Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

HP hid screws underneath two of the Little Rubber Feet, and their service manual tells me to pry them off.

I am repairing a computer, and the service manual instructs me to basically destroy its LRF-compliant desktop interface.

@zac I'm out of ideas.

@zac Is bash installed? It's not the default in most BSDs, and if it is installed, it'll be /usr/local/bin/bash.

@zac @rechner I think his logic was that it maybe wasn't getting set properly or at all. The /home directory being a symlink shouldn't be an issue, especially since you *are* landing in your home directory on console login.

@zac Indirectly, perhaps. Assuming fish is your shell as given in /etc/passwd, I'd guess there's a relevant difference between the shell's login-time-only .profile script and its run-on-every-new-shell $ENV or .shrc script. (Or fish's equivalent scripts.)

@zac check your .login & .shrc files for cd weirdness? i don't remember that happening to me.

The AC in my server room seems to be working pretty well.

The early history of Windows file attributes, and why there is a gap between System and Directory: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180830-00/?p=99615

There's more CP/M legacy in Windows than you may realize.

LB: Rumor has it that, shortly after the worm Morris wrote unexpectedly raged across what was the Internet at the time as malware, not as the benevolent potentially bug-fixing worm he wanted, someone got root on Morris's system & changed his login name from rtm to rtfm.

Related: If you want to follow log files that are rotated, regularly or on reaching a certain size, use `tail -F` instead of `tail -f`. The difference is that -F tells `tail` to reopen the file if it's truncated or deleted/moved and recreated.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
tail -F \
/var/log/maillog \
/var/log/messages \
|
while read -r line
do printf \
"\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[0m\n" \
$(($RANDOM%214+17)) \
"$line"
done
#
# Follow log files, showing each
# line in a random color.
# Needs a 256-color terminal,
# works best on dark/black
# backgrounds.
#

But the weird thing is both original disks were fine in my 286's 1.2 MB drive the one time I put them in there, & by coincidence the one command I ran to exercise them both was diskcopy, giving me a full duplicate of both disks, & both copies work just fine in my XT.

It's a good thing neither IBM nor Microsoft put copy protection on their DOS boot/install disks.

It's hard to tell from the label. The icky label is the Startup (boot) disk, & the good label is the Operating disk. The mylar of the Operating disk is just as damaged. It does explain why it wouldn't boot in my XT.

You'd think that a boxed set of disks still in shrinkwrap would be best protected from damage. Nope. this is the underside of a DOS 3.3 boot disk that sat unused & protected in a tyvek sleeve, in a special pocket, in a 3-ring binder, in a box, under shrinkwrap for 31 years. Look at the mylar disc visible through the oval access hole.

@trysdyn This is awesome. :3

The IBM DOS 3.3 User Guide has a yellow bird character in some of its illustrations.