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The birth of liberty

Technical, Political ·Sunday March 29, 2009 @ 21:49 EDT (link)

On Friday (27th) I picked up the computer I'd ordered from Hard Drives Northwest. I tried to install (Gentoo) Linux on it; it failed the same as the Costco machine.

I eventually figured out why it won't boot (VFS: cannot open root device): it needed SCSI disk to be enabled (for a SATA drive; apparently libata uses SCSI); kernel option CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD. As I understand it (documentation is a bit scarce; the libATA Developer's Guide was somewhat helpful), libATA implements the ATA standard and translates to the SCSI command set, which allows the use of various low-level transports such as SATA and SCSI.

The new machine will be named liberty—in hope that liberty will return to this nation: that the grassroots efforts by the Campaign for Liberty, the tax protest tea parties, the various conservative and libertarian discussion groups and book clubs and the groundswell of support to overthrow creeping socialism, to fight the liberal fascism of the left, will triumph and return freedom to these United States of America. It's a grand aspiration: but these are interesting times, ripe for revolution.