perldiver

So, in a fit of "let's be smart and helpful", I pointed out to my new (contract) employers that they really should have a development server, since it isn't safe to do dev work on the production machine.

Their response?  "You're absolutely right.  Can you have it built and ready to deploy by January 11?"

Me and my big mouth.  I'm not good with hardware or sysadmin stuff...ah well, it's a trip.  I'm raising my geek quotient considerably: so far, I've had to debug why the monitor wasn't working (possibly the video card flaked, but sticking an old one in worked fine), fought my way through an installation of Debian Linux (for about the 3rd time; as usual, I failed to get it installed), learned how to use BitTorrent, made it into a Slackware install only to find that the install disks  did not have a kernel that could talk to my SATA hard drive;, and I am in the process of learning how to compile a Linux kernel.  The last is complicatedby the fact that I don't have the ncurses library on the system as it stands (so I can't run the 'menuconfig' program that is the first step in kernel compilation), and I don't have another Linux box that I can build it on.  I may have to cross-compile on my OS X box--yet another geek skill, whee!