World: r3wp

I remember! That was a cool move, by the way...

Thanks

Didn't realize that it wasn't standard in XFree, but now that you 
mention it

As for comparing 13000 lines of Perl to 1600 lines of Ruby, if the 
Perl was written to be readable, that comparison sounds about right. 
Perl isn't that powerful a language unless it's written in an unmaintainable 
way. It takes a lot of Perl to equal Ruby, or REBOL for that matter.

At least that's true for Perl 5 or less...

OK, but those 1600 lines build a complete desktop operating system 
with applications, while those 13,000 lines install and configure 
one application - without checking for destroying your system

Those 1600 lines can also install an arbitrary number of applications, 
as a side-function

Sorry, haven't kept up here. Should I be able to run Syllable under 
VMWare? I tried it on my laptop, but it never completes the boot 
process, and no time to spend digging right now.

Seems they have an old image with vmware, and vmware ate Kajs ubuntu 
when he tried to update that. If a normal install works Kaj will 
say. :)

Yes, if you have VMware installed you can run Syllable, but you have 
to consult our VMware FAQ for special boot parameters

http://syllable.sourceforge.net/faq.php?cat_id=3&cat_name=Vmware

Gregg, did you try safe mode? What are the last messages you see 
on your screen?

I'll check it out again when I get a chance Kaj. Thanks! Can't remember 
the last message at the moment.

I am happy to report that I ported Orca, the open-source REBOL clone, 
to Syllable. I intend to make this the default scripting language, 
and in the long run, the default programming language in Syllable

I had heard of R# and Freebell, but not Orca. A link?

You can get there through the descriptions in the recipe for the 
Syllable build system:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/syllable/syllable/system/apps/utils/Builder/packages/orca-current/

ORCA : http://wsrebol.sourceforge.net/

Syllable page is not working for me (at least two days)

Yes, we were caught by SourceForge's move from MySQL 3 to MySQL 4. 
After a month they just cut off the old functionality, so now we're 
forced to migrate in a hurry

When our sites were created I wanted to have them done in REBOL, 
but I had no control over it and no time to contribute to it myself, 
so I focused on the Syllable system itself. Of course, it's nonsense 
to have our small amounts of data in relational databases and things 
like this would never have happened with a REBOL implementation

However, the parts of the site that are not in MySQL are still functional

I published a binary package for Orca:

http://kamidake.other-space.com

How is Orca compared to Rebol? what is missing?

A lot, but as far as I have seen so far it should be fairly usable 
already for not-too-complex tasks

Probably comparable to the first stages of REBOL/Core years ago. 
On the other hand, it also has some much newer functionality already 
implemented. It has a simple interface to QT on Linux and the beginnings 
of an interface to OpenGL

Lots of functions are still missing, but you can probably work around 
most

What I like a lot is that CALL and things like GET-ENV are already 
there, so you can do a lot in a Unixy system by calling external 
commands, which is exactly what my programs do

So it can be your shell?

;-)

Not very well. It has the interactive REBOL mode, but it's still 
very primitive. No tab completion and history recall and such

Just tried installing Syllable to a AMD K6-350MHz system. I checked 
the menu.lst file and it seems to be correctly pointing root (hd0,0) 
  (there's nothing else on the drive.)   On rebooting, I received 
"Error loading operating system. Setup cannot continue."

Any ideas ?

Did you install GrUB after installing Syllable?

Probably not. How do you install grub ?

I managed to skip past the grub notes the first time, so I had to 
reinstall. :) Looks like I have to do it again.

Thankfully it doesn't take that long.

You don't have to re-install Syllable, but you do have to follow 
the GrUB installation procedure in the installation instructions

Read the included install.txt. The note at the end of the Syllable 
installation just tells you to look there

We have to automate the GrUB installation, but there's a technical 
hurdle to that that we're still working on taking

Ah..  I was just ready to give my user feedback on that. :) No matter, 
I still think the install was pretty easy. The only thing was not 
knowing how to edit menu.lst (I found AEDIT, but that was not obvious, 
eg. I tried "ed" "edit" etc first.) But you're going to fix the whole 
issue anyway.

The installer gives you the option to press "e" and AEdit will start 
automatically with menu.lst :-)

I know how you feel, though. I also have the tendency to feel my 
way through the installation and did it several times in the beginning 
to form a mental picture of it

Though, maybe you could change the part where a return key continues 
the installation after reading grub doc. I was pressing enter to 
scroll down through the doc. I didn't notice I had reached the end 
of the doc when the prompt to continue the installation appeared. 
I just pressed enter again.

I noticed the 'e' option, but first I wanted to read about it with 
'?'  That's how that problem appeared.

Is it easy to change that, do you think ?

Yes, it's primitive. It should be replaced with a native graphical 
installer, maybe with Orca scripting embedded. It just hasn't been 
a priority yet. We were pretty pleased a few years ago to replace 
the manual installation with a text installer :-)

It's a pretty streamlined process, anyway.

That sort of stuff wouldn't be hard to change, but I want to see 
if I can redo the whole installer in Orca. Then later, we could embed 
it in a graphical user interface