Author Topic: Operating Systems As Religions  (Read 606 times)

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Nation of One

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Operating Systems As Religions
« on: November 28, 2015, 09:20:04 am »
I think that the next time someone asks me what my religion is I might respond with something more creative than "non-believer".  How about this?

"Do you practice a religion?  Do you believe in God?"

Ummmm ..... Ommmmmm mani padme ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... ummmmmm?

"Religion, you say?  Why, I guess I believe in C ... err.... Unix?   Um ... Linux ... What do you mean by "religion"?  Can you be more specific?   Are you asking me what programming language I prefer?   Are you asking me what operating system I prefer?   Or are you asking me what branch of mathematics I am exploring?"


What If Operating Systems Were Religions?


"Those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another."

So, while I named Book of Nonsense and Tinkering N-11: Programming As Mathematics, I may name N-12: Programming As Spiritual Experience.

And by using the word "spiritual" I am spitting in the face of gort-society since I equate spiritual with intellectual.  It is an intellectually stimulating activity, hence - a spiritual experience.   :)


"Nobody likes Android very much but, hidden in smartphones and tablets, it knocks on our doors like Jehova's Witness."

I don't want a mobile phone.  Where I stand with mobile smart phones is where I stand with mainstream religion:  I don't need one, so I don't have one.

The gorts must rush out and get whatever gadgets "everybody else is using".

I have many inappropriate jokes inside my head, such as, "You have a smart phone?  You must be retarded."   ;)

Question posed by the gorts: "How can you NOT believe in God???"

My response:  "Well, it was quite a struggle before I was able to develop strong mental independence, but once I faced down the herd, it was just a matter of recognizing the idea for what it was.  I lose respect for most people who try to push that weight around in order to compensate for their lack of honest reflection upon our actual situation in the universe."

In other words, I isolate from liars, bullies, phonies ... most people.  If I am forced into society, I refrain from honest conversations.  In other words, I politely conceal my mental powers.

I'm a difficult specimen to categorize.  I blur the lines.
« Last Edit: November 12, 2018, 07:57:09 pm by {{}} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Nation of One

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Re: Operating Systems As Religions
« Reply #1 on: May 13, 2017, 12:13:12 pm »
Similar to the way studying math that feels weird to me helps us to humbly acknowledge the limitations of our mental capacity, experimenting with various Linux operating systems also grounds me in reality. 

I like to set up a machine with 2 or 3 operating systems, one being Windows 10 since Microsoft gave it to us for free during the summer of 2015 - a rare event, indeed.   For the linux distributions I like to install Arch Linux and Slackware Linux since they require me to learn about pacman and installpkg, respectively.   On another machine I keep a version of Ubuntu and Debian (BunsenLabs) so as to not forget how to use apt-get or aptitude, and to set up something like PC-BASIC in a linux environment when it is impossible to do in either Arch linux or Slackware.

Since I screwed up my Slackware environment while trying out slackpkg upgrade-all, I found myself wanting to check out Gentoo Linux, and even though I succeeded in creating a bootable usb drive from the iso image (which requires iso-to-usb program that handles UEFI booting, my brain is just not feeling up to the task of setting Gentoo up from scratch.  As I do not want to mess up the other systems (I "multiboot", obviously), I am going to try out Sabayon Linux which is based on Gentoo but provides an easier installation process.

The iso image is taking hours to download.

I always feel like a second class citizen when it comes to such things.  It is very similar to how I feel about my amateur hobbyist status with regards to my lifelong engagement with mathematical concepts.

So, where do I stand?  There may be parallels of this situation throughout history in various religious cults.

There are the high priests of the craft, and then there are acolytes (followers/students).

I suppose I am surfing the learning curve of Sisyphus.  There is a time for caution and humility when I am in over my head in deep water.   Sometimes we need a lot of assistance.

People all over the world may think their religions are a big part of their identity.  Rather than ask someone what their religion is, ask them what operating systems they use or have explored or tried to set up.

I wonder if there is a relation between those who stick with the mainstream operating systems and also remain loyal to the world religion of their prospective regions, as opposed to those who explore the bleeding edge experimental distributions.  Are such "mad scientist" types more likely to be those who do not identify themselves with a "world religion"?

Maybe there are those, like me, who are intimidated by the thought of a pure Gentoo installation from the command line, so I will place these keywords here in hopes they may find Sabayon while searching for an automated Gentoo installation.

__________________________________________________
UPDATE:  Rufus (for creating bootable USB from ISO image), while it did create a bootable usb drive, when Sayabon intallation tries to find necessary files, it looks for CD rom.   So I was going to create iso-to-usb with unetbootin.

Then, playing around, I switched usb flashdrive from 3.0 port to 2.0 port.  Then, when extra entries appeared on my rEFInd multiboot menu, I chose the last of the 3 new entries, as it appeared to be the actual usb drive labeled "SABAYON GNOME".

I apologize for my ramblings.  For all we know, there might be some crazy mad scientist lurker who stumbles upon our weird message board by searching for things like Gentoo USB "No media found."

In between these operations I am working ever so slowly through proving the most basic theorems using axioms.   I am beginning to suspect that the unconscious knows more about what is going on than the conscious mind (ego?).   Didn't Schopenahuer and Kant say that the Will can not know?   But what part of us knows what it is doing?

The conscious "I" can't keep track of all that it is doing, and it seems as though the unconscious mind does what it does without knowing in the proper sense.

_________________________________________________________
UPDATE 2:  OK, Sabayon (Gentoo-based) is installed next to Arch Linux and Windows 10.  Slackware Linux is on old machine that is left off due to overheating.  Now ... back to the math.

Mental Note: Dad still in hospital and has not moved bowels EVEN AFTER SURGERY.   Intestines 10 times normal size.  I have to drive the Mother to church in the pouring rain ... so I'll have a chance to look at pure math in the car.  I've been feeling a little guilty for eating so well while my dad is laying in a hospital bed in such miserable agony.  Helpless.  It doesn't look good ...

By the way, from what I am seeing already, needing to learn about "overlays" and "portage", this gentoo environment will require a great deal of reading documentation.  Oh well, I suppose I'll have to be very careful setting up sagemath and anaconda (python) and other essentials.  LibreOffice comes with the Sabayon distribution.

It's almost as though I get into being disoriented.  Maybe this is as good as it gets for me ...

Before barreling through with my obsessive setting up of sage and anaconda, it is best I do a little "learning" first.  I may post little trails with their own headings in this thread so that the search engine will find them.  I'll have to remember I placed this thread in Why Laugh?

Please do not feel at all obligated to read these unless you are absolutely curious, as I imagine it could be quite boring unless you were in need of the specific guidance.


sage-on-gentoo "overlay" ... did not work for me, so tried to just build from source, but during 'make' it failed to build "linbox".   :-\

Anaconda installs smoothly.  Download Anaconda3-*.sh and just :  bash Anaconda3-*.sh

After Python3 is installed, just add Python2 with:

conda create -n vpy python=2.7 anaconda
source activate vpy
conda install --channel https://conda.anaconda.org/vpython vpython

test with:  jupyter notebook
Vpython Session:

from vpython import *
b = sphere()

exit

source deactivate vpy

.....  next?    libre-office, calibre?
« Last Edit: May 14, 2017, 09:46:46 am by Raskolnikov »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Entropy

I apologize for the cryptic technicalities.  This message board also serves as a kind of repository for some details I might need access to from different machines or different incarnations.  The subject headings will hopefully help our struggling local search engine.   Placing such things in Why Laugh? will help if we (I?) have to do a search manually. 

Come to think of it, I may try to step away from the computer for longer periods of time.  The math I am studying at the moment is all very much pencil and paper and moments when I have to force myself to just think.  I might be better off taking this kind of math on a walk outdoors, making a list of theorems to be proved and just carrying pencil, notebook, and pencil sharpener.

I have Gentoo set up (thanks to the Sabayon distribution), but I do not want to become too obsessed with getting Sage up and running on Gentoo, first of all, like I said, I am not in dire need of it, and, secondly, I have it on Arch Linux and Ubuntu and even as a Virtual Machine in Windows.

One has to tame the Will in all its forms ... and I have to drawn the line here.  I will not be wracking my brains to run sage on gentoo.

Last error message after "emerge -va sage" is:
The following mask changes are necessary to proceed:
 (see "package.unmask" in the portage(5) man page for more details)
# required by sci-mathematics/sage-7.6::sage-on-gentoo
# required by sage (argument)
# /etc/portage/package.mask/00-sabayon.package.mask:
# 2013-08-12 Fabio Erculiani: dev-perl/math-pari wants exactly
# sci-mathematics/pari-2.3.5
=sci-mathematics/pari-2.9.1-r100



I have the six ten-foot 2x8 pieces of lumber being delivered soon, so I can make my grumbling attempts to raise the garden this coming week.

I love sage and I am enthusiastic about learning about how things work in gentoo, but I really want to work with pencil and paper and proving simple theorems ... so, enough is enough.  Sometimes you have to turn the computer off for awhile and fiddle with a pencil.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2017, 11:42:51 am by Raskolnikov »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Operating Systems As Religions
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2018, 09:13:56 am »
Excerpts from an email to mi sobrino [Wu Qi] minus parts about su abuelita (mi madre) posted here for posterity:
_______________________________________________________________________________

I just installed Slackware current, kernel 4.19.1 (current = unstable?).

It comes with g++ 8.2 which includes c++11, c++14, some c++17 and ability to use -std=c++20 (experimental), whereas the stable 14.2 comes with g++ 5.3 or sometimes 7.1.

The thing is, with 5.3, there was still built in support for fortran and java (so it had gcc-java, to build openjdk which is used to build LibreOffice).

I sacrificed LibreOffice and will just use OpenOffice as I want to test some stuff with the 8.2 compiler.

Anyway, Sage 8.4 is built and Anaconda3 locked and loaded (for isympy computer algebra system).

Don't forget to get some small 4GB to 8GB USB's to make bootable iso images of Windows 10 and the Linux distros you might want to try.

If you can, place your /home directory on a separate partition so you can use it without losing all your stuff.  I install Sage in /home/mwh/sage-8.4 and then do not format that partition during new installs.  Be sure to write down the user ID.  Then use same name and id number when adding user in new system (say no to changing PATH when "it" warns you that the directory already exists).

For sage: sudo ln -s /home/mwh/sage-8.4/sage /usr/local/bin/sage

If you have an NTFS partition (when you partition the disk) that you will share between Windows and Linux, then in the /etc/fstab, where X is the NTFS partition and, here, sda2 is where ESP drive is :

/dev/sdaX  /mnt/data   ntfs-3g   umask=111,dmask=000 00

Also, the ESP (uefi boot partition) gets mounted at /boot/efi:

/dev/sda2   /boot/efi      vfat    defaults   1 0

And the others, of course:

/dev/sda7   swap    swap   defaults   0 0
/dev/sda8   /           ext4     defaults   1 1
/dev/sda9  /home    ext4     defaults   1 2

If you use refind, things will be easier for you to manage if you go nuts and want to have a couple Linux distros with windows.

Sorry I am all geeked out as usual.  I don't want you to think I am not concerned about my mom.  I am anxious to find out what is the reason for her not being able to swallow solid foods.

The reason I am getting back into Slackware is because it was created in 1993 and is most UNIX like.  Lots of text files and scripts.  We have come a long way.  You would be surprised by how much you have learned over the past 20 years or so if you decide to give it a whirl again.

Remember that it uses a lot of space in /tmp to build the packages, and it can get to 10GB quickly after a series of package installations.

In /etc/rc.d/rc.S, I added toward the bottom after "# Cleaning some files", just before X11.ICE part:

echo "Cleaning /tmp"
mkdir /saved-packages
mv /tmp/*.tgz /saved-packages > /dev/null 2>&1
rm -rf /tmp/*
mv /saved-packages/* /tmp > /dev/null  2>&1
rm -rf /saved-packages


That cleans it up between each reboot.

... <SNIP> [ I am ] relieved that you are staying dry.  Even if the room is small, I know you appreciate being able to keep computers out of the rain and having dry blankets and a place to cook and eat oats and such.

Enjoy your brain even if it gets a little crazy sometimes!

PS:

Three ISOs you may want (the third is for Funtoo/Gentoo and is basically just SystemRescueCD with some extras.  You have to wget the stage3 tarball for that one while chroot-ING onto /mnt/gentoo).  I must sound like a real geek, huh?

slackware64-current-install-dvd.iso  (you can use rufus in Windows, but choosing DD works best for me even though ISO format is recommended. It doesn't matter if you can see the files in Windows.  It matters that rEFInd and your "BIOS" recognize the bootable USB.)

Archlabs ISO

https://www.funtoo.org/Install     This one works fine even though 2016: https://build.funtoo.org/distfiles/sysresccd/sysresccd-20161103-4.9.0.iso

It doesn't matter since you only use it to boot in and install.  You will get the current stage3 tarball ...  During installation, at some point after you know you have an internet connection:

cd /mnt/gentoo
wget https://build.funtoo.org/funtoo-current/x86-64bit/generic_64/stage3-latest.tar.xz

OVER and OUT!
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~