[school-discuss] BASIC-256, Linux, &c.

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

LM wrote:
>Having a class try to work through a Linux from Scratch
>book seems like a good way for them to learn the internals.

If the goal is to give the students knowledge about the nuts and
bolts of Linux as such, then by all means have them construct a
distro from scratch. However, there is a reason I suggested they
could âalso get experience in providing technical support to an
end user.â I'm not a Linux administrator or the like; I'm a
digital artist who is attempting to put together the best possible
environment in which I can do my work. The hardware and
software are components of this larger goal. The context isn't
about Linux for it's own sake; it isn't even about computers all
the time, since I will (when it's appropriate) grab a plain old
fashioned pencil and a piece of graph paper to sketch out a
certain stage of a project I'm working on. If students are in
contact with me, they can see their activities connecting to a
larger world away from the computers. I encourage you to 
show students some of the pictures I've made....

http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/307020

....and see if they display any interest.

Now onto the technical details of my tools. The laptop is a
Dell Inspiron 1545 with three GB of RAM. This amount of
memory, and a 64 bit dual core chip, are plenty for my needs--
*if* (of course) all of the hardware and software are brought
together properly. As Bill noted, this is not going to be easy.
The laptop's original OS (MS Windows 7), while it was dying
its slow and ugly death, gave error messages that seemed to
indicate possible problems with the hard drive and/or other
components. The messages often contradicted each other;
furthermore, my general success in running Linux distros on
this machine appear to indicate that the hardware isn't in any
really bad condition. But we can't take anything for granted.

I'm currently running Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.1. Bill suggested
this could have the right Qt version for a BASIC-256 build.
I haven't started that yet, as I'm still looking at other options.
Ubuntu does have an old version of BASIC-256 in its repository,
and that's what I'm using now. It's pretty stable, but I also
have to deal with significant limitations in the old version,
which is why I started thinking about building a newer version
from source in the first place.

For some time, I was running Trisquel on this laptop:

http://trisquel.info/

Trisquel is derived from some recent Ubuntu version, but the
people behind Trisquel are âFree Softwareâ ideological
fanatics associated with the FSF, and they scrupulously went
through the thing removing every bit of code that didn't meet 
their exacting standards of Freedom. One can see the similarities
between Trisquel and Ubuntu, but significant differences are
visible as well. Overall, I liked Trisquel better. Unfortunately,
BASIC-256 (also an old version) had a habit of crashing in
Trisquel without any particular warning or pattern. Another
reason why I'm hunting for solutions.

I went through NetBSD's repository and found an old BASIC-256
version. When I tried installing the OS, its program came up with
strange data about how my hard drive was supposedly operating,
and NetBSD refused to install. One more bites the dust.

In a private email to me, LM mentioned Arch Linux. In its
repository, it does show a recent version of BASIC-256. The
installation instructions for Arch seem to be saying that it is
not one of the easy âsemi-automaticâ installs that us lazy
ignoramuses like. If I do give Arch a shot, I think I'll print out
the instructions and hope I can work through the thing OK.
But this probably won't happen until after Christmas some time,
so you guys will be able to throw other ideas and suggestions
at me for at least a few more days. :-)

Happy Holidays.

Joel
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