Absurd

W E L C O M E T O A B S U R D I S T A N

The Absurd License: Licentiam Absurdum

Slackware 15 Beta ⇢ Patrick Volderding announced the following yesterday: _I'm going to go ahead

Slackware 15 Alpha ⇢ Two days ago, alienbob (Eric Hameleers) announced the release of Slackware 15 Alpha after nearly 5 years since Slackware 14.2. It's a big big day. The most recent upgrade was to glibc-2.33 which then required a rebuild of all of the packages to be include

The First PC ⇢ What is a personal computer? When we say that compound word, we all know what we mean. They are multipurpose general computing devices that are generally cheap enough for people to realistically afford to purchase, they are usually pre-assembled by a comp

CentOS is Dead ⇢ In 2004, the CentOS project started. The idea of the distribution was to be binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This worked well for quite sometime. The Linux community was able to offer up a stable and useful distribution that rivaled corpor

Chips and Soda ⇢ I have never cared for ARM CPUs. The Acorn RISC Machine designs just don’t do it for me. The CPUs are lower power but they also aren’t very high performance compared to the AMD64. The Intel x86 and AMD64 chips are also a more open platform. The BIOS a

WPM 4.1.0 Stable ⇢ Today, WPM 4.1.0 is out of beta. This was, by far, the longest testing period

Apple and the M1 ⇢ Apple has announced the use of its own ARM processors and its own GPU

Multi-account Mutt ⇢ Mutt is a mail user agent. It's an old one. It doesn't have a GUI.

Slackware Current ⇢ Slackware Current usage isn't really explained anywhere, but it's somewhat

MySQL and its 'open_files_limit' ⇢ So, very often, I come across a super annoying aspect of MySQL on so-called

Open Source Fatigue ⇢ Traditional models of software development are largely dead. Even Microsoft no

Waste and Wasters Who Make It ⇢ There's a rather large issue in the technology industry that no one within the

WPM 4.1.0 Beta ⇢ Many bug fixes have been pushed for this release, and anyone using the alpha

WPM 4.1.0 Alpha ⇢ May the Fourth be with you!

Setup WordPress Yourself ⇢ _This article assumes the reader has some basic familiarity with the Linux operating system, and it assumes that either Linux or Windows with WSL is in use on the reader's computer._

WPM 4.0.2 ⇢ The release of WPM (the WordPress Mangler) version 4.0.2 is official.

WPM 4.0.1 ⇢ I have worked on WPM a bit, and I am pleased to announce version 4 update 1. As

Linux Kernel 4.19 ⇢ For those individuals using Linux distributions that ship with older kernels, they may find themselves needing a newer kernel for hardware support, and not having a package available. Never fear. In this document, I will be using 4.19.21, but you will wan

WPM 3.1.0 ⇢ The old WP script that I created and maintained has been dramatically altered.

An Introduction to C, XIII ⇢ We've covered a lot of ground with C so far. The big problem here is that we've not yet covered one of the most common tasks on a UNIX system. We have not covered files. So, let's look at files. For file I/O in C, you need a file pointer. We declare a fi

An Introduction to C, XII ⇢ So, in this part of the C Intro, I would like to say a bit about memory management.

An Introduction to C, XI ⇢ Some time has passed since I last did anything with my C tutorial. This is largely due to work and having several different projects going at any one time (learning Chinese, developing a hobby OS, a gaming community, etc...). However, I felt that I ought

An Introduction to C, X ⇢ It's time for a cake walk. Here's an array of integers.

An Introduction to C, IX ⇢ In the last post, I briefly introduced arrays and strings. Let's look a little more closely.

An Introduction to C, VIII ⇢ So far, we have already covered the use of the character data type, but what happens when you want to print more than one character to screen? This was strings are for.

An Introduction to C, VII ⇢ So far, I have thrown a lot of information at you very quickly. Let's recap with completely useless programs.

An Introduction to C, VI ⇢ Now for something odd.

An Introduction to C, V ⇢ As you might imagine, a large series of conditional statements could get really tedious. Imagine a series of 20 if statements... and imagine typing that out. Very quickly, it would become very annoying. For this reason, C has the switch-break.

An Introduction to C, IV ⇢ Programs are a lot more useful if users can interact with them. It is equally useful to be able to perform specific operations depending upon what input is gained from said users. That's the topic for this entry.

An Introduction to C, III ⇢ So, in this installment, let's talk about loops. So far, all you have had is sequences. Programs only consist of sequence, loop, selection, and data. Looking at it this way, you're nearly ready to call yourself a programmer. So, don't get discouraged.

An Introduction to C, II ⇢ Last time, we got into the absolute basics. This time, let's cover something more useful.

An Introduction to C, I ⇢ C is a computer programming language that was designed for the purpose of implementing system software. Today, it is still used for that task but is also used for implementing application software. C is insanely widely used. C is the bedrock of UNIX, Linu

An Introduction to Slackware Linux ⇢ People often look at Slackware with a certain amount of trepidation. It appears complicated, difficult, or tedious. If you ever felt like trying Slackware but didn't because of those fears, this is an article for you. I am going to cover installation ste

It's Not the End of the OS ⇢ In a recent article over at MyBroadband, Alastair Otter says that the end of the OS is nigh. I couldn't disagree more. His argument is that cloud applications along with browser innovations will replace our normal applications. He argues that cross platfo

An Introduction to Find ⇢ Learning find can seem daunting at first, but it is worth learning. There is no single more useful search tool for UNIX like systems. You could almost consider find a very primitive scripting language in itself as find can find the files you request and t

An Introduction to VIm ⇢ A long time ago, in a college far far away, some nerds were playing with UNIX. At that time, UNIX shipped with ed. Some rather clever programmers made a replacement for ed called em. Em became en. En became ex. Ex is Vi. Why is this important? Understandi

An Introduction to Mutt ⇢ It seems as though every time someone sees me at my desk reading my mail, they ask what it is I am doing. I tell them I am reading my mail, and they're shocked. They see me pull up image attachments, and office and all this, and they think I am some kind

Manual Backups with dd ⇢ There are several different ways to make backups of data for any operating system. In the "glory days" of UNIX people would usually write a cron job that would create a Tape ARchive of their system and write that TAR to a tape drive. Well, those days are

OpenSource Operating Systems ⇢ Well, I figured that I should take an opportunity to introduce a few opensource OSs that really haven't been in the lime light much. We all know about Linux and many of us also know about Darwin and BSD. Still some know about OpenSolaris. Which ever ones

Clouds Eventually Burst ⇢ So often lately, I hear of the cloud and the wonderful things it will do for the world. I increasingly hear that any software effort that is not directed toward the cloud is going to fail. So much, I hear that desktops and laptops are antiquated due to th

Building your own Slackware Distribution ⇢ Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and SuSE have system for making respins. Slackware's package manager has an easy to use makepkg script, and the installer is wickedly easy to customize to meet your needs. So, let's go through making a Slackware-based distribution.