Re: Name change

On 2007-04-07, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

snip

I'm possibly going through a paranoid patch. I rode to Chester this
afternoon and spent some time in conversation with a chap who makes you
look like an incredibly well-turned out and well-groomed young man.

(The reason for that was his companion - a much younger chap (27, if I
caught it right) who was a bit drunk and behaving a bit obnoxiously, but
only a bit. I could see roughly what was up - the only way to get a
forearm looking like *that* is to cut it yourself. I took some time to
try to point him in the right direction. No other bugger was going to
bother - who gives a *** about single young men going down the tubes,
eh? I didn't weep then. I am now. What a shitty world we live in.)

On their behalf, thank you.

snip

The problem with the `dock' is that it ain't; it's a hang-over from
NeXTSTEP, and I suspect the `non Mac' version might well have been
heavily configurable - but of course that's not the Apple way, is it?

I think the NeXT and related interface was very configurable; it is often
the basis for Linux interfaces.

<stunned> Blimey. There is convergence going on, isn't there?
NeXTSTEP was the basis of MacOS X. Linux is copying NeXTSTEP (okay,
only in some corners), while M$'s Vista is copying MacOS X's UI.


I think that should read 'Vista is trying to copy ...'

Well, at least the free Unix world has a lorra lorra diversity.

That's a teralorra by now I think.

snip

I think you'd like mc, especially if the Mac port comes with mousey stuff
enabled.

The problem with that kind of thing is that you often get an effect akin
to Windoze where the installer throws files all over your HDD and it's
nearly impossible to uninstall, so I'm a bit wary about giving it a go.

If you compile from source you can tell it where to put its bits. You get
a list of files installed anyway, don't you? For mc, most of it on my
system is in the directory /usr/share/mc/ or as files in other 'usual
places' with names that start with mc. or mc- or mcedit so not all that
hard to scrape off the walls if the uninstall or make uninstall command
doesn't work. (Of course, Mandriva uses a package manager based on RPM so
the rpm -e or urpme command takes care of all that if you want to
uninstall - or you can click on the selection box to change the little
icon from an 'installed' to a 'remove this' symbol in the GUI software
management tool. The GUI tools or urpme will also warn you about any other
programs that 'depend' on bits of mc which will also be removed at the
same time and give you time to re-think or choose not to uninstall the
dependent things despite the potential problems later on).

Take a look at <http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/> - there are screenshots there,
as well as a large FAQ.

snip

One of these days, I'm going to sit down and make some notes on `how to
use find from the command line' and stick to using that. It's not as
bad as all that - MacOS X has a nice `open' command in the Terminal
which is about the same as double-clicking a file in the Finder.

Sounds sensible. Midnight Commander has a nice 'find file' tool - Alt-?
(ie Alt-Shift-/ on a UK keyboard; M-? in emacs notation) to get the dialog
in the mc window or console, or use the mc drop-down menus to get there.

Hmm. The ports I've just looked at require Xfree86 and Fink. I think
I'd have to look into things a bit more carefully before installing
anything.

FAQ 5.2 Why is MC linked with X libraries?

GNU Midnight Commander is linked with X libraries to read key
modifiers from the X Server. It may be helpful to distinguish
between keys that the terminal emulator reports in the same way, e.g.
PgUp and Ctrl-PgUp. Versions of GNU Midnight Commander after 4.6.0
will load X libraries dynamically on the systems that support it.

I'd imagine that if you aren't running X then you won't be troubled by key
modifiers from the X server. You might have a corresponding phenomenon
from the MacOS GUI, I suppose. MC certainly runs fine without an X server
being available; that's one of its advantages - a familiar file-manager
and editor are very comforting if you manage to arrange things in such a
way that your GUI no longer works.

snip

One of these days, I'm going to try booting up whlle holding down cmd-v
- that apparently puts the machine into `verbose' mode so you get all
the messages on startup and shutdown that are usually not displayed.
I'd quite like to find out what the bloody hell the damned thing does
when it shuts down - startup's quick (RAM check aside), but shutdown?
What *IS* it playing at? No, no, nothing like a MS-type wait - just
more than I'm used to.

Rowland.

If your system is anything like a normal linux system, shutdown probably
tries to arrange that processes are closed in the order that lets
everything keep running safely until it is stopped, and that caches are
flushed and disc-writes are actually made to disc and log entries are made
all the while and that file-system journals are OK. A global 'kill
everything now' might be quick, but it can be very messy. Unix systems
keep a lot more stuff in RAM than Microsoft systems do - after all, that
is what RAM is for - so the extra 'speed' you get while using the system
has to be paid for when you shut down and your RAM has to be 'synced' with
the permanent storage.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~
.