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Linux Software

Linux/Mandrake's Open Source GUI Partitioner 109

Posted by CmdrTaco from the divide-for-conquer dept.
dayeight wrote in to tell us about Linux Mandrake's new DiskDrake GUI Disk Partitioner and resizer GTK Based replacement for FIPS or Partition Magic- it looks like a promising for the free world.
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Linux/Mandrake's Open Source GUI Partitioner More

Linux/Mandrake's Open Source GUI Partitioner

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  • A friend of mine who is trying to run Windows and Linux/Mandrake just asked me for help concerning problems with partitioning his hard drive.

    Time to run screaming into the night.
  • I hope the authors remember that Linux supports a bunch of different disk partitioning schemes (DOS and MacOS to name two), and provide a consistent interface regardless of what partitioning scheme is used. If this same tool can be used to manage partitions on my Linux/x86, Linux/Alpha and Linux/mac68k boxes, it becomes much more useful.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that mandrake isn't just a better redhat than redhat anymore? Almost like coming into it's own? (Assuming, of course, that this is actually a better, more useful tool than disk druid, which is certainly seems to be.)

    kmj
    The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.

  • Quoteth the press release:

    The first released version of DiskDrake is beta software, but it should improve rapidly with the contribution of the free-software community.

    Just make sure you've got at least 2 backups of your drive first. I wouldn't let partitioning software that's in need of rapid improvement anywhere near my hard drive.

  • At first glance, DiskDrake appears to be a very great step for Linux - no more reliance on Disk Druid or fips or Partition Magic, or whatever. However, it's missing one feature Partition Magic has which really sets Partition Magic apart - it can't resize ext2 drives. According to the website,

    resize partitions (when not caring loosing its data)

    That sounds to me like no ext2 resize-on-the-fly support. It's not needed often, but when it is, it's a really nice feature to have. I've had to install Linux multiple times after adding/removing DOS partitions for whatever reason, and it's no fun. DiskDrake looks like a great program, definitely a step up, but until it gets ext2 resize support, Partition Magic's the way to go for ext2 resize, DiskDrake/fips/whatever for your Linux partition manager of choice.


    -David Ziegler
    -dziegler@hotmail.com
  • If memory serves, when PowerQuest first announced that they were going to support resizing of ext2 partitions in Partition Magic 4.0 they promised to (eventualy) release the source code for the ext2 resizing modules under a GPL-like licence. Partition Magic 4.0 has now been out over 2 years, and I have yet to hear of any source-code release announcement from PowerQuest...

    So... Where's the code?

  • From what I have seen from the screen shots the program looks relatively easy to use. The interface looks as if it might run under X-Windows, but there seems to be some trouble with the over all look of it (Fonts seem bigger; at least from the screenshot). But it looks as if it supports a wide varitey of useful tools for partitioning. Looks like something to download a test.
  • This looks pretty cool, but will it help people who are installing Linux for the first time? People are always so scared of the partitioning part... If it's a GTK app, you need X, which means you need Linux, which means you need... an ext2 partition. Is there any way this could be used during the initial install, or is it just for post-install maintenance?
  • "Warning: features was the main focus, so don't be too hard :)"

    -----
    If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
  • I forgot to mention that ext2 resizing code (like PowerQuest had promised to release) would be a great addition to something like DiskDrake.
  • People trusted the beta's of Partition Magic...why not this program?
  • You sure whine alot. Especially considering I dont see anything "NEW" from you or anyone else who just sits and complains.
    PLEASE stop whining and do something! What not a programmer? Well think of something that is "NEW" and let programmers know about it.
    Damnit man the cup is half full okay?

    --doobman
  • While other people BMW (bitch, whine, and moan) about how RedHat is taking over the world and releasing buggy distributions etc. etc. etc., the Mandrakesoft guys are actually DOING something about it, and contributing their own GPL apps as well.

    Until something else comes along, Linux-Mandrake is the best hope we have for getting Linux to the masses.
  • I think the main advantage this has over disk druid (or cfdisk) is that you don't need to wipe out old partitions. So if you've already got that legacy OS from Redmond, you can repartition and make room for Linux and you won't need to reinstall the original OS.

  • Windows port 'envisioned'? (Score:3)

    by Jburkholder ( 28127 ) on Thursday July 22, 1999 @10:07AM (#1789198)
    Ok, this is great news, just a question, though.

    The article says:

    "Recently, a new need for hard-drive partioners has been felt with the growing success of Linux: people often want to install Linux on their PC without having to remove Windows(tm)."

    Ok fine, but... if this is initially written for Linux, is there going to be a lot of interest? Granted, it would be great if an installer could resize your partitions for you on the fly to make room for Linux. I guess from my perspective, I'd be more comfortable using a 3rd-party package like Powerquest PM4 to do the changes from within windows and make sure that it still works before doing a Linux install.

    But then, that's just me. I hope this does well, I'm just scratching my head wondering if the targeted users for this would really be interested. Who knows?
  • IIRC, it's been a lot less than two years since 4.0 came out. I remember buying it as soon as it came out probably 6 months ago.
  • What I would like to see is a FIPSish tool for NTFS. That would be really helpful for installing Linux in corporate settings.

    If they can put that into this tool, it could well become the standard partitioning tool.
  • Yes it looks good, but at the risk of drawing the wrath of the true believers...

    I think that the Wizard (Lizard?) way is the right way to go. Presuming that this is aimed at new users who are most familiar with Windows in its various flavors, a wizard approach would be comfortable, intuitive, and best of all, repeatable.

    I am a bit scared off by the Perl/Tk requirement. It has been my experience that shipping interpreted applications that you have to have version X.Y.Z of package ABC, or else you get all kind of errors.

    ----
    Wind and temp at my house [halcyon.com]

  • Please... PLEASE oh admins of /., give us killfiles!
    ---
  • Um, that's not precisely true. First, I've installed linux *without* partitioning before, UMSDOS support still works, and you can mount ext2 partitions (or any other filesystem type, pretty much) on loopback, which means they're just files on top of another filesystem. It isn't necessarily as efficient, but it's still pretty fast, actually.

    Also, you could run X off of a CD, if necessary, with a little magic for file locations and temporary files. However, you're right in that I wouldn't want to run X in the initial install, unless I was assured that I could *always* either pick the right X-server, or use one that would work the first time. That seems unlikely.

    Time for an ncurses version... (there might be one, I haven't looked into this at all...)
  • This tool does not have to run under Windows to still be very useful. It can be easily built into the install process of a Linux distro to allow non-destructive repartitioning. In fact this is probably easier than using Partition Magic before starting the Linux installation since the process is more integrated.
  • It is on X, but you can't tell X by looking. X is a protocol for talking to graphical terminals, just as VT100 was a protocol for talking to text terminals. This gets confusing with workstations, becuase the terminal and the host are the same computer.

    Systems running X can look completely different, even Linux systems, depending on whether they use 75dpi or 100 dpi fonts, which window manager is running, which widget set and application uses, which theme the window manager and widget set is using (where applicable).

    Things are further confused by look-alike themes. In some cases a Mac, or W95 theme running on X can be indistiguishable from the real thing.
  • I love perl, but it is a little scary trusting my hard drive to it.

    Not for any real reason, but it just seems somehow wrong.

    It's like a Java disk partitioning program. It would just be totally, wholly, cosmically wrong. =)

    -awc
  • It looks like you're right. I found the original slashdot article [slashdot.org] where this was announced... It was just over a year ago, and that was a beta announcement. But (also from the article) PowerQuest said it was going to release the source-code "soon".
  • >This tool does not have to run under Windows to still be very useful.

    Right, I understand that, I don't dis-agree. I just meant that a first-time Linux installer might be wary of something like this. From my experience (not *all* that long ago) installing Linux on a Windows machine, the scariest part was repartitioning to free up space for Linux.

    I guess my experience was that running PQPM and then booting windows to make sure it was still there felt a little safer to me than if there was some 'out of the box' solution to do it during the install. Once I was comfortable that Windows was still working, I had no qualms about firing up the RedHat installer.

    OTOH, an integrated partitioner in an installer would be great for users that don't care. But I already paid my $30 for PM and it works great so I don't personally have much interest in this (especially if it cannot resize ext2 partitions on the fly without losing data).
  • Freshmeat's been on the fritz lately so...
    --
    "All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
  • This thing is written in PERL/GTK. The moment you need a disk partitioner is during initial install. However, during install you probably don't have PERL or GTK installed.

    The whole idea of a GUI based install seems slightly suspect to me: I want to be relying on as few components as possible during install. This program depends on having X configured/ running (even if only with a default VGA server), perhaps a basic window manager, a (kitchen-sink) kernel, probably a shell (ash?), PERL and GTK. That is quite a bit of code.

    In this decadent era of LCD displays and bootable CD-ROMs, it may well be possible to keep all these dependencies on a "live" filesystem on the CD-ROM. In such case, this may be a workable solution. However, I do all my installs over FTP, and I don't want to have to pull all that code base over a pipe (especially a modem), just so I can look at pictures instead of ASCII.

    I like Mandrake, and I'm glad they are trying to further the cause. And, despite my views, having a graphical partitioning program is probably a Good Thing for bringing more users to Linux. But, I still think that, in this case, the minimal approach is the wiser.

    --Lenny
  • Just goes to show: if you mark a comment flamebait, it will get flamed...
  • Yeah you're right - I bought it too when it came out, can't be any longer ago than last fall. I remember because its one of the few that I've bought by download, and I only got my cable modem last October.

    Probably thinking about PM3 that has been out for a couple years. I think I got that one about the time Win95 OSR2 was out with fat32 support, If memory serves.

    That doesn't mean that PowerQuest shouldn't release the code soon if that's what they promised! :-)

  • >If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
    ..oh wait, he does.


    (Offtopic) Heh, been a while since I laughed that hard at a .sig

    Good one! (moderators, do your duty)
  • Perl frontend. Note it's gtk-perl. I'd hazard a guess the actual gruntwork is done in C. --Dan
  • I like that - "the free world" as a term for all people who use free software. We should try to establish it in that meaning.
  • I thought at first that writing it in perl was a bad idea, because you need a perl runtime environement (or does perl compile native these days?).

    But one big advantage of using perl is that the port to Win32 should be fairly easy. Assuming the disk access code for windows can be ripped from FIPS and put in a library, the trickiest part will be the GUI. Of course, if they used a cross platform toolkit (either wxWindows or QT) then that would become a non-issue.
  • If you want ext2 resizing, there is a project called parted [alphalink.com.au], based on the fsresize [alphalink.com.au] and the ext2resize [www.dsv.nl]. Currently under development.

  • Betas (Score:2)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    That goes along with anything in "beta" or earlier. If you are not a developer, or fairly intelligent tester (ie you can say more than, "it broke my hard drive") you should not use betas of anything unless you accept the chance or ruining things. If you are real cautious of disk partitioning programs, wait until a few weeks after version 1.0 is released. Then read mail lists and do research to make sure the more adventurous folks are using it without problem. Then maybe, give it a shot yourself.

    I haven't bought Partition Magic myself, but does anyone want to guess if their EULA has a line like, "PowerQuest is not responsible for any damage done to your computer..."? I'd prefer an Open Source product for such a task. If the $50 (or whatever) for PM doesn't get you any guarantee, what hope is there? If I'm wrong, and they do take responsibility say so, I would commend them, but I have yet to see a piece of software for Windows that does not have a line like the above in the EULA.

  • One assumes the point of this hinges on the upcoming MS Windows version -- i.e., using a graphical partitioner for an initial Linux installation actually makes a great deal of sense.

    However, I've always maintained that dual-booting is usually a mistake, and that people seek out "non-destructive" resizers because of an underlying lack of control of their systems that they'd be better off curing, instead. See: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#partiti on [linuxmafia.com]

  • If a feature is wanted, do it. Others have said here how they want support for this/that filesystem type. It all comes down to a developer scratching an itch. If you can't code, find information about filesystems for the developers. But just whining will get you no where. Does anyone know where some source for the ext2 filesystem might be? :)
  • There are a large number of spell checkers out there. ispell is a good one, but there are other ones (GUI ones, web ones, etc).

    There is, however, no OpenSource method of making everyone use them.
  • Mostly french running the company side of things, but a lot of europeans involved. Meaning non-native English speakers. Give them a break, it's a second language for them, unlike our fearless leaders. We could all use a good spell checker on this 'bored' however. My problem is that my fingers get cold while typing. They keep it a comfortable 65 F in here sometimes. Brrrr.

  • To make this perfect (Score:3)

    by Gleef ( 86 ) on Thursday July 22, 1999 @11:31AM (#1789228) Homepage
    To make this perfect, they should do a version with an ncurses or newt frontend, so you can put it on a single-floppy distribution of Linux.
  • I agree with you in prinicle, but not in practice.

    The GUI is important because these days anything with a GUI is comfortingly familiar, and anything
    without is dangerous and frightening. But, the problem of not adding bloat before the bulk of the install is an important one.

    I'm not sure perl is an issue, since I think a perl runtime is quite small and available for many platforms. But X, gtk and so on are certainly an issue.

    To me the ideal approach seem to be a fake GUI which dresses up the CLI install - just like Stormix are doing. You can use a 16 colour VGA driver, which is small and will work on almost anything, and still draw good 'fake' gtk or qt widgets and window decorations. If it is done properly (and it looks like Stormix is), then the CLI option can be run with the same code, and I guess the bloat for the CLI can be kept to a fraction of a floppy.

    I'm not sure whether this is the approach adopted by either Caldera or Stormix, or whether they are starting up a basic x-server. But its the way I'd do it.

  • Re:Good work, but not quite a replacement. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Two points :

    Ext2resize [msede.com]is free and will resize ext2 partitions.

    What good is a X windows based disk partitioner when initially installing Linux? Setting up your partitions is the first thing to be done, configuring X is way, way, way in the distance.

    Hamster
  • By all means don't do anything yourself. After all this is a GPL'ed product, meaning you let other people do the hard work and just sit back and moan about how ti doesn't do X, Y or Z. Let alone time a moment to think about how to implement such a product. One thing that comes to my mind is to have a core library or set of routines that do the actual work on the disk, then provide a separate handy user interface. Since that interface is separate, it could be implemented in any way, GUI, Command line, ncurses, etc as long as it calls the appropriate routines in the back end. I haven't (yet) looked through the code, but this just came to my mind. I doubt I'm all that enlightened that none of the Mandrake folks have thought of it either. But I could be...
  • Yes, it does.

  • Oh what a world of whiners we are today. Certainly don't do anything productive like offer services for clarifying English material written by people who don't have it as their primary language. How many languages do you know again, and if more than one, how often might you misspell something in a secondary one? Unfortunately for those of us in the US, since English is perhaps the most universal language, we're not motivated to learn another language.

    Take what you read with a grain of salt, or don't read it at all, let alone whine about it...

  • The Windows 2000b3 installer still partitions disk the old fashion way (DOS FDISK + NT blue screen installer to format).

    (Having a Linux eqiv for Disk Mungler would be nice, though.)
    --
  • I'm pretty sure that Caldera uses the frame buffer feature during it's install of OpenLinux 2.2. Friendly looking graphics during installation, and it lets you play Tetris during most of it. (It also includes the older text-based installation tools)
  • To add to that, please, do more than just think of a new idea. Do some research, find related material (how a filesystem works if you want another one supported by this program, or hardware info if you want a driver, etc) to help out programmers. If you do some things like this, you'll have a better chance of catching a developer's attention. If I just see, "I want X," it's doubtful I will pay you any attention.

  • Re:Good work, but not quite a replacement. (Score:3)

    by mangino ( 1588 ) on Thursday July 22, 1999 @11:59AM (#1789241) Homepage
    The code to do that which is part of Partition Magic will be released as open source shortly. Part of the deal the author made when he wrote that code is that it would later be opensourced.
  • I'll give you a hint: mini VGA X-windows installation procedure in ramdisk.

    Jean-Michel Dault
    jmdault@linux-mandrake.com

    "If it's a GTK app, you need X, which means you need Linux, which means you need... an ext2 partition"
  • Ooh! Neat! Someone's found a way to /. the human brain.
  • resize their disk partitions, which is still a delicate operation, only permitted by some hard-to-use text based programs like "fips" or other proprietary software.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't fips open source? Maybe it is freeware, is it commerical binary only? I remeber downloading (binary) for dos....
  • A GUI is great for newbies that purchase the CD-ROM. You can put all the bells and whistles to offer a good alternative to M$.

    Hackers prefer the command line, I agree. But then, when you install by command line, you should know how to use fdisk.

    Mandrake will offer best of both worlds.

    JM
    jmdault@linux-mandrake.com
  • If they wanted to use cross platform GUI with perl then Perl/Tk would be the obvious choice.
    What would be even cooler is if they were to work on porting perl/GTK to windows. I've used Tk under linux and windows and it is lacking some stuff that pelr/GTK has.
  • Did you score it as "Flamebait," too? I tried moderating down bugbear's SHIZ-NIT post yesterday, but made the mistake of scoring it as "OffTopic" when it was already at 0:Flamebait. My guess is, a posting has to get two whammies of the same kind to get it down to -1.

    bugbear, why are you pulling this crap? Your user history reveals your past posting have (at least) shown more intelligence. This sort of stunt not only pisses everyone off at you, it also brushes up your account for the axe.

    (Filter idea: run gzip on postings, and if the compression ratio is greater than 95%, drop the score!)
  • It needs to be fired up, even if it only supports the Linux-recognizable fs types. It seems to me this shouldn't be devastatingly hard, given the existing code; perhaps more a matter of organizing the expertise for various filesystems.
  • Check out your user preferences. There's a "long post" field in which you specify a number (defaults to 10000). Posts with a character count higher than that number automatically get bumped up one moderation point. I just set mine to 1000000.

    --

  • Ok.

    The way I read that sentence was (fips) or (other proprietary software) of which I assume they were referring to Partition Magic.

    You're corrected.
  • ...learn to write in complete sentences.

    --

  • but emotional, not that I blame you. I agree with your sentiments.
  • That'd be rather stupid if it could only enlarge and create ext2 and not shrink it. It'd be nice to shrink *or* enlarge ext2 partitions. For example, if you find out you have tons of space on your /usr partition, but your running out of space on /var.
  • PowerQuest was to release the code 18 months after the commercial version was released.

    This post [deja.com] is by the author of the ext2fs resizer and does not dispute the information that Rik van Riel posted. It was posted 15JUN98, so I guess we can look forward to seeing it in the next few months.
  • These are ideas for features I want to see in this program (I may, perheaps, contribute on some of them):

    Resizeing of ext2fs partitions (Resizeing is allready supported for FAT partitions...)

    Partition seek. The ability to seek for an existing file system (ext2fs) on a disk, to recover from a corrupt/overwritten partition table.

    Moveing of partitions from one place on the disk to another, whithout losing data (Perheaps to another disk too).
  • To quote Mandrake:
    "DiskDrake currently runs under Linux. A Windows(tm) port is envisaged."

    It seems they are aware of the catch22 you mention and are planning a Windows version for pre-linux partition juggling acts.

    I wonder if other Linux distro's and maybe even FreeBSD etc. are going to bundle it up in the same way some bundle a "lite" PM-4??

  • (Score:1)

    by edLin ( 5192 )
    MY GOD THEY WROTE FDISK IN PERL!
    Is there no limit? What falls next, how about a port of gcc? or emacs. We are all going to be running emacs written in perl/gtk with a lisp interpruter inside. Why do not just release perlix with the perl kernel.
    Or we could rewrite X11 in perl.

    So remember kids, next time you are offered some perl: JUST SAY NO.
  • I think they are doing it mostly for installers (their own installer, primarily). Otherwise ext2 support is a must.

    But still, they plan to port it to Windows, so you can make changes from within Windows, without having to shell out a bunch of bucks for Partition Magic.
    --

  • Go ahead a fire up a GNUPM. Make your own if you don't want someone else's free software. The more the merrier. Co-opt the mandrake code if you want. Embrace and extend.

    But why wait until now? What was wrong with last week? Last month? Why wait until someone got half the work done for you before starting? The free software community would be better served if people helped with existing projects rather than trying to put a "G" in front of everything.

    To misquote Gandalf: "Not all that's GPL is GNU. Not all that is BSD is Bad. Look for great things to happen, outside of the RedHat labs."

  • In that case, they need a comma following the `other' as it is being used (sort of, or is `other' always one?) as an adjective, and adjectives should always be separated by a comma (proprietary is nothing but an adjective).
  • I'd like to see killfiles.

    However, I'd rarely use them, I only used killfiles to get rid of spam, a problem non-existant on /.

    Before going nuts on someone and killfiling someone or posting against them for something like this, check out the little (User Info) link under the name. His latest post (as of this writing) says that someone used his password to post a ton of comments commonly despised here today. Look further down and read some of the previous comments.

    He appears to be a Perl hacker who attempts to contribute to /. code. So I *seriously* doubt he's lying about the misused password. It's probably some jerk friend who decided to have some "fun" with his account who posted the bad ones.
  • That is a fine idea. I often use these small distributions to fix stuff after I do something bad (sidenote: don't use root as an everyday login ;) and a small version of this would certainly be useful.

    --

  • "Until something else comes along, Linux-Mandrake is the best hope we have for getting Linux to the masses"
    Have you seen the Caldera's new installer? From what I understand, it starts from windows, the uses a wizard-like process to help you select the right packages to install. Best of all, you get to play tetris while it copies files and does whatever else it needs to do. :)
    That, I think, is the kind of ingineuty needed to bring linux to the masses.

    --

  • This is a warning.

    I like RedHat because they work. I never liked Mandrake because they made configuration files.

    Now Mandrake has been doing what I always said RedHat should do.

    GET YOURSELF A DESKTOP DIVISION!

    The answer then was, well you know there isn't really any interest in Linux on desktop! No apps etc...

    This is an honest warning. IBM did that years ago and got screwed by Microsoft!

    You are doing it now and will get screwed by Mandrake! They will have the huge desktop market in 10 years or more with MS, and you will battling crap with SUN!

    I wouldn't want RedHat to be SUN, I want RedHat to be ALLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Kidding, but it's true that Mandrake is doing what RedHat should have started doing simultaneously with its corporate attack. They should and I still should again and again create a desktop division.

    Hey, we have 3 office suites of great quality.
    5 commercial games plus other (FINALLY) 3D GNU games.
    All you need is a usable (not hylafax, not mgetty) fax/voice/data gtk/gnome based software that autoconfigures, and you are ready for SOHo's.

    Why are people so blind?

    Kuddos Mandrake even though I still don't like you!


  • I never thought of rewrighting X in perl, I better get right on it!

  • It *could* happen (Mandrake is #2 seller behind RehDat at Linux mall), but much more likely is that RedHat will take note and copy all of Mandrake's improvements...

    Actually, what I think will happen before too long is that RedHat will aquire Mandrake as one of the first moves in the inevitable consolidation of the Linux market. Having many competitors is the sign of a young industry .. at this point it's hard to call the eventual winners, although RedHat is about to aquire the financial staying power and muscle to pretty much guarantee they're there (barring a huge fuck up).

    I think that's why the RedHat IPO is likely to do well - people are really buying into the future of Linux, not RedHat per se...


  • I wonder if one could re-write Perl in Perl. People have ray-traced in Perl.

    Hey, you have to boot-strap somewhere! If Be is the Object-Oriented Operating System, PerlOS can be the RegExp TMTOWTDI Operating System!

    --
    QDMerge [rmci.net] -- data + templates = documents.
  • Last time I used fips the source code was available, so not only did they get that bit wrong, they also label it "hard-to-use".

    Anybody who thinks fips is hard to use should pack up their computer into the box it came in, take it back to the place they bought it, and tell the salespeople they're too stupid to own a computer.
  • Well - Perl can be quite useful - just think of the "Perl Power Tools|Toys" - a rewrite of many GNU tools in Perl.
    I did write an (albeit simple) HTTP server in Perl (single client since I don't have fork() on NT yet) - I guess that maybe a distribution of a kernel, Perl and a huge batch of Perl programs could make a real "Linux" (under the GPL for the kernel and under the artistic license for the rest) instead of that "GNU/Linux" we all have to put up with currently :)
    Perl can be quite fast too since it compiles into bytecode ... Amazing what people do in Perl, "just because they can" :)

    -max
  • and its not free!
    so no one cane improve on it, or put it in another distro.

    So they lock you in, and we are back to square one again.

  • It seems to me that they should just release it as a bootable floppy with an extreeeeemly pared-down linux/X configuration. Could this be done on just one or two floppies?

  • Your GNU-less distro needs a C Library to run Perl. libc6 is GNU Libc. libc5 is unsupported.

    :-P
  • because it hadn't been mod'ed yet, silly

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