Microsoft sucks

Once upon a time, there were HP PC computers. They ran HP-Dos, then MS-Dos. These machines were meant to be personal computers. Personal rather than a group machine. Not multitasking and not multiuser.

The operating system was not built with security in mind. It really wasn't a big issue. The only way to move data from one machine to another was to copy it onto a disk. If you were a little bit careful about what disk you stuck in your machine, you were more or less safe.

Then came networking for the PC. Now security is a much, much bigger issue. However, retrofitting MS-Dos for security is not possible. It's in the nature of the thing to be a great big security hole. Over the years, Microsoft has shipped ever newer, bigger and "better" versions of the operating system. It doesn't resemble its ancestor at all in any particular beyond the fact that it is a great big security hole.

To be fair, there are many ways to make a Linux machine into a great big security hole, too. But in Linux, it is possible to fill that hole in and make the system reasonably secure.

Why am I ranting about this at noon on Friday? 'Cause this office is filled with PCs running various versions of Microsoft Windows and various versions of DOS apps. The system makes liberal use of file sharing and network drive mounting. Everything is connected together in one big happy network.

And the mail program of choice is Outlook.

And this morning, we are chasing a goddamn virus all around the building.

Yep, it's annoying.

My plan? Convert it all to Linux as quickly as I can.

uff dah

I've been trying, off and on, for a week to get various utilities to compile from source. I've gotten a pretty consistent error that I've worked around, but I've still been unable to get any configure script to complete without error. I went back to a script I know worked and even it failed.

The error I worked around was this: bad interpreter: Permission denied
The she-bang line just failed. If I ran "sh configure" it would work only to have configure fail later in the run.

I wrote a little test:
#!/bin/sh
echo "This worked"
exit

It failed with the same error.

THEN I remembered. When I rebuilt the hard drive partitions on this machine a few months ago, I made a separate file system for the development stuff. I ran mount.

Yep. There was my development file system mounted "noexec." I have no idea why that was so. I changed the fstab entry to explicitly allow exec and rw. Now all is fine.

Well all is back to normal. I'm still compiling other people's code that spits a mile of warnings at me about signedness and ptr type problems. Doesn't anyone try to write clean code?

Anyway, I feel like an idiot.