Playing with ASP Linux 9.0
Posted on June 29, 2003
As I noted in my previous post, I am toying around with ASP Linux 9.0. It’s still early, but I have hit a couple of hurdles so far.
First off, it’s a 3 CD set. I downloaded all of the CD’s which appeared to be fine after burning. I put the first CD in the drive and rebooted. It wasn’t recognized as a bootable CD (BTW, my computer is set to look for bootable floopies and CD’s before going to the hard drives). No problem, I thought. I just set CD Bake Oven to burn it as a bootable CD. I put the reburned CD1 in the drive and rebooted again. It got recognized by the PC, and started the installer. I got done checking the packages I wanted and it ejects CD and says to put CD1 in the tray to start the installation. That’s odd, I thought. I’m guessing that making it a bootable CD messed with the installer, so it didn’t recognize it as CD1. So my solution was to burn 2 copies of CD1, one as bootable, and the other as “normal”. I just finished burning the normal one (again) so we’ll see how it works.
Later that day… Well, that didn’t work either (on the plus side, I did take the time to fix the ‘E’ key on my keyboard). For some reason, when I tried installing this way, it kept giving me an error about the GPG key. All of the packages are (or are supposed to be) signed with a GPG signature from ASP. The idea behind this is that the digital GPG ‘signature’ is unbreakable and can’t be forged, thus proving that the packages really did come from ASP and aren’t laden with viruses (or so the idea goes). I’m reburning CD1 in a different way. Previously, I had mounted the ISO image and let CD Bake Oven then make its own ISO from this. I did this because I didn’t know how to use it to burn an ISO that was already built. After a little investigation, I found it was as simple as ‘File’ -> ‘Open’ and it will look for ISO images. So now I am re-burning the CD. As a backup plan, I also made a boot floppy. Take 3.
Mulitlingualism is tough
Posted on June 28, 2003
First off, although the grades won’t be official until July 1st, I was signing up for the next japanese class today and I thought I saw that I got an A in the first japanese class. If it’s true – w00t!
I’m still having a tough time writing in japanese using Slackware. So I headed over to linux.org and see what distributions had support for both English and Japanese. I did a search of Japanese and it came up with 9 distros. Some were pure japanese distros with no english, but since my japanese isn’t there yet, those were out. Of the remaining distros, at least one, Kondara, was a dead link, which didn’t bode well. Mandrake was a possibility, as was TurboLinux, but I decided to try ASPLinux again.
I tried ASP this past winter, but wasn’t that impressed with it at that time. If I remember correctly, at the time, the version I downloaded had the 2.2 Linux kernel and KDE 2, both of which were outdated, even then. However, according to their homepage, they are now with the times with the 2.4 kernel, KDE 3.*, Gnome 2.* and other updated software. I haven’t actually tried it yet. I’m downloading it as I write this. At any rate, it is Red Hat compatible, so I’m hoping that it will be easy to install japanese language programs, if they aren’t already included. ASPLinux itself is based in Russia, and includes support for Russian (of course), English, Japanese, Chinese, Ukranian, and Bulgarian. With all of that, I’m hoping they have better support for alternative keyboards than Slackware, which is an English only distro. Then, just maybe I’ll be able to write in ひらがな and カタカナ (heh, you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had trying find a way to put hiragana text into that sentence. For future reference.)
Well, that’s it for now. Time to go to bed while ASP downloads.
Fun with Japanese by マイコル・ハックス。
Posted on June 21, 2003
Thanks to the cool benefit of working for a University, I get to take some classes for free. For no reason in particular, this summer I am taking Japanese. It’s not as bad as it sounds…5 credit hours in six weeks, which works out to about three hours a day for four nights a week, which is how often I am in class. So far, less than a week away from the final, I am probably looking at a low A or high B. I am also considering taking the follow up session which starts the beginning of July.
My theory is that the world is getting smaller (so to speak), and the Internet makes it smaller still. I have been in chatrooms where I spoke with people from Thailand and Sweden in the same day (at least that’s what they claimed). So, with the world getting smaller would be a good idea to learn another language (or two or three). I’m not arrogant enough to think that everyone should learn English. However, I do think people should at least try to become multilingual (Note: I don’t think it should be required just encouraged). Plus, it should look good on a resume.
In the past, I had bought computer stuff from Directron. I was recently looking for a new mouse for my computer when my old one (5-6 yrs old) started acting up. When I was browsing I noticed a section of non-english keyboards. I had to get one. Of course, the fact that they were $10 didn’t hurt either. Since I run Linux, it has taken a bit of work to get it working.
Japanese has three alphabets. Kanji is based on Chinese writing system, and each character represents an idea (a word or a phrase, usually). According to my teacher, there are believed to be over 40,000 Kanji characters in total, with 2000 – 3000 in common use. Hiragana was developed because there were words in the Japanese language that didn’t have Kanji characters (or maybe were to hard to remember :-) It is a phonetic language, where each character represents a sound, so the the western mind, it may seem like a more conventional alphabet. However, they developed another phonetic language called Katakana to help them spell words borrowed from other languages. The keyboard I bought is pretty much like any other keyboard, but there are some definite differences.
I think when the keyboard is used with Windows, it is supposed to be able to toggle between Hiragana, Katakana, and Romanji (the Roman/western alphabet). There is even a key that has the words (in japanese) for Hiragana, Katakana, and Romanji on it. However, there are a couple of other keys that have a bunch of Kanji written on them that I don’t know what they mean (yet). Mostly though, it is just like a “normal” keyboard. They most annoying things about it (to me) is the space bar is really small, and somce of the punctuation is in different spots than “normal”. On my Linux computer, it wants to act up a bit. I have it setup to write in japanese, but for some reason, it’s only writing カタカナ – Katakana. From what I understand, Hiragana is used more often in than Katakana, because Katakana is supposed to be used only for foreign words, or to attract attention (I guess it gets used quite often in advertising). Since they are both phonetic languages that share the same sounds, I could use it, but I would just be grammatically incorrect. I’ll have to keep woring at it to see what I can do with it.
To toss in some more Japanese text for those who have Japanese enabled browsers, in romanji my name is spelled Maikoru Hakkusu, while in katakana it is マイコル・ハックス. Japanese doesn’t have any V or L sounds, so V is usually replaced with B, while R replaces L. In romanji, the title of this site would probably be gottahabakappamoka, though I would alter it to sound more like gatahabakapamoka, which is closer to the way I pronounce it. In katakana, that would be カ゛タハハ゛カハ゜モカ.
One more. 鷹 is kanji for hawk or falcon (pronounced taka)
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