Significant Discoveries, Revelations, and Worthwhile Ideals
The open source community is a form of anarchy, which is its strength: But the community needs solidarity to fulfill its potential and to cast off the shackles of disorganization and ineffectiveness.
To accomplish its potential, a means of unifying the community behind worthwhile ideals need be devised, and a method of disseminating important discoveries and revelations devised and implemented.
Indeed, this was the foundation of the community when GNU established the Free Software Foundation.
“All history hath shewn that mankind is more disposed to suffer than to alter or abolish those forms to which it has become accustomed.” Declaration of Independence (1776)
I logged onto this forum today to share what I think is an important revelation with others, only to realize that the form to which we have become accustomed does not accommodate that end very well;
wherefore, I have submitted this message in the hope that it will germinate an idea that will alter those forms to which we have become accustomed… as GNU’s novel idea for free software once did.
For the novice attempting to build a linux system, it is a daunting and perilous task. Even for the seasoned veteran there exists many potential pitfalls, and they might become afflicted with cranial rectalitis on any given day or hour:
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for the community to share its collective knowledge and assist that intimidated novice in that first linux build! Can you imagine the quality and power that would be placed at that novice’s fingertips in only a couple of hours? Even the most knowledgeable expert could benefit greatly. Such sessions could be recorded and would add greatly to our knowledge base and how to tutorials: Especially if the truly enlightening sessions were posted prominently.
I spent 5 years in college studying computers, and have spent another 5 or so years attempting to build linux systems in my spare time, albeit mostly with inadequate, obsolete junk computer components.
I’ve remained like the optimist child in the room full of horse dung… looking for the pony!
Yesterday, I attempted (once again) to install opensuse 11.1 on a true dream machine as far as hardware goes. I was attempting to set it up to run vmware, so two kernels were installed to /boot, along with the debug applications in .tar.gz form. For the first time in my life, I choose to use LVM instead of hard partitioning. After all the hundreds of builds, I still do not consider myself to be a partitioning expert, but I have learned a thing or three about it.
I took the defaults for LVM, thinking that I would be easily able to allocate space if needed. The default settings allocated only 20 Meg on the /boot. I was unable to update more than 1 update at a time, and even after much persistence there was one that I could not do. I kept getting the error message “Aborted by User” and the yast2 system update program would exit. I used the yast2 software update program to attempt installing the last update, and it failed, but gave me a much more descriptive error message… which told me that I was out of space on /boot!
I moved some files out of /boot and installed the last update without a hitch. This may not seem like it is that important, but it revealed that 20 Meg is not sufficient for today’s installs. I see as I look, that many are loosing their systems and incurring much frustration with linux because of this.
When I tried to share this revelation with the community, I find that the forms to which we have become accustomed to not lend themselves toward that end, but rather they tend toward obscuring the discovery by making any post I can make like finding a needle in a hay stack.
I hope that you will read this, and attempt to alter or abolish the forms to which we have become accustomed so that the open source community will be unified by lofty ideals and easily able to learn of important discoveries and revelations.
Fiat Justicia Ruat Caeleum
