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I will have to grindle Linux — 26 Comments

  1. Coming from South Africa ubuntu jumped out at me so I decided to send you an explanation….

    Ubuntu, pronounced /úbúntù/, is an ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The word has its origin in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa. Ubuntu is seen as a traditional African concept.[Wikipedia]

    At least that explains one of the words in Linux…not sure they are doing the word any justice…? Glad i have been warned, will be staying far away from it….I would not know how to do all the “things” you have had to do to get rid of it…I am U-S-E-L-E-S-S with technology….a course would do me some good.
    And Happy Birthday for the other day! Celebrated in the pub!!!

  2. Natalie – Thanks for that. I will treat it with a little more respect as it seems to be a reasonable and respectable philosophy.

    On second thoughts, Ubuntu, the Linux, obviously doesn’t follow Ubuntu, the philosophy, so it shall remain fair game.

    Neighbour – Not half as worried as I was. All shall be revealed. In due course. When the nerves have settled.

  3. Phew! Great to see you back, Grandad but sorry to hear you’ve had a ‘difficult’ day.

    Nothing a pint of Guinness can’t fix – I hope?

    You do realise it’s a criminal offence to reveal all 😉

  4. Steph – Thanks! But it’s more of a whiskey day.

    You do realise it’s a criminal offence to reveal all

    Sh*t! Does that mean I have to stop wearing the raincoat down to the primary school?

  5. I wish a speedy recovery for you from your ‘death’ …

    And Steph, if you look at the calendar, you’ll see that he hasn’t even been gone twenty-four full hours.

    You should market that strange, near-pheromonal scent that keeps your readers so relentlessly enthralled … ‘Eau d’Ageés‘, perhaps.

  6. Daz, I’m not sure I’d call it a “scent”…..coming from Grandad it might better be described as something else….perhaps that explains the rumors of his untimely demise. 😉

  7. Grandad,

    Why don’t you leave the technical stuff until Ron comes back from Thailand, or wherever it was he went on his trip?

    Otherwise you’ll end up having to take the laptop down the pub so Dick can try to fix it and you’ll end up having an argument with him, resulting in the Garda Siochana being called and the pair of you being slung out (again!)

  8. You should see what your laptop has been saying about you on IT’S blog.. not pretty. Do you REALLY spill coffee on it just to be mean? and it would appreciate it if you’d clip your fingernails once in a while.

  9. mmmm I shall have to take your discipline suggestions to my neighbour who is having a hell of a time with Windows Vista….in fact right now she is burning Bill Gates in effigy in her backyard as we speak…

  10. JT – I had a shower last month.

    Ian – Still no word from Ron, and I haven’t seen Dick in ages. Something strange is going on.

    Rhodester – I didn’t know the little sh*t had a blog. Do you have it’s address?

  11. carrying on from Natalie’s explanation of Ubuntu. It is considered good Ubuntu to share your beer/grub with neighbours 🙂 It is currently the ‘buzz’ word in South Africa and we are continuously encouraged to have ‘Ubuntu’ towards our fellow citizens. You on the otherhand Grandad, would be seen to have the opposite of Ubuntu – towards the tourists and for that matter Linux.

  12. Don’t they teach history in today’s computer classes grandad?

    GRUB = “Grand Unified Bootloader”
    grep is another abbreviation but of a different sort. It comes from old vi where to search you would use g//p where RegularExpression is what you are looking for.

    As far as finding things, actually you do use find and locate to find files. If someone told you to grep for the location of your grub file, well you need to smack that person. Between locate from teh command line, and the GUI tools “Find Files” in your menu, the rant seems a tad on the disengenuous side.

  13. TheBaldGuy – When I went to school, there was no such thing as computing. In fact there was no such thing as a portable electronic device at all. Everything [and we are talking wireless and TV] was valve driven.

    I take it you are a Linux aficionado, in which case it will come to you naturally. To someone who is familiar with slide-rules and Windows [at a pinch] then it is a little confusing. To put it mildly..

  14. Oh, all the best people are in Hell, anyway…

    I’d add the near-obligatory ‘get a Mac’ comment, but I might get shot/set fire to.

    By the way, if you want to see truly archaic frightening old UNIX (or Lisp Machine, really) weirdness, try Emacs. Great once you get used to it; the downside is it takes a decade or so to do so.

  15. I’m a South African of Black Irish descent. How about a school boy game? South Africa is better than Ireland. We run over and shoot tourists (and locals) for real – no satire, no joking. Ubuntu is a myth propagated by politicians and is only “believed” by businessmen who wish to lick government’s arse and make a lot of money before they emigrate to Ireland!

  16. ubuntu rocks, for the simple reason that it’s an *easier* way for people to linux..

    it’s all a royal pain in the arse when you start off, but it won’t be easy. try and compare it to using Windows 3.1 (or 3.11 in my case) for the first time..

    if you’re going to linux at all, you have to do it the hard way, ie;

    login as root, if you haven’t done this before, see;
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

    it doesn’t mention there how to “normalise” the root account, ie, set the root password, and use the root account when necassary..

    sudo passwd

    this will prompt for YOUR password (created during install for your normal user) and THEN the NEW UNIX password, pop a new pass in twice, and you’re done.

    locate grub.conf
    vim /the/path/where/grub.conf/exists!
    make a change to the “timeout=5” and change it to 30 seconds instead? change the default too, so that XP boots instead of Ubuntu

    Vista is proving itself (as being crap, and only getting worse) which is why Ubuntu, Fedora, random other distos, and of course Mac OS are going to take the lead. Just decide, will you Linux it or Mac it?

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