Showing posts with label Debian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Debian. Show all posts

Monday, 4 January 2010

My 2010 resolution

A lot of people failed to achieve their last year resolution. I did not make any resolution last year, but I believe I made a lot of progress last year. New job, better salary, Suse Linux Professional 10 certification, ITIL v3 Foundation certification... quite an achievement I would say.

Most people also think, resolution should be made on new year day, but I think, resolution should be made year round. In Islam, there is a concept of daily muhasabah before you goes to sleep, to think what you have done good today, what you have not done what you should be doing, what bad thing that you have done and what you should do tomorrow to make sure it is a better day than yesterday, and you become a better person than yesterday.

So, if you still don't have you 2010 resolution, read this article first: New Year's Resolutions Experiment

In essence, the article mention that
Men were significantly more likely to succeed when asked to engage in either goal setting (e.g., instead of trying to lose weight in general, aiming to lose a pound each week), or focusing on the rewards associated with achieving their goal (e.g., being more attractive to the opposite sex).

Women were more successful when they told their friends and family about their resolution, or were encouraged to be especially resilient and not to give up because they had reverted to the old habits (e.g., if dieting, treating a chocolate binge as a temporary setback rather than as failure).

It also said that it is better to have only one resolution, and the resolution is specific.

For 2010, I have several resolution, but I will try my best to achieve it for the length of the year. Here goes:

1. Be a Red Hat Certified Engineer
2. Learn Python, become a master, and get certified.
3. Be a Debian Developer

Resolution number 3 will be very tough, but I know I should start doing something to become a Debian Developer. Let see if I can achieve what I have planned here by the end of the year :)


Monday, 23 July 2007

Journey to NetBSD world - part zero

I’m always unhappy with Linux memory requirement for old and small memory PC. I have an Intel Pentium 133 MHz, with 64 MB RAM. Installing minimal Debian Linux, without any other application will eat up as much as 50 MB of RAM, leaving only about 14 MB for application. On percentage basis, Linux took about 78% of system memory.

Few people that I have asked about this issue, advise me to recompile the kernel, and remove any unnecessary thing that is available in the kernel. Well, being lazy, I want an OS that when installed out-of-the-box, will use small enough memory, while leaving a lot more for application.

I have heard about NetBSD for a long time, since I started using Linux in 2001. But, I don't have the courage to use it; maybe because when I first use Linux, I thought Linux is hard enough. BSD-based OS must be harder. But sometimes, necessity can be a good motivator for you to try something new.

In this part zero, I will explain the preparation that I have done to install NetBSD on the machine. Because the machine already got Debian Sarge, I don't want to format it because I think it might come handy later. So, I bought a used 2GB hard disk drive, just for this exercise. It's not that expensive, only RM 16

Because the PC can be considered a dinosaur, it can only boot from floppy and hard disk. There is no way to boot from CD. So, to get the floppy boot image, I browsed to http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/i386/installation/floppy/ and then downloading boot1.fs and boot2.fs using IE. (My office is using IE, btw )

Then I download WinRawrite from http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite to write the image into a couple of floppy disk. The write process complete, but when I tried to boot the floppy, the machine keeps rebooting. Hmm... why this is happening? NetBSD don't like my PC? NetBSD is not good enough? (scratching my head)

Reading again the installation document, they already mentioned that the image must be downloaded in “binary” format. Downloading using web browser will result in the image downloaded as “ascii” format. They advised to download the image using FTP client, and setting the client to download in binary format.

This time, the Debian installation really comes handy. I plug again the Debian hard disk; reboot the computer, and FTP into NetBSD ftp site. Download the image using binary format, then write the image into floppy disk. I write the image using dd command available in Debian.

dd if=boot1.fs of=/dev/fd0
dd if=boot2.fs of=/dev/fd0


I re-plug the blank hard disk, then boot the computer with the NetBSD boot floppy, and few minutes later, NetBSD installation menu comes up on the screen. Wee… I manage to boot NetBSD

On next part of the journey, I will show what option I select during the installation, and how it progress after that. Till next time.