Status Report

I’ve fin­ished read­ing How to Lose Your Altruism How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the review is up. Also upgraded to WordPress 2.7, although since I’m using my own cus­tom theme the changes will be all on the backend.

I attempted to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Macbook, which failed pretty spec­tac­u­larly. The prob­lem is that I still want OS X to be acces­si­ble because all my stuff is there1, but the Solaris installer’s fdisk doesn’t han­dle the GUID par­ti­tion table that MacOS X/rEFIt requires. There used to be hackarounds in 2008.05 (which is what all the “installer howto”-style blog posts were writ­ten for), but those paths were closed in 2008.11. Specifically, in 2008.05 the installer used to have a remount­able root par­ti­tion and exe­cutes fdisk using path-aware meth­ods (i.e. “sys­tem()”). In the new installer, the root par­ti­tion can­not be remounted read-write, and the installer calls fdisk using an absolute path (i.e. using “exec()”), so you can’t use the hacky over­rides to make it not over­write OS X’s par­ti­tion table.

After a dozen times around the block using var­i­ous online-suggested meth­ods, I couldn’t jus­tify not being able to use my lap­top any longer and just re-installed OS X, then put Ubuntu 8.10 on, which I’m using pretty much exclu­sively now.

  1. Yes, I’m a prag­matic freedom-hating douchebag… or was, so long as OS X worked bet­ter than I could rea­son­ably expect out of a Linux sys­tem. It hasn’t really been up to my angry stan­dards for a while, so fuck it.

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