On Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:52:44 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> All fairly old, IIRC.  Certainly openSUSE (note: spelling is important
>> - it's openSUSE, not OpenSUSE, OpEnSuSe, OpenSuSE, opensuse, ....) is
>> well past a 10.x release being supported.
> 
> At the time when I tried this, these were the latest versions available
> for download.

Ah, I see - a present idea of how it works based on something that 
happened at least several years ago.  (openSUSE 10.x is at least 3 years 
old now, since 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1, and 12.2 have been 
released pretty consistently - except for 12.2 - on an 8-month release 
cycle.  So that's about 50 months of openSUSE releases, as 12.2 was a 10-
month cycle IIRC....)

>> I've never counted on that working, and have never used it.  I prefer
>> my guests to be somewhat more isolated than allowing drag and drop.
> 
> Fair enough. For particularly /large/ binaries, I sometimes use other
> methods. (In the vein hope that it will keep the disk image size under
> control...)

Or indeed the "vain" hope. ;)

What I do is used shared folders and put data on the host.  That way I 
can just have the software installed in the VM and take a snapshot, and 
if something gets borked in the VM, I can just revert and not lose data.

>>> All it means is that for Linux, I have to use Samba instead. (Assuming
>>> the distro in question installs that by default. Installing it
>>> manually doesn't appear to make it work...) I suppose the really
>>> ironic thing is that Linux can connect to the host OS via SMB just
>>> fine, and yet a Windows guest OS cannot seem to achieve this feat.
>>> (??!)
>>
>> You don't have to use SAMBA, use shared folders.  That's what it's for.
> 
> Like I say, I don't even know how that works. Presumably under Linux it
> would show up as an NFS share or something weird which would be hard to
> configure.

Nope.

Shared folders are VERY easy to use.  Take the time to try it rather than 
assuming it's impossible to use (and then declaring it's impossible to 
use).  Giving up without even trying is a poor approach to life.

>> But when connecting a host to a guest filesystem, make sure the
>> firewall permits it.  Most Linux distros lock the firewall down to only
>> permitted services.
> 
> It seems to vary. I did a default install of OpenSUSE 12.2 yesterday,
> and it defaults to leaving the firewall disabled. (I'm pretty sure
> earlier versions had it enabled by default...)

That doesn't sound right for 12.2.  If it does, that's something that 
needs to be fixed.  All earlier versions do leave it enabled by default, 
and 12.2 *should* as well.

>> MS certifications are somewhat regarded as a joke.  LPI doesn't have
>> that reputation, and have worked to try to prevent that
> 
> Well, it makes sense that any provider would /try/ to prevent the
> devaluing of their expensive certifications...

Yes, but dealing with braindump sites (for example) is like a huge game 
of whack-a-mole.  The same organizations shut down one site and open a 
new one under a new name.

There are other ways to address it - one of the more interesting 
techniques I heard of was to create a HUGE question pool - say 10,000 
items, and release it publicly.

All questions on the exam come from the pool, but only use about 1% of 
the questions from the pool, with the item bank changing frequently.

Creating a pool that large takes a huge amount of effort, though.

There are some specific countries where item banks tend to leak from - 
due to poor security practices or (more often) testing centres that 
actively participate in stealing the content for publication.  I've had 
to deal with some of those in the past myself.  It's sometimes why you'll 
see exams available worldwide except for select countries.

>> but IME there are things on their exams that don't make sense to test
>> on - things like what command-line switches
> 
> Yeah, indeed. The difference between cat -n and cat -b? Well, if I EVER
> NEED TO KNOW THAT, it's going to take me a few split seconds to look
> that up. Knowing that cat is even the program I need to be looking at in
> the first place? That sounds far more important.

Yep.  Which is why I would tend to look for (and value) performance based 
exams like the SUSE CLP/CLE and Cisco CCIE more than something like an 
MCSE.

>> I prefer hands-on exams, myself - much better to show that you can do
>> something rather than that you know something.  Application of
>> knowledge is important to me, moreso than the knowledge itself.
> 
> I hear you...

It's one of the reasons I didn't start taking certification exams until I 
was employed by the exam sponsor (Novell/SUSE in my case).

>>> Regardless, I may learn something interesting in the process. E.g.,
>>> everybody knows that you can go through the Bash history using the
>>> arrow keys. But did you realise you can actually /search/ this? I had
>>> no idea.
>>> There's also half a dozen text-processing commands that I've never
>>> heard of. (E.g., "od", "fmt", "pr", "nl", etc.)
>>
>> Well, I did, of course.  Did you know there are a bunch of different
>> shells?  I use tcsh myself. :)
> 
> I knew several shells exist. I didn't realise quite how many though.
> Also, the book I'm reading seems to indicate that these shells are
> actually far more similar than I had imagined; I expected the similarity
> between (say) bash and zsh to be the same as the similarity between Lisp
> and Python (i.e., no similarity whatsoever). But the impression I get is
> that actually that's not true... which leaves me wondering what the
> actual difference is.

Well, derivatives of bash tend to use one type of scripting, csh 
derivatives use another.  Most of the actual differences seem to be 
fairly small, though, these days.

> Still, I'm only a few chapters in. Perhaps this will become clear
> later...

Probably. :)

Jim

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