onward and nerdward
The geekery has been intense around here the last couple of days. First, I'm hustling to finish up an overambitious GreaseMonkey project. It was spawned by the ad-killing efforts mentioned here (incidentally, if the project hadn't changed direction, Kanishka's Simpsons reference would have totally won the naming competition). But more on that later. In a few days to a week I should have a script/site that I'm hoping some of you will help me test before it's unleashed on the world.
Second, my external hard drive finally arrived in the mail, allowing me to backup and reformat our Linux machine. It had been limping along -- I'm no Linux guru, and the machine had been built out as a MythTV box. When we got a real Tivo I turned off as much of the MythTV detritus as I could find, but it still had problems working as the MP3 jukebox I wanted. So, after making some backups and downloading Fedora Core 4, I wiped the machine.
And voila: FC4 works nicely. The installer is a pain in the ass to use when you've got a TV as your primary monitor, but it's hard to call that a shortcoming. And properly configuring the remote-desktop software VNC is still more confusing than it ought to be. But so far the only real irritation comes from its shitty support for the USB hard drive -- it can't seem to pull off USB2, even when I load the ehci-hcd module that's supposed to handle it. And while it's nice that FC4 automatically detects the drive when I connect it, I can't actually access the drive unless I'm logged in as a superuser (an extremely gauche thing to have to do by Linux standards). So I ended up copying everything back the way I took it off -- over the network from a Windows machine. D'oh. (My advice to those stumbling in from Google -- don't install SELinux.)
But still, anyone who's got a spare machine lying around and no command-line phobia really ought to try installing some flavor of Linux on it. It's nice to have an MP3 jukebox, or a file/print server, or a VPN server, or some free, light-duty webspace, or just access to a machine that can always be counted on to be up and ready to do things for you.
For instance, I've got a "torrents" file share up on this one: download a .torrent file to it over the network, and within a minute the server's copy of Azureus will pick it up and start downloading. When it's done, a perl script will scan the downloaded files and sort them away into the correct directories -- one for MP3s, one for video, another for ISOs. The MP3s automatically get filed by the contents of their ID3 tags... And if they don't have ID3 tags, they're fingerprinted using MusicBrainz and then sorted (by this script)! Perhaps you don't comprehend how awesome this is. So let me just tell you: very awesome.
So in conclusion -- servers: yeah.
Comments
Can you explain to me all the hat imagry associated with Linux? "Red Hat"? "Fedora Core"? Shouldn't they focus on vicious animals names?
It's only Red Hat and its derivatives that have the hat imagery. Fedora Core is a spinoff from RH -- they decided to cut loose their free consumer-grade offering and focus on selling RedHat Linux to businesses. So they forked their project and gave Fedora to the community, for it to do consumer-type things with; business customers don't have much use for supporting every sound and video card, for instance. RedHat still supports the Fedora project in various ways (most visibly offering the backend for a free windowsupdate-style patch notification tool -- it's that red exclamation point I'm ignoring in the screenshot above).
So the hat thing is just them. Different Linux distributions have different mascots -- SuSE has a lizard of some sort, Debian's got a spiral dealy, and Ximian (although not a distribution) had a monkey thing going before it was bought by Novell.
But the unifying Linux mascot is Tux the penguin. He shows up all over the place.
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