SPARC Live CD?

Neil Joseph Schelly neil at jenandneil.com
Thu Dec 21 07:57:07 EST 2006


On Wednesday 20 December 2006 07:13 pm, Paul Lussier wrote:
> I wouldn't call myself a Solaris fan, I haven't really used it in
> about 5 or 6 years.  But I know it well enough to feel at home there
> and found your description of "painfully lacking" a bit extreme.

That wasn't a dig on all Solaris boxes everywhere.  On this machine, it's 
appropriate.  It was setup long ago by people who shouldn't be allowed to 
touch a computer.  I turned it on and /usr/local couldn't be mounted.  I 
don't know the root password off the top of my head.  Ask me where sudo was 
installed next.  

> Hmmm, I seem to check man pages by instinct and make liberal use of
> -(-)h(elp).  As far as stuff not being in my $PATH, ahm, that's
> *almost* not possible :)

And doesn't it take you longer when you have to check the man pages for each 
common command you run?  Or when `man gzip` doesn't give you anything useful 
because the man pages either aren't to be found or aren't even in one of the 
thousand man paths you already know about?  There's crap all over this 
machine. I never setup a real home on it and any portable home scripts I 
could use would be out of place since this machine is so scattered.

> > (though not with locate because that's not there).
> Locate is too often wrong (i.e. not up-to-date) to be dependable for me.

It's not up to date?  It's as up to date as it was when it last ran.  This is 
an old machine that isn't actively being used even.  What do you use that's 
quicker than locate?

> To me, the 
> amount of time spent looking for, downloading, and burning the
> appropriate Live CD would have been far greater than a simple perusal
> of a couple of man pages.  

I can download a CD image without looking.  It comes with the opportunity to 
do my job more quickly.  Browsing around with a man page lookup every few 
keystrokes is annoying and keeps me from doing other things.

> If I found that I *really* needed something 
> from GNU or Linux that Solaris was missing, I'd extract the drive from
> the Sparc and mount it under Linux and just us rsync/cp/mv/tar to put
> it where I can easily get at it rather than mess with a LiveCD distro.
> At least that way I'd also have my own home directory, shell,
> environment, and extensions at my disposal as well.
>
> I view LiveCDs as either a nice way to try out a new distro or an
> indispensable recovery tool when there's absolutely no other easier
> way.  Again, just my opinion.

I don't have another machine I can put these drives in.  I can't imagine what 
would cause you so much hatred toward LiveCDs.  I don't have some super 
custom environment I work in that a LiveCD with a modern BASH shell doesn't 
suffice me fine for.  I consider it good to have a collection of them handy 
for rainy days too, so it would have been nice to find a LiveCD I could use 
on this box in the event I needed one down the road.  I learned something as 
did everyone here from the experience of looking.  

Why do I feel like I'm defending myself for asking a question?
-N


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