Re: OT: Re: [Pan-users] Click on URL in a post??

[Duncan]

On Thu 12 Dec 2002 12:57, Eric Ortega posted as excerpted below:
> Barf.
>
> I install Debian over the net.  Part of this process involves creating
> two floppy disks, root and rescue.  As a byproduct of a net installation
> of Debian you also have a disk with a bootable linux kernel and some
> editors and fsck and the like on it.  Saves you when you have lusers
> mucking about in places they don't belong (it's a graduate lab, gimme
> a break) and/or when your distribution decides to go bonkers as yours did.
>
> No sed necessary.  Just mount your /dev/hda or whatever, edit, then
> reboot.
>
> Of course, learning sed will help you in the long run, I guess, assuming
> you never learn perl.  ;)

Interesting...  I'm working on perl now...

As for the boot and rescue disks, I have them around too (in this case, both 
on floppy, and as part of the original install CDs which also work as 
bootable rescue disks), but was a bit proud of the fact that I didn't have to 
resort to them.  

On sed, that was the first thing that came to mind after I realized mc and vim 
wouldn't work, as I had seen the section devoted to sed in "The Arabian" 
("Linux in a Nutshell").  That gave me a chance to dive in and actually work 
with it a bit.  

After that, I realized I could use sed in a PAN starter script as well.  PAN 
at that time had a 1 G max cache, and I'd have difficulty with it deleting 
posts b4 I could even read them, because I often do >1G d/l sessions (not so 
hard to do on a cable modem!).  I'd realized that I could manually edit the 
config file to my preferred 4 gig, but it had a tendency to revert, if I then 
used the preferences dialog.  Thus, I set up a script to start PAN that first 
used sed to alter that line in the config file back to 4G if it was smaller 
than that, b4 starting PAN itself, which I renamed to pan.real.  Then, I 
installed a symlink named pan, that pointed to the script, so I didn't have 
to alter my menus, etc, and updating pan wouldn't erase the script, just the 
symlink, so all I'd have to do then would be to again rename pan to pan.real, 
and recreate the symlink.  Of course, I eventually got tired of that, and 
made my first PAN suggestion.  The next version of PAN increased the max 
cache size to 20 gigs, which should be plenty, until 10Mbps ethernet WAN 
internet links and 1 terabyte drives become common, anyway.  (My normal cache 
runs up to about 2gig at times, so the 4 gig setting I use is plenty.)

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin