Anthology of Interest

I'm often asked how many lines of code there are in some project I'm working on. I think it's the least useful metric of any codebase, but people always seem interested in knowing. I'm not sure if they are more impressed by a small number or a large number...

Since it comes up, here's a one liner to count the number of lines of code.

find . -name "*.cc" -or -name "*.hh" -exec wc -l "{}" ";" | gawk '{nlines = nlines + $1} END {print nlines}'

If you want to have multiple OS's on your USB drive, you can install GRUB. I haven't actually installed multiple OS's, but GRUB does work:

1. Mount the drive somewhere, say /media/usb.
2. Copy the grub files to the flash drive: mkdir -p /media/usb/boot/grub, then cp -R /boot/grub/* /media/usb/boot/grub.
3. Change the device map for the flash drive: echo "(hd0) /dev/sdb" > /media/usb/boot/grub/device.map
4. Run grub using the new device map: grub --device-map=/media/usb/boot/grub/device.map
5. Install grub on the flash drive: root (hd0,0), then setup (hd0), and quit.
6. Edit the /media/usb/boot/grub/menu.lst file so that it will load FreeDOS by default:

   
         default 0
         timeout 10
   
         title FreeDOS
         root (hd0,0)
         chainloader +1
         makeactive
         boot
   

7. Unmount and test in qemu, or on a real machine.