smert.net

While initially setting up a kickstart installation on CentOS I needed to add additional repositories without having to worry about them overwriting base packages. Thankfully there are two options priorities and protectbase. Since I was only adding one extra repository that would conflict with anything (rpmforge) I used protectbase. It is really easy to setup all you need to do is add protect = 1 to the yum repositories that you want to protect located in /etc/yum.repos.d. Now everything works great and I don’t have to worry about a 3rd party RPMs effecting the stability of the base OS. I always assumed the process would be the same for RHEL too but this was a bad assumption.

Read more

Recently I’ve bought another PC which I’ve started using in place of my laptop while I am at home. I’ve decided to switch my laptop back to a machine for testing. I like trying other Linux distributions and I don’t care for testing them out using virtualization. Once I get a feel for it on a actual machine it is a lot easier to test and revert to a previous state using VMware Server or VirtualBox. Since I’m using it for testing again I decided to put several distributions back on it. At one time many months ago I had installed Windows XP (with Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit which is now called Windows SteadyState), Windows Vista, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Slackware and Ubuntu. That didn’t last long because I was actually using that computer and I didn’t want to make major changes to it when newer versions of the distributions came out.

Read more

For many small Windows programs I use AutoIT (I’m not much of a programmer) and in Linux I do a lot of Bash scripting (comparatively). In middle school I took a computer course where I learned some Basic programming. I really started learning programming on my TI-83 using kinda a form of Basic. I was interested in games and how they worked so I tediously copied the entire source from them onto paper to learn from it. Eventually I wrote a game for it (hah it still exists) and I was planning to port it to Z80 Assembly (since it was sloooooow, and it would run out of memory). When I started learning Z80 assembly for processor and coding it by hand since I didn’t have a PC. At one time I started to learn some assembly for the x86 because I was interested in making an OS and understanding how it works. I’ve used Perl over the years a few times to do more complicated things that I couldn’t do in Bash. I’ve wrote a packet sniffer for Diablo 2 in C++ and a few tiny Visual Basic applications (for generating large IP address lists) many years ago. I’ve created some rather large projects in mIRC scripting (AIM client). I feel that I’ve started to reach the limits of AutoIT when I have to rely on DLL calls and other executables to get the job done. I’d rather learn an actual programming language than continue to work with AutoIT. AutoIT still has a place for me when I need to make tiny program, automate a task or create a installer.

Read more