Hail the Sys Admin!!!

After much ado i finally got a job i love. I am now the sys admin of a psychology lab in my university. I will probably also be working with Dr Marc Howard. He has done a terrific job of developing Temporal Context Model (TCM). In a nutshell its a mathematical model of how human memory works, how distant memory gets weaker and stuffs like that. It involves a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge and his two research assistants are from electrical engg and bio engg dept. I really do hope i m gonna get involved in it in a big way.

Well Marc is really kewl, perhaps the only linux evangelist/geek i saw in the college (Mr fawcett is an all rounder... he seems to know about every field that exists on earth and work on them... but he prefers micosoft technologies in his classes). He is a hardcore Debian user. so finally i was pushed to install debian :) instead of my favourite fc4. So now I have worked on all of RH/fedora, solaris 10, Deb and a teeny weeny bit of SuSe.

deb is a totally different distro than fedora. For one thing its definitely slimmer than fc4 and somehow faster than it. As a sys admin I had to install debian on one of the systems, piece of cake, yeah !! but the X kept on crashing...
XF86config asked me all kind of ugly questions about the hardware, nobody knew about it as it was a closed box PC( Dell dimension 360...I can write another blog to describe it though).. I went to the dell site using the username i got when i got my laptop, got the service tag from the cpu tower and got all the specs...
But still XF86Config was not helping... on top of it the wireless conked out and had to use the wired internet on the laptop to google things out...

Some obscure posting in a blog told me that XF86config sucks on debian and i should use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common xserver-blahblah ... great!!
tried it and it worked like a baby... mouse was the next problem child as it wanted to know the device filename explicity. The list was small so got that working in 3 tries (randomized search algorithm based on heuristics :) ...

All u reading this entry Hail the sys admin.