Not much testing recently

When I do more testing on the job, I do less testing in my free time. I have been working since November 2; I moved from a home I had owned to an apartment on November 7, and the next thing I need to do is schedule a Cataract Surgery appointment; I have a consultation in January unless I can get it moved up sooner.

During the course of gradually moving things from my home to my apartment, apparently I did not secure the deadlock bolt between the house and the garage. Someone opened the fence to the back yard, peered in and saw some computer stuff, came in, found a suitcase, took it and used it (with handle and wheels) to carry off some moderate sized computer equipment - mini desktop, monitor, external USB drive, and printer. That also affects my testing; the USB drive had lots of ISO images, which I could test with Virtualbox OSE. Until I can replace it I will do without and test less.

Using Debian Squeeze

Last Friday I downloaded a daily build of Debian Squeeze and I have been using it since that time. I was not very happy with the default graphical installer; it got into a loop when I attempted to start it in the default settings. I did not attempt to figure out what was happening; I used the text based installation instead. I was not very happy with it either. When I tried to reuse an existing partition to load Squeeze, the partition handling routine failed. I had to remove the data on that partition, delete the partition, then create a new partition in the same spot, then it worked.

That had other undesirable side effects, because it renumbered the partitions after the partition that was recreated. This caused me other problems and even temporarily caused one of my existing systems to have a kernel failure, probably due to its initrd file no longer reflecting the correct disk identification, so more work is needed to get things back in order. I have copied the contents of that system that I want to retain to an external USB disk, so that when I reinstall that system or reconfigure it, I will not lose all of the information that I had saved.

Once past these annoying issues, Debian Squeeze has proven to be a solid system, and I have not encountered a single problem with the installed system, and in fact, I have been using it ever since.

There have been a modest number of changes since Friday to Debian Squeeze, so it has not been quite as volatile as the Debian Sid based systems that I usually use.

I'm not happy with the state of the Debian Squeeze installer, but to be fair to the Debian project, it is not final, and in fact, this was only a daily build that I installed, so I expect the final version not to have the issues that I experienced. I will check it out again later, and also see if others have encountered the issues I faced, and if not, report them as installation related defects.

Keeping technically astute

I am working hard at reading and studying about technology, while at the same time, spending time each day researching companies and looking for a job.

I most recently worked in project management, so that is my first preference, but in most of the project management work, there were still close ties with quality assurance, and I rolled up my sleeves a number of times to help testing efforts, so both my QA and Project Management skills are fresh, and I am working VERY HARD at keeping it that way.

I have had two other times during the course of my career where I went through long lapses between assignments in the software industry. Both times I worked very hard to remain as current as possible on the technology.

The most recent time I was extremely successful at it, and even was able to demonstrate capabilities beyond what I had originally been hired to do, leading quickly to a move to a position with additional responsibilities. I want to make certain that I can do the same thing as I continue to look for work.

Karsten and I are doing our Blogs

My son Karsten loves computers and he is an avid SimplyMEPIS Linux fan. He is using it right now on a Dell Latitude D600 laptop while I use sidux on a Gateway PA6A 17" portable.

Karsten desperately wants to get his blog working. I will be helping him out so he learns how to do it appropriately.

Slackware 13.0 and Jibbed 5.0.1 Live CD

Yesterday I downloaded the new Slackware 13.0 32 bit DVD (there is also a 64 bit implementation). I have not installed it yet, but I plan to do that some time during the next week.

Slackware was the very first distribution of GNU/Linux software that I ever used. It was quite familiar to me because I was an active UNIX system user prior to that, and I would frequently download and use various GNU utilities - tar, gzip, and GNU Emacs in particular, on my UNIX systems.

As I was typing, I just received notification that my download of the Jibbed 5.0.1 Live CD is complete. Jibbed is a Live CD implementation of NetBSD, and it contains a pre-packaged XFCE desktop implementation. For those of you who have used NetBSD or OpenBSD before, you may know that the standard NetBSD and OpenBSD do not include any window managers or automatic setup for X, though there are procedures that do allow you (on your own) to install and configure a rich assortment of applications, including X and many window managers. I generally do not have the time available to spend configuring them, though I have done so in the past. But this pre-configured setup might be a quick and handy way to use NetBSD (possibly on the fly).

At the very least, I intend to test this out on my Virtualbox OSE setup.

Hope to be trying BSDAnywhere 4.5 soon

I previously downloaded a copy of BSDAnywhere, but this time I wanted to save the ISO image on my removable USB disk drive, where there is plenty of free space, so that I can reference the ISO image directly in Virtualbox OSE and run a virtual instance of BSDAnywhere 4.5.

I plan to do that today.

Canabix Linux distro starting up, checking it out

I recently found out about a new Linux distro that has not yet been released: Canabix. Like UNIX, this name seems to be a play on words, like “What have you been smoking”?

The people involved in the early activities for this upcoming distribution mostly come from the sidux community. Not long ago there were serious sparks flying between the existing developers and a developer who left the project entirely over disagreements concerning the use of administrative add on tools.

The Canabix project, at least at this juncture, seems to have none of those kinds of arguments. If anything, a lot of joking takes place.

I look forward to adding what I can to this new community.