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The nice thing about the Nokia is that it's not a pda, it's something 
really new, and for geeks it's a dream machine, it's just plain linux

Yes, and it's discontinued as well, so that leaves us with N800 pretty 
much unchallenged

Hook it up with a  bluetooth keyboard and you code as you please 
on the go

Yeah, but the iphone is more expensive, and the screen is much smaller, 
i've been waiting for something like the N800, but that's me

GTK almost always runs on X. Ports to other graphics systems are 
incomplete and outdated

But If I click on the icon in nautilus (gnome), then I get this error 
message, although it occured only recently and for the life of me 
I can't remember what I changed

I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the evolution suite. It 
does sync with the palm, and the mailer itself is nice, searching 
is very quick even within large mail databases.

After a month of Evolution, I can say I'm not totally satisfied. 
It has some shortcomings both in the UI and in functionality.

I use fetchmail to retrieve the mail and postfix to deliver it, so 
I can experiment at my heart content.

Read this page from Eric Raymond's Art of Unix Programming.  The 
part about Unix is Fun to Hack.

I think it may explain why I feel an affinity to drag people to Linux 
(kicking and screaming until the aaahh, thanks).  His whole book 
is a wonderous read, but for now...

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s05.html#id2873078


Same applies to REBOL.  Serious suits don't want engineers having 
fun.  But fun work is good work and yet 40 years later that lesson 
still hasn't sunk in for mainstream development.  Sad clowns.  :)

Guys, I need your advice. I want to setup a new version of my dedicated 
server,because I'm currently running RH7.2 and it's really dated...

I think the Debian people would say that any Debian ISO is a minimal 
one. If you do a custom server install, you can easily start with 
the minimum and just add Xen

easy to create template driven new guest's, easy to admin and very 
stable...

no overhead, very lean and fast - another fine construct is ubuntu-xen 
with jeos guest and webmin for admin tasks

Tom, thanks for the link. I took a short look and this looks very 
promising. Will take a deeper look.

EC2: Yes, the problem is that you can't save a state. So EC2 is more 
for serve-only stuff but not for interaction and state storing. At 
least that's how I understand it.

Regarding EC2: yes, you have to do persistent storage outside of 
EC2. The logical choice for that is Amazon S3. You can install an 
S3 driver for the FUSE filesystem on Linux and use it transparently, 
if you keep the performance characteristics in mind

Syllable: Well, for me a server distro doesn't need to have graphics, 
sound etc. Just plain minimum server, virtualization enabled, SSH 
for remote access and a simple way to add more packages.

Syllable Server doesn't have graphics, sound, etc. beyond just the 
standard audio system that comes with the Linux kernel and the lightweight 
DirectFB and SDL libraries. You need SDL to run QEmu, which we include 
to do virtualisation. You can still run QEmu as a daemon and control 
it remotely, via VNC for example

There's no way to boot a Linux from S3 except the way it already 
works: you store your virtual machine image on S3 and EC2 starts 
it from there

The only thing that's required is Amazon's Linux kernel: you can 
define all the rest of the Linux system yourself. You could boot 
the very minimum off the EC2 image to mount S3 as a filesystem and 
then continue booting the base system from S3, but it would make 
no sense. Once the image is loaded by EC2 it has much higher performance 
than accessing S3 over the network

S3's role in this mix is to persist your data, and mounting it as 
a filesystem is as transparent as you can get

Cool stuff…


I don't find either QuickTime or Flash to be quite as pervasive as 
everyone would like to think.  We have found bugs amongst about 50% 
of the Mac users trying to display Flash media, and about 20% of 
PCs have some sort of trouble with QuickTime (not the least being 
they have not downloaded it yet).


The fact that Apple only supports Flash 4 is a pain.  I wish they 
could simple confirm their was no security holes, and that installation 
from all browns (like all four) was truly just a confirmation box. 
 Some times I will go to upgrade someone, and I will even be forced 
to reboot.  Deep shame.

apt-get install libx11-6  returns:
libx11-6 is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.

It can't even find the GCC, C++ and FreeType libraries

And don't you know if there is a version of Core with Rebcode for 
linux?

I have a problem that my httpd (an old Apache installation) goes 
into DE-FUNCT state from time to time. But I don't have any clue 
why. And, it never happend before. The last thing I did, was to disable 
SSL mode and I now have a SSH server running in port 443.

If you need more control, Gabriele and Doc have a great async-call 
module.

I do the same thing (on WIndows). We have a lot of REBOL processes 
running, so mine also sorts and filters, showing the top CPU users 
and the stats for all REBOL processes.

I just downloaded vmware image of CentOS (based upon RedHat enterprise) 
and would like to run httpd automatically after my system starts. 
How do I do that? I can log into X, start services config tool and 
start httpd manually, but I would like to run it after the system 
boot. httpd is configured in /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd .... don't remember 
where to put it to have it started automatically ....

Does CentOS have update-rc  by any chance?   update-rc.d httpd defaults 
 will configure the init.d scripts for all default run levels on 
Debian.   For CentOS (I don't know CentOS utility bits) try
# chkconfig --level 235 httpd on
# chkconfig --list httpd

Which will set httpd to run at levels 2 3 and 5.   *Assuming # is 
the superuser prompt, not the bash comment.

Umm,  how to describe.  bootup and shutdown modes.  5 is GUI, 2, 
3, 4  is console (or gui on some distros)  multi user, 1 is single 
user only  0 is go down  and it is similar to protection rings on 
the x86.   Move into and move out of control sequencing.  With a 
fairly hairy system of named scripts controlling whether they get 
executed and in what order  S80 K10 kinda things.  S is "normal", 
run me at startup, and all through symbolic links our of init.d

Nice to know about if you really really need to figure something 
out admin wise ... for home use, su's crontab and utilities like 
monit can make life a little easier on the brain, but perhaps less 
secure.  Just don't let the scripts break during boot in superuser 
mode if you don't play the rc game.  :)

Just read a couple; this is a good intro.  http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/212


and I was just about to his ^S on this entry and then noticed the 
 :-)   :)  Oh, well

I've been looking at D-Bus. It looks useful, and easy to implement 
in REBOL in a cross-platform way.

Hey!  What are you doing in this group?   I love DCOP ... too handy, 
definitely one of the beautiful things about KDE.  It'd be neat to 
see D-Bus catch on.

Escape the .Net Brian, Come to the light side.

Umm, if you ever get sick of this running gag; just yell at me and 
I might stop.  :)

The're porting D-Bus to Windows, and the object model is as much 
like COM as it is like CORBA :)

They're already doing it. What do you think Compiz and such are?

Love the KDE blue ... but to be honest, prefer a white background, 
black text and a CLI

I grew up on Amber and Green screens.   Take that eyeballs.  :)  
 Especially when you have a couple of each colour (we had four or 
five tubes each ... windowing at it's finest).

Has anyone much experience with using Wine?  I'm running my application 
under wine and all the decimals are being displayed in scientific 
notation.  So, instead of seeing 14.5, I see 1.4500000 x10^1 etc.

I'm relatively new to Linux in general, so this may be a simple question: 
When running REBOL in the terminal, how can I enable the <HOME>, 
<END>, and <DEL> keys? Right now they just print out "OH," "OF," 
and "[3~," respectively. I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper with Gnome.

James, I guess, you're interested in the keys in View. This will 
tell you the actual key in view:


view layout [b: box red feel [engage: func [face action event] [probe 
reduce ["box" action event/key]]] do [focus b]]


Run the code, activate the view window and press the keys. You can 
see the key values in the terminal.

Graham, I modified one old form-decimal i had around to work with 
the wine bug; i just needed to test one of my old programs on wine, 
so it's not bullet proof, but it seems to work here. i will paste 
it to you, but you basically just need to parse the output of form 
and make it correct, it's easier than what it seems.

It's geared towards Dutch money, with two decimal positions and a 
decimal comma, but that's easy to adapt

If you start from a terminal session and use $ rebol    ( or whatever 
command)  and then hit the console, does the REBOL banner show up 
in the terminal?  That's where it should be.  No seperate "windows" 
console required for GNU/Linux.  If there is no banner, then puppylinux 
may be pooched.

Normally yes.  But there are X11 configurations to worry about; try 
(from the REBOL console  - being your shell term)

con: open/binary/no-wait [scheme: 'console]   wait con   ch: copy 
con
and see what gets placed in ch

I'm using call and call/wait to invoke gs to convert ps files to 
pdf.  Anyone know why the return code can be non zero on linux and 
yet it is still doing the conversion??

CALL has a bug in Linux (and other Unix), it just returns a random 
number...

Gabriele .. are these bugs ( and the lack of scalable font support 
in draw ) being addressed in 2.7.6 ?

Anyone know what I need to do to get view running on Ubuntu 7.10 
?  libstdc++.so.5 is missing.  And sym linking to ibstdc++.so.6.0.9 
doesn't work.

Yes, it will download and correctly install libstdc++5.

Carl knows about the call linux bug since quite some time... and 
I have provided him with what I think could fix it (but I have no 
way to test the fix). Qtask needs this bug fixed too, so one can 
say it's reasonably high priority. :)

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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  :(

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

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.  :)

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.

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.

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

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.

and then 'port-modes and ???

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

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

I'm not sure I want to pursue that route at the moment. It makes 
for more brittle code. But I will note it down if there is no alternative.

I've noticed that the Windows build running in Wine seems to be "immune" 
to symbolic links (which I think just makes an access error, and 
be ignored.)

It's just a panel. Right-click on a panel and choose Add to add applets 
to them

If you mean how to write such an applet, you'll have to look up the 
documentation. It's probably done in C and there are likely some 
bindings to languages such as Python

and Rebol ?

BTW: The hanging happens even for connection to "localhost". But 
those connections are resolved via the machine name and a DNS lookup. 
The DNS server is operated by an external provider.

Graham's talking about the Notification Area applet, not gnome-panel 
itself

And as far as I know, it's not doable yet.

If I wish to upgrade/replace the binary I am currently running, and 
I am running it from a symlink, can I just overwrite the target file?

Does anyone have any methods for limiting process resource utilization 
?

I have two situations in linux where (single-core) CPU is maxxed 
out, which makes it very slow to manipulate desktop environment, 
open process manager etc.
The first case is Thunderbird, which maxxes cpu sometimes.

The second case is developing with rebol linux build. It sometimes 
goes ballistic, eating memory like there's no tomorrow. Pretty soon 
the system is paging madly and it's very difficult to analyse the 
situation and shut it down.

My first solution is to use Monit to monitor a particular process 
and automatically take action when it uses too much memory etc.

And   priocntl  may help  too

We've been hearing that and similar claims for a decade

Major apps like Thunderbird and REBOL effectively locking the rest 
of the system means that the system is not meaningfully handling 
apps in a concurrent way, so I would venture to say that the scheduler 
has very little if any effect on this

In fact, Syllable used to have a very primitive scheduler and was 
already as responsive as now, except for some corner cases

Does mounting a filesystem change anything on the filesystem ?

I'm on Kubuntu and I've taken a new laptop's 80GB internal disk into 
an external drive enclosure and connected it via USB to my computer.
Kubuntu detected it and automounted the filesystem.

My task was to duplicate the disk, in the pursuit of which I've used 
various combinations of dd and gzip.

However, I can't get a straight 80GB image to compare equally (using 
cmp or diff) with a compressed image.

(I decompress the compressed image on the fly and pipe it into cmp.)

After many hours, it occurs to me that having the filesystem mounted 
might be changing it slightly over time... which would make my images 
different. (This would make my mission a failure, as I wanted a pristine 
image.)
So can anyone answer the above question ?

From the depths of my memory comes a blurry message from someone 
who did this exact thing... I think I should have made sure not to 
automount it, and only mount it read-only. :-/

I'm a little bit confused;  I didn't read the dd and gzip part until 
just now.  You want a compressed mirror?  I don't think that will 
ever cmp true to the original.   dd will include partition table 
info that is normally "invisible to the naked eye".  Including that 
in the compressed file doesn't give dd the chance to dump the invisible 
bits back into invisible places.


Or am I more than just a little bit confused?  Maybe Kaj will come 
by shortly and fill us in with the technicals instead of the voodoo. 
 :)

For backup purposes, be aware that dd-ing a partition mounted read-write 
is likely to result in a more or less inconsisten state of the backup, 
as data is changed on the partition at the same time, and dd has 
no knowledge of the file structure

I have sshd running on my Kubuntu, and when I fish: across to it 
from another kubuntu box on the local network, it takes a long time 
to connect. Today I counted 45 seconds before authentication dialog 
popped up. I think I remember reading something about a delay for 
encryption etc. but I'm wondering if that's a "normal" length of 
time to wait.

45 seconds seeems long.  My nodes usually (including Dev - old) in 
under 4.

One point; you set no root login in /etc/ssh/sshd_config ?  Otherwise 
brute force password attackers will try, and try, and try...  I'm 
not sure why ssh ships with root login enabled.  If an admin is remote 
configuring a bunch of nodes, let them configure it to allow; ti 
shouldn't be a default imho.

That's true, actually, the remote computer could be compromised and 
then keylog me. But I set up the "remote" computer, being my flatmate's 
in the next room. I can't remember if our firewall allows ssh between 
local and wide area network...

I think that needs a port-forwarding rule and there isn't one enabled 
for ssh.

Yes; there are quite a few ways to secure Secure Shell ... but you 
do have to stay on your toes.  Just turning it on ... bad idea.  
;)  With most distros that is ... Cygwin included.  There are copies 
that default to lockdown and you have to work to open them up, but 
those are the exception still.   Assigning ports above 1024 is always 
smart, and the $40 firewall routers can easily be setup to forward 
port 22 or 80 etc, to a usermode port.  You might still get broken 
into, but at least not with root access.  And hey, iptables is fun 
stuff.  Light reading.  :)


And, just because I'm being gabby ... rsync is a wonderful tool if 
you have multiple nodes and want hot backups.  This article expalins 
how to set it up, and while doing so, explains setting up ssh keys 
and locking things down.
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/rsync.htm

Umm, read that link Anton.  You can set authorization keys for SSH. 
 It takes a liitle to setup, but handy dandy once set.  Then you 
can disallow password login.   And if you don't know the machine 
and have shared keys, no looky no touchy.  It's part of what I'd 
like to see with the REBOL ring of trust.  Digital signatures.

I already have ssh, scp and fish installed, so I avoid adding another 
package on top...

But rebolview for Debian does not load on my Kubuntu machine.  Well, 
actually it loads, but after I give my user info it dies and won'

And PlayStation 3.

Hm, strange. And rebol is executable?
chmod +x rebol