Linus Torvalds at the Pearly Gates
Linus Torvalds is standing at the Pearly Gates as people are coming in.
He
asks the first person, "What's your IQ?"
"150."
"I'd like your opinion on some things I've been thinking about in
termsof
tools to partially automate the process of porting a kernel to a new
architecture."
The two of them have a wonderful chat for a couple of hours, and then
the man
goes in.
Linus asks the next person, "What's your IQ?"
"110."
"So, how're the Mets doing?" They chat for half an hour before the man
goes
in.
There is nobody for a while, and Linus begins to get bored. Then,
finally,
another person comes.
"What's your IQ?"
"65."
"Aah, wonderful! Would you mind explaining to me a couple of things
about
Debian's apt-get hamm to slink upgrade?"
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I "upgraded" my laptop from 2.0.34 to 2.1 in order to have better
chances with
Blackdown's Java 2, and I am far from pleased with the results so far.
I have
discovered by now at least two major things that were working quite well
and
are now quite broken:
1: XFree86 was downgraded from 3.3.3 to 3.3.2.1. 3.3.3 supports my
video
card; 3.3.2.1 does not. This means that my X display is now
(mal)functioning at 320x200 -- I can see the lower right quadrant of
an
xterm. The machine was also set to start xdm on boot; coming in with
a
rescue floppy was the only way I could figure out to get it to boot
and
give a text terminal (I did not have the boot scripts start xdm
before).
2: /dev/eth0 no longer exists, and I cannot locate anything in the
documentation telling how to regenerate that or some equivalent
device. MAKEDEV, for instance, did not recognize eth0 as a
parameter.
Therefore, I have no network functionality, and am forced to do all
my
transfers by floppy. There are several dozen megabytes of software I
want to download (Blackdown JDK and XFree86).
This is really frustrating... I can see a plausible reason for the
first
to have happened (specifically, since I did not install 3.3.3 through
dpkg, it thought that the files were its own), but that blindness can
and
should be avoidable. One mechanism I can think of OTOH would be for the
database to keep checksums of the files for earlier versions, so that it
can
at least ask before clobbering something which does work and replacing
it
with something which doesn't work. If this behavior isn't changed,
there
should at least be an emphatically worded warning so that people don't
lose
their files.
Can anybody help me? In particular, can anybody tell me what the major
and
minor numbers should be for /dev/eth0 (or, if that file has been
replaced,
what has replaced it)? I'd really like to have ethernet working, so
that I
can get XFree86 and (God willing) JDK loaded and working, and get back
to my
programming.
-Jonathan
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