workbone: I happily announce that I was wrong

I knew I had seen workbone (ahem) working before. I thought it was dead, but with a little perseverance and a bit of luck with outdated distros, it’s back.

So, whither comest thou, workbone? Good question.

Without any real record of its origins, and only a slightly modified version of its source code available, I got lucky with a few oddball links.

Jared has workbone on his magnificent list of console applications, but the link is outdated.

As an alternative, the host suggests a few FTP sites with similar packages, and the ftp.cstone.net mirror of an old Debian version is still hot.

Of course, with the 386 version of that, I can jury-rig an Arch version with deb2targz.

And voila! the packaged binary still runs on the Solo.

And there you have it, with the meager exception of an error message if you try to eject the disc. Magical.

Not everything works this way, of course. I have seen a few smaller applications work fine across distros though.

And I promise to be more careful in the future, and not declare an application dead until it is actually moldering in its grave. 🙂