World: r3wp

I just sstarted downloading this ubuntu linux OS.  I don't know much 
about it.  My last venture into Linux was REDHAT 5.2 which was sometime 
ago.  Can someone tell me how ubuntu compares to other linux flavors 
and if it is pretty standard.  If I'm going to learn linux I would 
rather learn what is the most useful set of commands that enables 
me to use the most distributions of linux.

imho;  Ubuntu is the current up and comer.  Ubuntu ships with a defaut 
set of packages more tuned for running Gnome as the desktop.  Kubuntu 
ships with a default KDE setup.  The Ubuntu family is spin off of 
Debian ... Debian is my personal favourite.  The RHEL branches don't 
seem to do it for me quite as much.  Ubuntu is well supported with 
a growing community and a fairly well off benefactor.   Canonical 
is funded.  I'm pretty sure they still support the WeShipIt program 
where you can order CD's for free - shipping paid by Canonical.  
Pretty sweet.  But imho Debian is a little more solid; years between 
releases.  Canonical likes to stick to a 6 month updgrade schedule. 
 So you get new shiny every 6 months, but ... running a business 
on it, I prefer the soak time Debian affords.


GNU/Linux commands are fairly standard across the board.  It's the 
config, and helper apps that diverge the most.  (That alone causes 
a mess in GNU/Linux land but POSIX is POSIX).  Things don't really 
diverge low-level till you enter the other free unix clones like 
FreeBSD.  One thing to watch on the horizon is OpenSolaris.  If it 
rolls out as it should, it could well be the player to take in Linus. 
 And Ian Murdoch (the man beside Debra in Debian) works at Sun now, 
so ...


In short, Ubuntu good.   :)   But, I prefer it's parent, Debian. 
 If you check the IRC channels on Freenode, #debian is ruthless, 
brooks no guff, with awesome technical support.  #ubuntu seems a 
little more people friendly and perhaps more likely to effectively 
help new users.  Umm, don't go asking Ubuntu questions on #debian. 
 They seem to have a little bit of jealousy toward the younger upstart 
with all the flash cash.  :)


distrowatch.com will tell you pretty much anything you want to know.

Thanks Brian.  Good info.

Oh, and if do have a spare hour or two, don't forget to test Syllable. 
 There is a group here for it.  Some of the principals of Syllable 
development are rebols at heart.  :)  The Desktop can be tested from 
a Live Boot.

Cool.  I just had to restart Unbuntu as it locked up during the installation 
process.

Crappy.   I had Kubuntu 6 Live do that on a lot of the machines I 
tried, but that was X and the mouse duking it out.  Never had a Debian 
install fail, but I have had to boot single user to tweak X11 config, 
but that all went away with the transition to Xorg.  ... knocks on 
wooden brain ... so far.

Gabriele, it's odd because I can retrieve decimal values but can't 
store them correctly.  I don't think the database will recast for 
me automatically but will have to try it.  More likely I'll get an 
odbc error.

If worse comes to worse, I'll have to store as int instead and recast 
using a trigger.

I did some more testing .. and using rebcmd 2.7.5, I can save decimals 
correctly.  I wonder if the problem is because I'm using the very 
old but latest encmdface which is 2.6.2 from Nov 2005 ?

Dec 2005

I may have found another solution.  I changed my column from decimal 
to float, and now it appears to be preserving the power.  Whereas 
with decimal it was changing the power to 0 each time.

Spoke too soon ... :((

Man this unbuntu is awesome!  Why they heck does anyone pay for M$? 
 I guess it is because people like me didn't know this stuff had 
progressed to this point.  My last dip into linux was Redhat 5.1 
and it didn't touch M$ from an end user perspective but I think with 
Unbuntu it has arrived.

Paul;  yep, leave the Money Suck corporation behind ... send money 
to RT instead.  :)   And umm, it's ubuntu ... something about peace, 
live, share, "be human" in Zulu.   It's nice but it's not Debian. 
  Love the non-obvious pronunciation names.  REBOL, Debra and Ian 
for Deb-ian  and ooboontoo  or some such.  :)  And here I am stuck 
on a Win98 box and Carl just fixed CALL on the Linux side  :(

lol

BTW thanks for telling me how to pronounce this ubuntu.  That was 
bugging me for a couple days.

I justed installed Kubuntu on this machine BUT the installed leaves 
a lot of room for improvement.If I had never installed a Linux distro 
before,Kubuntu for the normal Windows user would have them saying 
"f*** Linux. The install gui does not have a progress bar and when 
it is done installing, it does not let the user know the install 
is done and what to do next :( Mandriva on the other hand has an 
excellent install gui. If the major distros could work on a unified 
install gui it would be worth its weight in salt. I did see an effort 
to that end by 2 different ppl but they can not work together because 
of design/programming ideas :( Linux on the desktop works well once 
installed/configed but still it not made for joe six pack

installed=installer

yeah; one of the last frontiers; ease of use.  But it is progressing. 
 It's a little bit too sad that the y2k thing gutted IT money (not 
that the whole .com thing didn't need a good slap to the face) but 
there were some corporate players taking all their funny money and 
setting up OSS departments.  That died an untimely death imho, while 
corporate got mad about spending billions to protect against fudiciary 
responsibility around legacy code and then got nothing in return. 
 No more funny money for the IT department ... since?  So now we 
rely on one of "us" to get the itch and dig in.   Some do.  But it 
is time consuming and somewhat boring clicking through the same installer 
screen 1000 times to cover (some fraction of) all  the bases.  :)

Any shell users here?

I want to create a backup script that calls a backup utility, but 
I want to create the target file with today's date and time.

look to touch

or is it more nerd and little bit gross sexy, to say
man touch

sorry, I wasn't clear .. I want to name the file with today's date 
and time.

I could use Rebol to create the backup script on the fly I guess 
and then run it.

$ a=`date +%D`
$ echo $a
$ mv $backupfile $a
# use date --help to see the plethora of date format specs

Those are backticks.  Assuming bash.

Oh and no space  a=`  a = `  not the same

thanks Brian.

:)

Graham, why not use Rebol for it at all? No need for shell scripts.

because it's faster to use shell scripts .. me thinks

Faster to write, or faster to run? I recently had to move a bunch 
of data and used XXCopy, because I thought it would be faster than 
REBOL (couldn't get robocopy for the old W2K machine I needed it 
on). After it took 34 hours to copy the data, I'm pretty sure REBOL 
would have been just as fast, or faster.

cp -u /source/* /target/ 

is a lot shorter than writing it in REBOL.

Did anyone find a method to determine if a file is actually a symlink 
?

I'm trying to fix my recursive file searcher. My wine installation 
creates some symlinks which point up to a parent directory, creating 
an infinite loop.

I'd start with get-modes ... 'file-modes  but I can't test from here 
on Win98

I'll try it.

and then 'port-modes and ???

file-modes doesn't seem to have anything

>> print mold new-line/all/skip get-modes %Desktop get-modes %Desktop/ 
'file-modes on 2
[
    status-change-date: 26-Mar-2008/12:29:33+11:00
    modification-date: 26-Mar-2008/12:29:33+11:00
    access-date: 27-Mar-2008/13:29:25+11:00
    owner-name: "anton"
    group-name: "anton"
    owner-id: 1000
    group-id: 1000
    owner-read: true
    owner-write: true
    owner-execute: true
    group-read: true
    group-write: false
    group-execute: true
    world-read: true
    world-write: false
    world-execute: true
    set-user-id: false
    set-group-id: false

    full-path: %/home/anton/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/profiles/anton/Desktop
]

You could look to 'copy-modes but I doubt it

Otherwise you'll need to call/info with one of the bash test commands. 
  -h I think.

That would need to be done for every file and would slow down the 
filesearch considerably.

Thanks for the ideas.

in that case, I'd shell script the tests and then  call/output  it

That's an idea. But you have to admit it's messy.

It would be much nicer if rebol could find out this information directly.

I'm going to check RAMBO.

Yep. yep.  Good.  :)

submitted a Wish

Yeah if you do go bash, (I'm not sure how you get your file list) 
ls -F will append @ to links instead of looping over test -h