“A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderſtanding of hard uſuall Engliſh words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine Engliſh words, gathered for the benefit and helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more eaſily and better vnderſtand many hard Engliſh words, vvhich they ſhall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elſe vvhere, and alſo be made able to vſe the same aptly themſelues.”
— Full title of the first English dictionaryYou know what Anaconda really needs?
An Unselect All button, so you don’t have to manually click on dozenshundreds of “optional” packages that are installed by default. It’s pretty sad that the easiest way to reduce the amount of cruft in a Fedora/Redhat/CentOS install is to ignore the GUI package selector, install once, save the resulting Kickstart config, load it into a text editor, strip out everything you’re sure you won’t need, re-install with that template, and then see if you ended up with a bootable system.
This still installs a lot of stuff that you’ll never need or want, but at least the resulting package list is smaller, and after a few iterations you can build a decent server or netbook install.
[Update: If my script is correct (package selection from comps.xml and dependencies from primary.sqlite), installing Fedora 10 without changing the default list of packages will install 1099 1109 1116 1070 RPMs out of 2218 total; stripping out the default-but-optional packages brings that down to 510 514 522 505, which still includes a working Gnome desktop environment. A typical offender is a2ps, which pulls in texlive, imagemagick, ghostscript, ncurses, groff, and plenty of others (even libthai!).]
I’d also like a Really, Really Unselect Everything That Isn’t Necessary For This Locale button; “core” and “base” still have a fair amount of cruft in them.
Note: this is not a Linux-versus-{Windows,Mac,whateverdude} posting; it’s just about the difficulty of overriding the decision to include every precious snowflake’s package in the standard install. The decision to enable every compile-time option doesn’t help, either, since you end up pulling in half a dozen other packages on the off chance that the user is in an environment where one of them might matter.
Why do I care? Because about six weeks ago, I did an update on my EEE PC running Fedora 9, and there were so many updated packages that I didn’t have enough free disk space on the 4 GB flash drive to download them all, much less unpack and install. I had to symlink the yum directory to a loopback-mounted ext2 image on another flash drive (because the drive itself was FAT32, which wasn’t good enough).
[note on the twice-updated RPM counts: my script wasn’t handling conditional packages correctly. I was processing conditionals before resolving all dependencies, so it missed cases where the package in the condition was added by a dependency, not by another group. A good example is language packs for OpenOffice: you select the packages for each application, all of which depend on the -core package; when you add support for a language, it adds the office language packs if it sees -core.]
[Update: Okay, I had to completely redo the dependency resolution, because multiple non-conflicting packages supply the same requirements. Anaconda chooses exactly one of them, apparently based on the length of the package name (shortest wins). My script now produces exactly the same results as a default install of F10, so the numbers should finally stop changing.]
Dear Redhat,
When someone installs a machine and enters somedomain.net as the hostname, please do not insert the line “search net” into /etc/resolv.conf.
You can take the girl out of Hello!Project
…but you can’t take the Hello!Project out of the girl.
Clearly I've missed something
When did The Rock become a pop-eyed cartoon dad? Because I’d swear that in the absolutely dreadful trailer for Race To Witch Mountain, his facial expressions were produced by animators.
Who do you hire?
You are Sony. You are having an event to celebrate a cool new Playstation 3 game. Its name? Little Big Planet. Which celebrities do you hire to emcee the event?
The littlest woman and biggest man you can find, actress/singer Mari Yaguchi (4’9”) and kickboxer Hong-man Choi (7’2”).
Milk: the cure for the common asshole
Random moment on Google Earth: I clicked on a photo of Takeshita-doori (major teen shopping street), and found the following banner:
イライラした人にからまれたら、
牛乳を飲ませてみよう。
More or less:
If you're getting hassled by an irritating person,
try making them drink milk.
I’m thinking that’s not going to help much. I can’t quite make out the kanji in their smaller banner in the background, but if it’s the same quality of advice, I think I’ll stick to pepper spray.
Frequently bought together
Gosh, I can’t imagine why…
(now available on DVD from Amazon, it’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog!)
"...and that's why we had to put him down"
This is claimed to be a real product, not just a design concept, but I can’t imagine anyone actually using one. Certainly not in a home with kids, pets, or, say, people. I understand the motivation, but antlers at ankle level?
