Editing config files as root in Knoppix 5.01

I was having difficulty finding a way to get a GUI editor to open config files as root in my HDD install of Knoppix 5.01. On the debianHELP forum, the user "cammoblammo" gave me this tip:

gksu kate [filename]

which works great. I'm repeating this tip here so I myself can find it more easily in the future. :)

The Left vs. property rights.

John Nichols wrote about how the Sister Cities organizations of the 1980's, which originally arose to help people suffering from a civil war at the time, are still active:

An example of how the U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities Network's solidarity model works will be seen Friday at the annual shareholders meeting of Au Martinique Silver Inc., a Canadian-registered mining exploration firm that is promoting development of a gold mine in the Salvadoran department roughly equivalent to a state of Chalatenango. The mining scheme has stirred broad opposition in Chalatenango, where farmers fear that waste from the mining operation will pollute local rivers and water supplies with arsenic and cyanide.

So in the conflict between the mining company and the peasant farmers, it is easy to imagine some entity called "The Left" being on the side of the farmers. The farmers don't want their farms polluted-- their "passive" property rights harmed. There is plenty of anectdotal evidence of mining pollution to prove the farmers concerns valid. The mining company wants to use its property as it wishes, their "active" property rights preserved. Of course, in such a competition, reason would favor the passive right-- just as I have a passive right to enjoy my car's windshield more than you have an active right to do what you wish with your hammer.

But somehow I believe that in the fights between The Left and The Right, the values of capitalism and free markets and liberty and property rights get conflated with corporation's uncharitable use of active property rights-- say hammers. I say capitalism and free markets aren't bad things, it's just that too many apologists for man's-inhumanity-to-man try to tie these good things to their bloody campaigns.

I heard a talk by Arundhati Roy on the radio about dams in India. Her take was that companies were getting big bucks to build dams which would put hundreds of thousands of folks out of home and field. It sounds like such a horribly statist enterprise-- the seizing (destroying) of hundreds of thousands of homes so that a government may enrich one particular business interest. But can't you imagine somewhere along the line the argument gets altered into one of unwashed peasants versus the businesses trying to bring something positive to the country? You know, kind of like was argued in El Salvador in the 1980's?

Ativa USB pen drives: cannot help you.

The biggest driver of hits to this web page recently is search engine hits on "ativa + USB". I wrote one blog post where I made a passing reference to my inability to get it to work with damn small linux. I imagine people want to read solutions and not gripes.

Here's one tip: I experimented with several live distros of linux, and Puppy 2.00 was the best at being able to read the ativa pen drive.

Ah, there we go....

This character seems to find his calling as a sort of circus strongman. You could easily imagine him with a leopard-pattern outfit straight from an old movie. I had been playing around with the strong chin and glasses, and it just didn't seem to match. The moustache however sticks.

Made with povray 3.6 on a box with a Knoppix 5.01 HDD installation. (Once I got wifi going, it was easy to grab pov via synaptic).

Sometimes mistakes along the way are more interesting than the intended art form

Wacky Liberals with far too much time on their hands

From an appeal I ran across from the Humane Society of the U.S.

Save Pets From the Next Disaster

Help prevent what happened after Katrina from ever happening again. The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS Act), requires state and local authorities to consider the needs of individuals with pets and service animals in the event of a major disaster. You could help save thousands of people and pets from anguish -- even loss of life -- during the next major disaster, just by filling out the form on the right to ask your U.S. Senators to support this legislation.

I consider myself very liberal on many issues. But this emphasis on animals when humans aren't even being taken care of goes over the top. It also seems a sort of unfunded mandate.

Workaround for Knoppix 5.01 USB problem

PROBLEM:

Knoppix 5.01 as a live CD, booted live, worked fine for me as far as hardware recognition-- it could see my USB pen drives of mulitple manufacturers. Knoppix 5.01, after a HDD install to my computer, did not. It could not see any USB stick. Or rather, an icon would pop up on the screen, but I couldn't ever get to the stick.

DETECTIVE WORK:

One of the error messages is reported below:

"Could not mount device. The reported error was: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1."

Following the "dmesg" trail, I saw it was complaining about the UID that Knoppix assigned as owner of the stick. Then, I looked at /etc/fstab, both for a live boot and a HDD boot, and saw that they were identical when the pen drive was in. And that's the bug. The "UID" for the /sda1 was in both cases "knoppix". That's the correct userid for a live boot, but it was not the userid I had chosen for my HDD install.

WORKAROUND:

Create a userid of "knoppix" for your HDD install of 5.01, and you should have no problems seeing USB devices. I have reported this problem as Bug #10 at the knoppix wiki for 5.0.

Ark Linux's lecture on what a live CD is for.

From their news item on the main page, "Ark Linux 2006.1-rc2 and Ark Linux Live 2006.1-rc2 released"

About Ark Linux Live
Ark Linux Live is a "Live CD" version of Ark Linux Home, meaning it can be booted directly from the CD, without needing installation.
The primary uses of a Live CD are:

• Recovering a normal system after a big hardware or software failure (Ark Linux will launch a special live CD for this purpose later, with more recovery tools and fewer other tools)
• Checking the system out without any risk
• Showing others what Linux is like, on their own hardware
• Taking your favorite operating system with you - e.g. to get on the net with Linux even if you're on vacation and the only internet cafe in town is a Microsoft shop

While it is possible to use Ark Linux Live as your primary operating system, that is not recommended -- a live CD is always slower than an installed system because CD/DVD drives are slower than harddisks, and the compression needed to fit 2.5 GB of data on a CD takes up processor time. Use Ark Linux Home instead.

Ah, but what if that internet cafe is one merely offering a wifi spot, and not ethernet cables all over the place? What do you do with your Ark Linux live CD? nothing. Because you'd have to remaster the CD to take something off and put madwifi on it. Go figure.

Puppy Linux 2.00's wrongheaded wifi strategy

From Puppy linux 2.00's Wireless Network Wizard:

Welcome to the Puppy Wireless Networking Wizard!
NOTE: if you have a physical Ethernet cable plugged into your PC, this is the wrong Wizard! Click "EXIT" button, and run the Ethernet Wizard....

GOOD: It seems that Perl is available, and Perl is needed to install the Windows driver for the wireless card. You now have three choices:

CHOICE 1: ndiswrapper
Note that Perl is only required during installation of the driver.
Okay, that is one requirement out of two! Now, do you have the CD that came with the wireless card? If so, click the "Setup_ndiswrapper" button...

CHOICE 2: wifi-beta.pup
If you do not have the XP driver for the card, Bladehunter (Forum name) has developed wifi-beta.pup, a DotPup package that enables you to use ndiswrapper without requiring Perl. But, it only works for certain wifi cards. Find out more and to download, go to the Announcements section of the Puppy Forum. Download it, install it (it is a DotPup package, so after downloading it, you just click on it to install it), then run this Wizard again.
Please click "EXIT" button if wifi-beta.pup not installed...
Please click "Run_WAG" button if wifi-beta.pup is installed...

CHOICE 3: Use a Linux driver
Many wifi cards have a Linux driver module and some are installed in Puppy, and more can be found if you go to the Announcements section of the Puppy Forum. Quit this Wizard, install a driver, load it with modprobe, then run this Wizard.
Please click "EXIT" button only...

My goodness, you either need the WinXP driver for your device (where the heck is the one for my laptop??), or a PhD in computer science and to piecemeal a bunch of things together, downloaded separately. You might as well write your own distro, or go get one with madwifi already installed as part of the distro. DSL-N somehow manages to have it, while too being a very small distro.

Lunchtime render

20 minutes composition time from scratch, not counting final render time.

povray 3.6 with DSL-N linux on a SanDisk USB pen drive

Probably could have looked better at higher altitude but i gotta move on.
Code below:

camera{location<0,1.2,2> look_at <0,0,4> angle 40}

#declare rrr=seed(123);
light_source{<0,100,0> color rgb 1}

blob{
threshold 0.2
#declare n=0;
#while(n<30000)

sphere{0, .1,.1 translate }
#declare n=n+1;
#end
pigment{crackle
pigment_map{
[0 green 0.9]
[1 rgb <0.15,0.65,0.15>]}
scale 0.03}

normal{bumps scale 0.1}
}

box{-100,<100,0,100>
pigment{blue 1}
normal{bumps scale 0.031}
finish{reflection 0.3} }

background{color rgb <0.7,0.7,0.9>}