Computer alarums & Excursions

[mdlbear]

Sunday night I finally got around to re-partitioning the 9Gig drive on Nova, the main household fileserver, so that I could do the Debian base install this morning. But this morning I discovered that I'd neglected to update the bootloder's config file, so it was trying to mount /dev/sda8 as root instead of /dev/sda7, which is where it had ended up. I also discovered that a lot of rescue CDs can't handle SCSI CD-ROM drives. Rather than hunt around for one that would, I eventually just shrugged and put in an IDE CD drive. Was going to do that eventually, anyhow.


Went in to work, to discover that my stupid Mac laptop had cleverly built all of X11 in the process of trying to install emacs21, then noticed that the Apple version was already there, and threw up its hands in disgust. And had to reboot to get rid of the bouncing Firefox icons. Spent the rest of the day trying to do such obvious things as creating a clickable icon for Emacs (obscure but eventually possible), trying to configure the Finder so that it would show such obvious things as /bin when you open the disk (impossible, apparently), and trying to figure out how to make X handle the mouse scroll wheel the way it does on Linux (also impossible). Three days I've wasted on that thing.

At this point I'm ready to regard it as an extra screen that can occasionally be used as a viewer for the proprietary file formats that Linux doesn't handle yet, and forget about trying to do actual work on it. Besides, it doesn't have an IBM Model M keyboard like my Linux boxes all do. Amazing what $2.50 will buy at Weird Stuff these days -- I'm stocked up on spares for the next year or three, at least.

Comments

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

To get the Finder to show invisible directories, such as /bin, install TinkerTool.

Yes, they should have an interface for this functionality built into the system.

Hm...I have a mouse with a scroll wheel that works just fine in OS X. I'm guessing you must be wanting some sort of specialized functionality.

[mdlbear]

I shouldn't have to go googling for third-party apps to do obvious things.

The scroll wheel works fine for Apple apps, but not for X apps like emacs and xterm. Doubly frustrating because it's Apple's X server, and it's derived from XFree86 which supports scroll wheels just fine.