World: r3wp

I'll try to ask in the Arch Linux forum about this tomorrow. There 
probably won't be anyone using REBOL there but maybe a few people 
are willing to try this out. I'm far from being a Linux guru, if 
someone with more experience would try the Word Browser on his Arch 
Linux system, the possibility of a configuration error on my part 
could be ruled out.

You could have a look in the script to see what it's doing at that 
point

Yeah I started looking at the code. It's a bit hard to debug for 
me though. The error doesn't give any line number, it just says "near 
show main". I searched for "show main" and found three occurances 
in the source. I'm completely new to REBOL so going through everything 
in the code would take me quite some time without being able to narrow 
it down first because everything looks alien to me and I have to 
look it up to see if something in the script looks wrong. Is there 
some good tutorial available on debugging REBOL code? Or is there 
some trick to find out the last line that was executed? I do have 
access to the terminal at that point, the view is frozen but the 
terminal still accepts commands.

Ah, I understand

I'm not aware of a specific debugging tutorial. It takes experience, 
yes. It's not ideal, either, and in REBOL 3 the debugging abilities 
are greatly improved

BudzinskiC, as far as I know there's no real tutorial. Let's continue 
this in the Debugging group.

Budzinski: my guess is that for some reason, either a size-text fails, 
or some othe code fails, leading to a 0x0 or negative pair somewhere, 
or something else weird. REBOL's codebase is just too old, so it's 
always a bit at odds with Linux. :)

Yeah on Mac OS X there are a few problems too. The bottom of a scrollbar 
isn't shown for example (I guess the resize graphic in the lower 
right corner covers it). And the console is unusable when the view 
freezes. Whatever I type ends up as garbage and gets mixed up with 
the command history so the only option at that point is to restart 
REBOL. REBOL seems to work only good on Windows at this point. But 
cross platform is always a hard thing to achieve, I haven't found 
any solution other than Java & Swing that "just works". Well, maybe 
Adobe AiR but only on Windows and Mac OS X, on Linux you get into 
trouble as soon as you use something other than Ubuntu :)

More a problem with VID (the dialect) than REBOL/View per se. I think 
REBOL lives up to the "write once, run everywhere" moniker better 
than Java ("write once, test everywhere") ... *as long as* you don't 
rely on OS-specific calls/fonts/paths, etc.

I hope we get those things fixed and resolved for View/VID 3 ....

We will for Windows and OSX ... but the problem for *nix land is 
the continuing lack of a standard distro to target for. You can't 
make *any* assumptions about what you're running on. I think the 
RT approach of, "this is the Linux distro we are targeting, uses 
others at your own risk" is about the only practical option.

Is the situation really so bad? Well then - there is no other chance 
than to do it on per distro basis then, and isolate what is common 
for more platforms, and then do special configs ...

I never had any trouble with Java + Swing working everywhere, but 
I only recently started using Java for real (about a year ago I think) 
so maybe it's just gotten a lot better now and was awful in the past 
^^ But I guess it also depends a lot on what you are trying to do. 
Programming shouldn't be generalized. There are so many vastly different 
categories of programming (database, web, server, games, system, 
scripting, image/video processing, automation, A.I., embedded, etc.) 
that your mileage may vary depending on your area of interest. And 
don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash REBOL in any way. Apart 
from being completely new to the language which means that I can't 
really say if it's bad or good yet, I wouldn't be here if I didn't 
think it was useful and had potential :) Thankfully I already had 
some basic experience with Scheme, Clojure (a lisp) and Haskell so 
that REBOL's syntax didn't come as a shock for me :)

Rebol crosplatform GUI support kind of sucks :-)

We are waiting for R3, but R3 takes kind of long to complete. We 
learned a lot with VID2 and VID3/View3 should address our problems 
of the past. We don't try to pretend, that REBOL is ideal solution 
for you ....

From my experience, no language is ideal for a person, but for a 
specific task instead. I try to use the best tool for the job when 
I can (same goes for operating systems, I use Windows, Mac OS X and 
Linux). At the moment all my projects are C++, Java, Clojure, Ruby, 
Objective-C, C#, Python and Vala (compiles to C). And sometimes I 
use even two or three languages in combination. I can't say if that's 
the best solution but for me it works good so far ^^

REBOL can cover an amazing stretch of that ground, but it often falls 
down on details, such as the one you just found. It's very frustrating, 
so we have pinned our hopes on R3 which is going to fix most of them

I guess a demonstration of its stretch is rebcode, which I had no 
idea was possible. It won't be in R3, but the fact that it's even 
possible to do in a scripting language and was implemented in as 
short time as it was is a great demonstration of how generic REBOL 
is.

Budzinski: REBOL's shortcomings wrt to "multiplatformness" are mainly 
due to Carl not having the time/resources to really keep all platforms 
up to date. Design wise, I think that we don't have the problems 
Java had/has; they do, though, have enough manpower to fix all of 
them, no matter how awful things end up being. ;)

Gabriele, that Java is open source should help a bit too ^^ But from 
what I read maybe not as much as it could. Seems like Sun needs to 
be forced to accept patches and it can take months until they give 
in. May have been just a few rare cases though, people who are angry 
about something are often more vocal than people who are satisfied.

Henrik, I read about rebcode. Any idea why it's not going to be in 
R3? Sounded like a pretty cool feature. Although I would probably 
never use it, haven't done anything with assembler yet and I don't 
think I ever will (which usually means that something will happen 
that will force me to learn it tomorrow).

I've read the explanation multiple times, but BrianH knows it better 
than me. It has something to do with how functions are implemented 
in R3, which would make rebcode work slower in R3. Therefore it's 
better to spend time perfecting extensions, so you can write time 
critical code in C and use that instead. Rebcode is not for beginners 
anyway (but it did bring up that oldschool feeling for a while :-)).

For REBOL, supporting all platforms, theoretically if you have one 
person who knows enough about all modern OSes to maintain ports of 
R3, that should be enough for good support. Most of the compatibility 
problems are specific and known.

It'll be at least a lot easier to write C extension instead of using 
an assembly like language ^^ I've used inline C and C++ in the past 
when writing Ruby code. I don't know much about C/C++ because I always 
try not to use them, but I read that nowadays the gcc compiler has 
gotten that good that sometimes the code it produces is as fast as 
hand written assembler would be.

hi rebol R2  do not working under ubuntu 9.10 !!!!!  probleme with 
lib libstdc++5

perhaps i must do a link with libstdc++6

what i can do thank in advance

look in the debugging group, this was just discussed about a few 
hours ago!  next to last post tells you where to get the libstdc++5 
package....

thanks a lot

it is ok know

now oups

just recieved my new samsung SSD's today. Any experience here in 
what kind of filesystem (linux) is optimal, blocksize etc? found 
some technical info's in 

the web (some choose ext3 others reiser) but I would prefer some 
infos from real life users. The intention is to use the SSD for highspeed 
desktop 

virtualisation (very big single files). any tipp for speed and durability?

Durability would probably be one of the new filesystems especially 
for SSD, such as LogFS. XFS has traditionally been best for very 
large files

ext4 would be better than ext3 because of extents. for ssd's the 
best would be btrfs but that's probably not mature enough for you 
to use.

thx for the info kaj and gabriele. looks like a non journaling FS 
(ext2) and a noatime mounting will speed things up. will post some 
experiences after a while using this new stuff.

When using LD directly, how can I specify that the default libs are 
inlcuded without having to list them all?

If I use GCC to build the extecutable there is a bunch of libs implicitly 
included. Doesn't seem to be if LD is used.

Is that on C++ code? It makes a difference whether you use gcc or 
g++ to compile

To include non-standard libraries, you can use the $LDFLAGS environment 
variable

I use gcc. But you can add -### to see what gcc routes to the linker. 
And there you see all the implicit libs. But I fixed the problem 
by using gcc as the linker command.

If it's C++ code you must use g++. The gcc command has been illegal 
for that for several years

My old Amiga club president wants to try linux on  an old IBM Thinkpad 
i1400 any suggestions ? Thanks !

Kaj, it's C code.

I'm mostly using Debian, what's the better GUI: KDE or Gnome?

Seems like Gnome is the standard...

Both are the standards, depending on who you ask. That's the great 
thing about standards - there are so many of them.

Oh, and XFCE is another standard that has been gaining some traction.

Ubuntu 9.10 is quite good. I've only had to visit the terminal a 
couple of times to get SMB filesharing working since I first booted 
it 5 minutes ago and only one cryptic error message appeared.

Wow... 420MB download for stripped down Gnome...

Robert, IMHO, neither desktop is any good. KDE is well engineered 
underneath but the end user design is clueless. Here Gnome is better, 
but suffers from poor code quality, and have basically been spending 
close to 10 years rectifying that.