Debian/KDE because I like the way I can customize (1 panel on the left with everything) No features removed just as one gets used to them. (looking at you gnome) No breaking changes to the desktop gadget api every update (you gnome again) Nice big repo.

Sorry my drawing did not come out well.

Drawing it up… : ^) Sorry, I am not a very good artist and it’s hard getting AI to give you exactly what you want when you want something exact.

t+ and T- to upstream neighbor (2) + a single wire from upstream to tell you to send (3), R+ and R- (5) to down stream neighbor + a single wire to let downstream know when you can receive from them.(6) And a pair to control a relay in what would be like a token ring MAU. Token ring is also a logical ring and a physical star: All the physical cables come to a central hub (physical star) but the machines are connected

Logical Ring                                                       Physical Star
+-->[ r t ]--> [r  t] -->[ r  t ]--> [r  t] --> [ r t]--+       [ machine1 ] ===== cat 6 ==== |  mau |=====cat6== [ machine 3 ]
 |                                                                 |       [ machine2 ]====== cat 6 ====|          |====cat 6 == [ machine 4 ]
+-----------------------------------------------------+

until the last machine loops around to connect to the first.

Is it anything like token ring? No, The difference is no token to lose, No ring master or deputy ring master to lead things- everyone just plays along according to basic rules. Any machine can move data to it’s upstream neigbor at any time that neighbor is ready to take it, no one machine at a time getting to talk. So it’s not like token ring. Also unlike Ethernet, you can connect any number of machines in a ring: 5 for a small office, 20 for a department of a large firm, 200 for every employee of a firm, 2000 for all the offices of a company or a part of a neighborhood. Since machines are not contending for bandwidth there is no collision, no backdown and resend.

Rings of machines are connected to bigger rings via gateways - which also have their own way of assigning addresses to each of their ports.

1. enough network wide addresses for anyone
2. addresses not controlled by any agency, but each machine gets a “computed” address by virtue of it’s own port address+the port on the gateway it is talking to.

I don’t bend my values for entertainment. I pick my OS for privacy and freedom first. If a game won’t run on it, that game doesn’t run in my life.

I used chatGPT to work up a backup program that tracked rsync backups as I wanted and could report which backups needed to be run and which ones should be started fresh because too many rsync runs from my home dir to the target dir. It’s call Loci, and it’s on codeberg.

“UEFI does have a legacy compatibility layer” And this is how one may have a “system firmware” that allows both. Could DOS be made UEFI compatible maybe by loading a .sys driver or maybe by replacing io.sys with one that made use of UEFI?

My system came with Python3 installed. Debian 12.

Ah, Improvements!

Looks like a line by line translation from the python. Will you use it to backup your home directory?

Actually, I do have a quite usable FreeDOS running in DOSBox on my Linux machine, but it’s not quite the same as running DOS / FreeDOS on the metal. Getting floppies to work as seamlessly as they do on a machine meant for DOS for example.

Linux for example will boot easily under both UEFI and BIOS - but I suppose that is because Linux does not ask anything of either once it is running.

Especially one that lets you know how long it’s been since you took time to run a backup, keeps track of which set of backups could be updated, and which should be refreshed, and keeps a log file up to date and in .csv format so you can mess with it in a spreadsheet?

Yeah, no problem… I started out with just bare rsync - but I did the backup infrequently and needed my notes to know the command. Then I wrote a simple shell script to run the rsync for me. Then I decided I needed more than one backup, redundancy is good. Then I wanted to keep track of the backups so I had it write to .backuplog then that file started getting dated (every time I run a “sun” backup the record of the previous one is useless) so Finally TaDa! loci is born.

It’s also to help me learn python. And it works for me. : ^ )

Like Beer, AI is the cause, and the solution of all our problems. – Homer Simpson

They probably named it HORNET for a reason - think Japanese Murder Hornets… What Could Possibly Go Wrong??

It will probably start out as little glitches and slowdowns to destroy faith in your system (“Windows works right all the time”) a random 2 second pauses. Finally one day every Linux box in the world crashes, all at the same time, because some ‘dummy’ in Microsoft deleted the private signing key.

Yes, this was it. I remember seeing that but tonight I could not find it, and I don’t remember changing it but I must have. Thanks!

An additiona feature might be if one types TRY DEFAULT then the batch file run GNUCHCP -R for you.