Status Report

I’ve finished reading How to Lose Your Altruism How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the review is up. Also upgraded to WordPress 2.7, although since I’m using my own custom theme the changes will be all on the backend.

I attempted to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Macbook, which failed pretty spectacularly. The problem is that I still want OS X to be accessible because all my stuff is there¹, but the Solaris installer’s fdisk doesn’t handle the GUID partition table that MacOS X/rEFIt requires. There used to be hackarounds in 2008.05 (which is what all the “installer howto”-style blog posts were written for), but those paths were closed in 2008.11. Specifically, in 2008.05 the installer used to have a remountable root partition and executes fdisk using path-aware methods (i.e. “system()”). In the new installer, the root partition cannot be remounted read-write, and the installer calls fdisk using an absolute path (i.e. using “exec()”), so you can’t use the hacky overrides to make it not overwrite OS X’s partition table.

After a dozen times around the block using various online-suggested methods, I couldn’t justify not being able to use my laptop any longer and just re-installed OS X, then put Ubuntu 8.10 on, which I’m using pretty much exclusively now.

1. Yes, I’m a pragmatic freedom-hating douchebag… or was, so long as OS X worked better than I could reasonably expect out of a Linux system. It hasn’t really been up to my angry standards for a while, so fuck it.