I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.

For Linux it’s a simple shell script, nothing fancy is needed. If the script ends with a 0 exit value, the commit will work, if it exits non-zero, the commit will fail. In Windows the syntax is different because you don’t have a real shell. Instead, you use batch file commands to accomplish the same thing. The logic is pretty much the same because it’s simple.

Udev creates and removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel sends out on device discovery or removal. In other words, Udev is the system that maps hardware devices to files you can interact with in the /dev directory. Udev runs in user space and creates points in /dev when the kernel detects and recognizes new hardware as it’s attached. It’s only been around since 2003/2004. All modern distributions use udev instead of the now depreciated hotplug.

I always hate having to reboot a server. I can almost always avoid it. And that sounds like there’s some effort put into avoiding the reboot, and you might think that — if you’re used to a world of Windows servers. But it’s just not that hard to keep a server up.

This is pretty simple, just like in Windows. You could probably set it up quicker in Linux too. Too much clicking in windows.

I joke, I joke, but what will they do? Perhaps it will just mean an even cheaper price point as microsoft takes a loss like they did with the original Xbox. When netbooks first came out, they only ran Linux, and microsoft got scared and changed their mind about ditching XP. It’s too bad the consumer demand for XP over Vista never influenced their decision. That would be out of character for microsoft.

I’ll start with a small DSL linux image. It’s only 50 meg, but it’s a pretty useful little distribution.
ls -lh dsl-4.4.10.iso

-rw-r–r– 1 ninja ninja 50M 2009-08-28 13:11 dsl-4.4.10.iso

Mount the original iso image you want to modify
mount -t iso9660 dsl-4.4.10.iso /mnt/original -o loop
Copy the everything that you just mounted to another …

The small size of the eeePC makes it a handy little machine to take with you anywhere you go. There’s plenty of smart phones out there that are just as expensive or more and lack 90% of the features of a netbook. Sporting a freshly installed eeeBuntu, the netbook does the job of browsing and word processing with an Atom N280 chip, 1024×600 back-lit LCD, two gigs of memory, Ethernet, wifi, three USB ports and a VGA port. The latest version of eeeBuntu Linux was installed from a USB live image.

and then I ran across this post with palm and blackberry users whining about their crappy devices, praying for the next gen linux smartphone gods to save them.

This lets you access your Linux home directory and local DVD drive from Windows without having to set up additional cifs/nfs mounts. My home directory is an NFS mount from another server, so you should be able to access *any* file system that is available on your Linux side.