Getting back to CVS... I thought I understood how to run it clearly enough, but whenever I tried to checkout the entire OpenBSD source tree, it would maddeningly break somewhere in the middle and refuse to continue. At the time, I didn't bother going through the CVS documentation to see if there was some way of getting around this. (Don't try this at home, folks. Never do anything without reading all the documentation. (I wish life had thorough documentation. If it did, I probably wouldn't be suicidal to begin with. In the "computer" world, people who don't RTFM tend to make problems much more difficult than they should be, or they create more problems instead of solving them. I don't understand why the "real" world should be any different.))

I eventually realized that I had completely forgotten about DOS's stupid reserved filenames. Because DOS is DOS, it imposes certain idiotic restrictions on names of files. For example, filenames like "com4.c" and ":tt" are not allowed. So, I actually took the time to manually go through the entire source tree and take note of filenames that DOS wouldn't swallow. Then I downloaded each file manually, saving each file under a filename that DOS could live with. Then I renamed each file back when I compiled the ISO. About four hours into this, my brain wizened up to what I was doing and realized what a complete waste of time this was. So, with a great big "fuck this" I decided to abandon dealing with the source tree altogether. Well, that was an interesting day. :)

OpenBSD
Life sucks as usual. Nothing much to report... Actually, I've kept myself busy the past few days trying to learn some technical computerese on my own. I figured it's better than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling for the entire day. I hate Microsoft Windows with a passion, so I've been trying to install a different operating system on my PC. I heard OpenBSD was very secure, and I've had some background with UNIX, so I decided to give that a shot.

The first thing I had to do was gather all the installation material. I've installed RH Linux before by simply downloading their CD-ROM images from their website, burning them onto CD-R's, and then booting them from the CD-ROM drive. OpenBSD offers a CD-ROM installation. I have to pay for it, but all the files themselves are available via anonymous FTP. Not wanting to pay for something that I believed I could do for myself free, I decided to take the cheap route.

Since I'd done UNIX installs before, I didn't bother going through any of the OpenBSD documentation. I did read something, though, that said the best way to retrieve the source was via AnonCVS. Now, I've heard of CVS from all over the place, but I'd never actually tried to use it myself. Given that my choices were to spend the rest of the afternoon either staring blankly at a wall or learning how to use CVS, I chose the latter.

Uh oh, I'll have to stop for now and pick up from here later. Sorry! I hate doing this -- it diminishes the reader's experience. Oh well, 'til next time...