Unspeakable Foolishness Called “Democracy”

Democracy in the widest sense of the word includes any system of government by which the people decide things. A republic is simply indirect democracy. The result of making it indirect is to slightly slow the degradation inherent in the choice to let every citizen — or “stakeholder” — have a voice, and creates a [...]

No Life on the Commandline

It was fun, and I really gave it a good run. I tried hard to make things work the way I needed them to work, but it was not to be. At least, not yet. I have found evidence there are some developers who believe in the console “desktop” but the support for the idea [...]

FreeBSD: Busted

I’m posting this from a borrowed Windows machine. FreeBSD was a bust. I got the whole thing optimized and ready to rock-n-roll, but most of the ports I needed were broken. That is, they refused to build, or did crazy things like looping and building the same dependency over and over. I couldn’t build MC, [...]

Squeeze Too Dependent on X

I’m finding I can’t even install Groff without X.
I was willing to learn how to mark up in troff so I could print a few things now and then, but I can’t get the basic Groff package without heavy X dependencies. I suppose I could build it from source, but with that much work invovled, [...]

Console Keyboard: No Help

After reading countless webpages, manpages, and everything I could find, I realize it’s pointless to try to fix the Debian console keymap files.
In the first place, Debian places in the keymaps tons of useless keystrokes no human could possibly make.
In the second place, there is no simple guide to making a corrected keymaps file. It’s [...]

Console Life: Adjustments

This is not about what you should do if you run the console, but what I have experience with Squeeze on my Inspiron 4100 laptop.
I tested the Radeon Framebuffer (“radeonfb”). While it does work, it’s not quite right. There are some odd changes in the default behavior of anything which actually calls on the fbdev [...]

Clarity: Market versus Government

We need a little clarity here. At places like LewRockwell.com, you’ll find the underlying theme, often bluntly stated, of preferring the Free Market over the State.
For those of us who serve Christ, the eternal viewpoint is the Market and the State are competitors, not enemies. If you grant all power to the State, you have [...]

Life on the Console: Debian Squeeze

Perhaps you can come up with your own reasons for it, but running Linux on the console only is certainly worth the effort. For example, a lot of really fine hardware still runs fine, but painfully slow if you run any recent version of the X-server. In my case, it’s simply a matter of comfort [...]

When the Time Comes to Dump the Lackeys

So we now see yet another UK government memo indicting the Iraq War. Let’s back off a bit and take a broader perspective.
I have long contended there are many ruling powers wearing no official title under any current government. That should surprise no one. If nothing else, we say people have influence in governments without [...]

On the Console Again: Debian Squeeze

After making provisions on another system for my responsibilities to others, I have studied again the possibilities of moving my laptop back to a pure console Linux installation. I waded through some discussions over FreeBSD, NetBSD, Gentoo, and a few others I would never consider. I slap myself for not thinking of it before, but [...]