Strange dreams, silly questions, linux misadventures

[vakkotaur]

I was outside someplace, the grass was trimmed, and there were what seemed to be a few coins in the grass. Some looked like coins, some looked like the planets of our solar system. Then someone, or maybe group, came and picked up all but three of the coins. Nothing was said that I can recall, but it felt like this person/these people were 'angels' or some such and would be putting the planets back in the sky where they belong.

I picked up the remaining three coins. One ordinary quarter, one penny - except it was too big, about the size of nickel or maybe even larger, and one the size of a dime but it looked exactly like the earth-facing side of the moon. I was going to take the moon coin to the person (one of the persons?) who picked up the other coins so it could be taken care of, or verified that it wasn't missed or something.

I'm not sure if I caught up with that or if the scene just switched. But I still had the coins and was now in a fairly busy town, making my way through the street crowd to some wooden building on a corner. Inside, I waited and showed the coins, the moon coin and the oversized penny anyway, to a fellow who was on a slightly raise area behind a railing. He moved in a motorized wheelchair and gave the impression of knowing more than he usually said. He said the coins were very interesting and seemed about to explain why when I woke up.

---

1. Do you watch sports? If so, which ones? Not only no, but hell no.

2. What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes? Not paying much attention, are you?

3. Are there any sports you hate? That would be pretty much all of them. With exactly zero positive experiences playing, watching, or dealing with those who watch or play - and an amazingly large number of profoundly negative experiences with same, this should be no surprise.

4. Have you ever been to a sports event? Twice, I suppose. I was rather young and just plain uninterested the first time. The next time I was considerably older and it just confirmed things.

5. Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? Only for the required phys. ed. course - and not willingly.

What astonishes me is that people who also had profoundly negative experiences can not only tolerate sports but be fans. In just about any other situation that sort of behavior would be considered a learning disability, at least. Also, it scares me just how rabid many fans are and the mythology they build up for themselves.

---

Spent part of Saturday burning CDs for Gentoo, Knoppix, Lycoris, and for good measure (and with some help) FreeBSD 4.8. Sunday I tried to use Knoppix only to find that pasofino's CD drive seems to be flaky, and that a couple other machine don't have enough RAM for it to be very happy, and, annoyingly, Knoppix seems unaware there is such a thing as a serial mouse. If Knoppix can be told about serial mice, I haven't discovered how just yet. Also, it seemed to whine that I had passed it a bad parameter for the screen resolution when I hadn't done more than booted the system(s) with the CD in the drive. WTH?

So I figured I'd give Lycoris a try on mustang (which had been a FreeBSD 4.6? install but hadn't really been used, so no big deal). First try it wanted to use the whole disk and warned against doing anything else... and then installed in such a way GRUB complained about the geometry and the kernel couldn't be loaded. Bah. Reinstall, with a bit of manual override for partitioning. Then it would hang when it said it was going to boot. Wait. Wait. Wait more. Nothing. Give up and force it. It boots.. and gets to the KDE screen.. and open a "Wanna take a tour?" dialog... and hangs. And again. Gave up on Lycoris for the night. A pretty nice install overall, and the solitaire game during install is cute, but I'd rather have the installed system actually work.

Then I had the bright idea of trying Knoppix on percheron. A newer system with lots of RAM, a reasonably fast CPU, and a PS/2 mouse (trackball, dammit!). It worked and I had a Knoppix system going. For being a one CD creature that installs itself into a RAMdisk it's rather impressive. Most of the programs I'd add to a linux install were already there. xchat was already there as was joe and NEdit, amongst others. No Opera, of course, but nothing's perfect. I found xine wouldn't start with much else running, but at least it didn't hang the system. With nothing else running, xine would start but I didn't get anything to play... mainly from not having anything to play on it handy just then. Mplayer was absent. Overall, Knoppix looks good. The only downside is that going the logical conclusion of throwing Knoppix to hard disk and having it go to a final Debian system is the idiotic kowtowing to a nutcase and prepending Linux with three letters and a slash.

I haven't tried gentoo, yet, nor FreeBSD 4.8 with an eye toward using it as a desktop system. Mustang hadn't been set up for that with its earlier FreeBSD install.

I did transfer some stuff from belgian to percheron (running Win2k from hard drive again) planning to burn CDs and have backups so I can install stuff on belgian. Besides backing up /home/vakko I'll need to grab some config files for Opera, NEdit, and Xchat at least. Once everything Is backed up I can use percheron while experimenting with belgian. I might give Lycoris another chance. And I may as well use a faster machine to try gentoo. Of course during this time I'd be stuck using Windows at home again for a while. Oh well, did it before and it'll be temporary.

Comments

[ginafae.livejournal.com]

Why do I imagine your dream in the pacing and coloration of "City of Lost Children"?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

No idea. I'm not familiar with the work.

[ginafae.livejournal.com]

If you enjoy foreign films, check it out sometime. It's quite fun. It was also a crazy little game for a bit, though the game was limited to the storyline of the film and didn't go out on it's own, it was still a puzzle game, and enjoyable for the puzzles.