ethernet. So where is the support for token-ring I ask, to nobody in particular.
Well, not wanting to give up so easily I try trolling the internet. There is a mini-How-to on token-ring but it seems to have not been updated recently. That is, in the last two years. During that time, support for the Olympic chip set was supposedly added to the 2.2 kernel. I also hit www.linuxtr.net. But while I may be dumb, I'm not stupid (copyright Sjon). And what they have doesn't help me to figure out why Linux is not recognizing the NIC when supposedly, Olympic support is already in the kernel.
So as a last desperate attempt to get things going, I email Caldera as part of my three months of included support when you purchase your copy of OpenLinux (as opposed to downloading it). Below are the emails. The short story seems to be that I have to recompile the kernel. I'm not sure why since support for token ring is supposed to be there but I guess I'm wrong.
From: Dan Seto
To: support@calderasystems.com
Subject: IBM 16/4 PCI Token-Ring Card [Incident:caldera 000927-0053]I can't seem to get my IBM 16/4 PCI Token-Ring card to be recognized by Linux. I'm not sure where to start to diagnose the problem, assuming the Olympic module works with this NIC (IBM is less than helpful on their site and the mini-How-To was written two years ago).
To: Dan Seto
From: support@calderasystems.com
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 07:25:27 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: IBM 16/4 PCI Token-Ring Card [Incident:caldera 000927-0053]I regret to inform you, but token ring network cards are not supported under installation support. This Url maybe able to give you helpful hints.
http://www.linuxtr.net
Also you can subscribe to the users forum for more information.
www.calderasystems.com/support/forums
-Thomas
From: Dan Seto
To: support@calderasystems.comThe Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 desktop manual clearly states that your version of Linux supports token-ring cards. Now you say they are not supported under installation support. Well, which is it? Either it works with your version and you support it or it doesn't work and you don't support it. If the later, you need to so state that in all web pages which show hardware compatibility and support and your manual.
I regret to inform you that I will be noting this lack of support on my web site, seto.org which is part of the daynotes.com network. My site alone gets 16,000 hits a month. The others get a lot more.
To: Dan Seto
From: support@calderasystems.com
Subject: IBM 16/4 Token-Ring PCI [Incident:caldera 000928-0010]Sorry for the miscommunication. It is not that there is not support available for token ring setup. It is that the free installation support that comes with the product does not cover setting up the machine with token ring support. You can see page 4 in the User's guide for a list of supported issues. We do offer paid support for all issues that are above and beyond these items listed. You can visit our enhanced support page at our site for more information about that support.
There are some things you will need to do to set it up yourself. First you will need to compile token ring support into the kernel. This how-to will show you how to recompile the kernel:
http://www.calderasystems.com/LDP/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html
This site shows a list of currently supported token ring cards:
http://www.networking.ibm.com/support/techtips.nsf/ViewableDocs/A0BD59F96=E3E29E285256720007D15F9?OpenDocument
This is the site where you will have to go to get the driver for those cards:
http://www.linuxtr.net/
And here is the complete how-to to setup token ring: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Token-Ring.html
You may also want to use our users mailing list they can give added insight and help you when you get stuck.
http://www.calderasystems.com/support/forums/users.html
-Terry
So that's where things stand right now. When I have some time, I'll see about re-compiling the kernel. But at this point, I'm still not sure this is what the problem is. Stay tuned.
Aloha!
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Aloha Friday - 29 September 2000
It's Friday!
Unix 2 - Dan Zero/Zed/Nil. There isn't
much to report this morning regarding the continuing
[mis]adventures of our hero. I can confirm that the 2.2.14
kernel does not appear to support token-ring. At all [Wrong
Windoze breath. See update below - Ed.]. At least, as far
as this newbie can figure out. I did a make
menuconfig on the source code and could not
find anything to indicate that Linux supports anything
other than Ethernet, ATM, or FDDI.
I guess Caldera support is right. I will need to find the Olympic [not to be confused with the games] patch and install that before compiling. Sigh. Support for hardware has a long way to go yet. Right now, Linux is about equal to Windows 3.1 during its time. Stay tuned.
0930 Update. The above was based on using
the make menuconfig way of
creating the configure file. As you may know,
make menuconfig creates a graphical
interface that you can point a click through the various
options. For whatever reason, it did not show any
token-ring questions.
However, as an experiment, I tried switching to the
standard text interface method by doing a
make config. This method gives you a line
by line grilling about every single option that can be
compiled into the kernel. Most of the time, you can just
take the default. But not always. At least as far as I can
see. For example, parallel port support defaults to no. At
least it appears to on my version.
In either case, by using this method, it did in fact ask if I wanted token-ring support. Which of course I do. But even after using this method, and doing all the other 'makes' that are required to finally get a kernel compiled (make dep, make clean, make bzImage, make modules, make modules_install, and make bzlilo), I still can't get Linux to play nice with the card.
At this point, I'm still at square one. Is the problem that the kernel does not support the card? Or is there a conflict between this card and something else? Or is it a software problem? Or all? Or none? I don't know. And I guess Caldera support won't help. Sigh. More when, or IF I know more.
I have a six hour class tomorrow that I have to prepare for so I am out of here. Have a Great Weekend Everyone! - Aloha!
© 2000 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.