There’s a saying that a sysadmin is someone who will write two hundred lines of code to avoid typing twenty characters. This was not quite true of me today, but it’s close enough.
You see, my father is coming to visit this weekend, and while he’s here he wants to spend a little time writing. His requirements are simple: A word processor and a USB port for his flash drive. No sweat; I have those on my laptop, and I even know I’ve got the kernel modules and software I need (because my camera works, and as far as Linux is concerned a camera is merely a glorified flash drive).
But what if I want to use my computer at the same time? Jeff and I each have a computer, so we’re not used to sharing. Luckily we have a third computer, an old box that was intended as a development system but can be pressed into service. No trouble running X and a light window manager (Openbox is my current favorite), but OpenOffice.org is a bit of a stretch. So I spent a few minutes installing X and a couple of hours figuring out why I couldn’t open remote X apps.
I did get it working, though only if X is started via startx rather than xdm. It was a webpage that gave me the crucial information yesterday, and it mentioned at least two configuration files to change (/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and another for /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers), but I can’t find it again to see if there’s anything I missed.
Situations like this are why I feel I both am and am not a geek. On the one hand I administer my own Debian system, compile kernels, and custom-compile packages. Yesterday I hacked a WordPress plugin (WP-DB Backup) and one of the core WordPress files and created patch files so that my changes would be more easily re-integrated into new versions. At the same time, it can take me ages to figure out something that should be easy.
Jeff thinks I’m a geek, and he loves it. Apparently he’s not alone in thinking female geeks are very attractive.