I honestly love the two together, I think the original was enhanced by the prequel, which is a rare thing.

Story-wise, the transition is pretty well thought out and I think the prequel does a good job of honouring the 1982 story.

There is a 1 hour yt video out there covering the making of the prequel and it really drives home how much the director was steamrolled by the producers, especially on the CGI.

Vi is unintuitive and annoying to me.

Totally fair, I only learned because I was forced to.

Why wouldn’t it work over telnet when it works via SSH?

Serial consoles feed back information one line at a time, so no curses interfaces. No arrow keys, just hjkl. Anything that needs to count characters and columns (like position-based cursor editors like nano) won’t work over telnet.

in my console, or rather terminal

A serial console and a terminal aren’t the same thing.

If you like micro, use micro. I don’t care.

which I don’t need my three year computer science degree for.

vi really isn’t complex.

CUA editors

CUA editors work as long as there is grid display and ANSI input. They do not work in a line feed or console-line environment like telnet, console, etc., hence the need for hjkl movement.

Also CUA is an IBM initiative, it wasn’t followed everywhere.

When I have to console into the old Solaris boxes at work, I’m reminded both of how many quality-of-life enhancements we enjoy on modern Linux, and also why I will always default to vi as my editor.

777 is read/write/execute for owner, group, and world, respectively. It’s the most permissive POSIX permission that can be set. If something can’t write on a 777 umask, then either the filesystem is mounted read-only, or something is deeply wrong with the storage.

drives are NTFS

You probably have the clean unmount bit unset for the NTFS partition. This is trivial to bypass, but I would suggest not using NTFS in Linux, NTFS is not a great fs and Linux support is… OK.

Really great article.

I was a bit critical of your last post on kernel init stuff, but this one is well laid out and gets quickly to the material at hand: all applications make the same system calls.

Keep it up, I’m going to follow this.