Still alive post

Schrodinger’s cat.

Am I alive or not?

I dunno either. Lets see what happens in a month when schools over with again.

legopatandmat

Why Arch Linux is officially my new favorite distro, why I am leaving BSD, and why I am creating Gryphix.

Lets go in order by the title. Starting with Arch. A reminder, this is my opinion, I will not say “in my opinion” for the entire post, because I don’t want to have to remind you. It is okay if you disagree with me. Arch Linux is a distro based off of CRUX Linux, a distro I myself have been using alongside FreeBSD, and follows some principles that CRUX follows such as the KISS philosophy. Even though Arch has been breaking away from these philosophies, I feel like it still has some of the essence. Arch has introduced many new pieces of software in the open source world such as systemd that has come with quite a reaction, as well. So, what I am trying to say is, Arch Linux has changed, and is probably still changing.

But is this change good?

I don’t know why I asked that question, since it is just a matter of opinion (EXCEPTION!). I, at first, scoffed at these changes, since I am a chap who dislikes change at first. It’s quite ignorant of me to do so, since I barely give change a chance, but it’s just me. After research, I seem to be interested in Arch’s changes, such as systemd. So, to me, it’s good, if you know exactly what this change is, and means. To some people, it is nothing, to others, it probably made them want to leave. Happens all the time when change occurs. Anyways, on to the next thing about Arch!

pacman and the AUR.

In my opinion, flawless. Arch knows how to do package management, and it knows how to allow it’s community to assist with software. I’ve seen all over the web users praising the AUR for installing obscure or packages that aren’t cut for the official repos for multiple reasons. pacman, from what I have seen, is probably the best package manager for managing binaries. When I used Arch a little bit over a year ago, I remember pacman very well. I got pretty pissed at it at first, but once I understood the commands and how it worked, I was comfortable with it. I love how pacman asks you everything, without being annoying  I love how it doesn’t delete anything that is in “question” (take .pacnew files for example). I love how pacman has a cool name, actually. Now, I am a guy that hates going the easy route. I would rather compile Blender from scratch than type “sudo apt-get install blender” or “sudo pacman -S blender”, but I think I have had enough time in no mans land to remember some tricks, and I’m not gonna let some easy to use package manager with 100% guaranteed dep checking get in my way of learning some more, but c’mon, everyone needs a break, whether you want to say so or not.

There’s one more thing, the ABS. Just another way to add packages to your system very easily. So, Arch has a lot of services, and makes it “simple” to do a lotta stuff. One thing I gotta criticize is the install process. I enjoyed the install ncurses framework more than I did these scripts they have, and I didn’t like either of them in the first place. I really like the “traditional” way. I can’t really define traditional, since there really isnt 2 exact same install processes, but I think that CRUX aims to be the closest.

Onto the next order of, uhm, I guess you can call it buisness.

Why I left BSD.

TL;DR: It’s difficult to get set up on the desktop side of things. I’m not saying it makes a good or bad desktop OS, it’s just not, well, Linux. Nor is it a distro. It’s a true UNIX operating system, and that is probably why I chose to use it in the first place. It also doesn’t have support for a lot of stuff. Like ALSA and Flash to name a few. Anyways, that sums it up pretty well.

Now onto some detail! My initial reaction to FreeBSD (which is the only BSD I used) was good. I like what I had. I said I had “…the stability of Debian, with the (sort of) bleeding edge features of Arch, and the configuration options and abilities of Slackware…” I then said “This is an Operating System I don’t see myself backing away from anytime soon” but, well, you can probably figure out what happened there. So, yes, first several days were great! Everything was understandable to me, and I liked it. But, after a month or so of use, I began to see some things that I probably wouldn’t be able to work out like my Wacom tablet. That is probably due to my procrastination-ish mind and laziness, but it didn’t work. Well, let me rephrase that. It worked, but I couldn’t draw with it. So, it was just a touchpad, and I don’t like touchpads. I like graphic tablets. Another thing was the constant seg faults. Yeah, I dunno. What were some good things about FreeBSD? It’s unixyness and the ports. Ports were awesome, and I understood them in about 2 days. Amazing feature. But, there were a couple more cons than pros, and I had to retreat.

 

Last thing is Gryphix. That thing I always talk about. That dead website, and that post. I like Linux. I’m a Linux guy. I used to be a Windows guy, and I am not fit to be a UNIX guy. Linux and UNIX are different. They have some similarities, but they are different. Linux is the modern UNIX, I guess you could say. It’s what the hip guys are using, and I use it too. I’m a Linux user, not a UNIX user. Simple as that. Well, I love Linux. I get happy when I turn on my PC at home and see LILO. I like to see systemd boot up (I’m working on it). I like how modular everything is. I like it’s complex simplicity. I like it. I wanna make my own, cause I can, so I am. Gryphix is more than just some project that some kid thinks he can pull through. It’s my education. It’s what  I will use to learn Linux. But, like, LEARN LINUX. OS calls, how swap works, how the kernel itself works, like, the code. I might learn those things, I might not, but I do know that I will learn something new, and thats all I care about. Is learning more. I like Linux, I like using Linux, all I do is Linux. Linux is probably why I wake up in the morning and go through a hellish day at school. So I can reunite with my Linux. My passion. Writing software is the reason why I breathe. I get so happy when I see code. So, I want to make my own. I want to make my own Linux and I want to make my own code.

Anyways, that’s why.

If I haven’t said it enough already.

Spuk, Gryphix’s package manager

I told myself to not do anything till I get something function in Gryphix working. What is Gryphix right now? A dead website, and a useless installation of LFS, with a binary called spuk in /usr/bin. That’s the truth. I’m lazy, and I suck at what I do. But I want to do it, and that is enough for me. So, this post must mean something right? Yes, it does. Spuk can… well…

Download files!

Yeah, 6 months into “development”, and no progress. Better late than never, I guess. Well. here is what I have to say about Spuk:

 

I’m using libcurl as  the means to do the downloading, and I am writing the whole thing in C. I don’t have a lot, only about, well, 15 lines of code. It really just download single files. That is it. its the same as wget (URL). But, hey, guys, a 15 year old kid did it. 

Yeah, you’re right, I’m an idiot who has no idea what he is doing. 

Whatever, I wanna see what I can do with curl_easy_perform.

wget tutorial Part 2, which is probably the last part.

Back in September, I made a wget tutorial. Since I am a lazy guy, you can still find it on this page of my blog, or maybe the second, depending on the size of this post. Back then I was running Slackware, and I was still attempting to do things I told myself I would do over the summer, even though it wasnt really summer then. /Life.

Anyways, where I left off was changing the directory where the file to be downloaded, would be… downloaded. I actually covered a lot in my last tutorial. In the context of syntax, I really only covered 3 or 4 commands, but you know, that syntax can do a vast number of things with just a few topics of knowledge (assuming that the word “topic” is some how a measurment of anything…)

Well, hopefully I haven’t confused you with that last paragraph, casuse I am about to get started:

This part will just be info I scrounged from the man page, since I can’t remeber syntax to save myself, which would make you question why I want to be an OS dev, but, whatever. Do what you want. So, you want to download file lol.jpeg from the domain loljpegforfree.com, sketchy file name on a very sketchy domain, but I’ll rolll with it. But, lets say you want to connect to ONLY IPv4 IP address, for some reason.

wget -4 http://loljpegforfree.com/files/pictures/lol.jpeg

You may have guessed that IPv6 addresses are as follows:

wget -6 http://loljpegforfree.com/files/pictures/lol.jpeg

 wget has the capability of logging into FTP servers, not just logging in anonymously. You can set 2 variables: USER and PASS, which set the username and password, respectfully, with whatever you enter.

wget –user=ENTER_USERNAME_HERE –password=ENTER_PASSWORD_HERE

Then, simply enter the name of the file you wish to download from the server, and you’re good to go. wget can also create logs of things that you do/download.

wget –output-files=FILE [URL]

Will log output of the wget session to the file located in the filepath that is inserted in FILE.

Thats all I got. To crawl a website (Act like a web spider, this is what Google does to make it’s search engine work) use the –spider flag.

wget –spider [URL]

There, I did it. Now, to upgrade to 9.1-RELEASE. Too new to use -STABLE.

FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE is now out

Cool new feature: Intel GPU driver that supports Kernel Modesetting, which now means that both my deskop AND laptop can run FreeBSD!

Second time this year I’ve switched operating systems, and as soon as I do, there is a new release… I really should wait for these. Let’s see if I can upgrade without breaking KDE4…

 

Also wget tutorial today, cause I said I would before the end of the year. 

It’s no suprise to me I am my own worst enemy

Inactivity has been invading my blog! Egad!

Well, whose to blame for that? Me, myself, and I. Again my excuse is me just not having enough time to post. Post post post post. I’ve typed post a lot in my life. Well, I suppose I will just explain what is going on with my life.

I’ve abandoned Linux.

No, I’m not running Windows.

No, not Mac OS X, either.

What else could it be?!

FreeBSD!

Yeah, BSD has been my attention for the past month. I like it. Technical specifications? Which is just a short term for what I’m running… FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE with KDE 4.8.4 as my desktop environment. Besides the base system, I have compiled ALL my software. KDE, subversion, wget, whatever is in userland is compiled. I got the stability of Debian, with the (sort of) bleeding edge features of Arch, and the configuration options and abilities of Slackware. This is an Operating System I don’t see myself backing away from anytime soon.  I still have a lot of configuring ahead of me (Don’t have Java, can’t play MPEG-3 files…), however such complexity is the reason why I would prefer statically installing my sound card driver manually into my kernel, instead of just plugging it in and clicking a slider, to note a scenario I attempted. Well, what does this mean for my blog? How does it affect it?

For you, the reader… It doesn’t. Linux was a base point of the creation of this blog (Or atleast this newest version… I think I’ve had this blog for almsot 4 years…), so I just have to take out Linux and replace FreeBSD. Is it naive of me to do that? To just switch it out? I guess so. I don’t see why not. I mean, not literally of course, figuratively.

What am I talking about?

Gryphix. That OS I am making. Still making. gryphix.org says to go here, but there is nothing here. Holidays and BSD filled my mind. I’ll see if I can fit some space for spuk the package manager and C.

Welp, an update. I’m still alive, and my intetions are still the same.