wonk mode

All,

I managed at long last (thanks, mathew) to get a workable Linux system for my home computer, and am engaged (a simple script has been running doing this for 24 hours now, and chewed up so far 8% of my hard drive capacity in the process, with more to come) in adding to a very stripped down "single CD" current MEPIS release (replacing a much older "Fedora" release of Red Hat Linux) as much as is salvagable from a version 9.0 (antique) Mandrake release.

The first step was to find stuff to steal, the second step (now underway) is to convert Mandrake's Red Hat Package Monitor formatted software archives to MEPIS "Debian" format (using a tool called, appropriately enough, "alien"), all 675,048,004 bytes of "*.rpm" archive files (I'm a very eclectic thief), so that the installation tool will be happily presented with a format it understands, and the third step will be to use the "dpkg" software installation tool to see how much of this will install without unconquerable conflicts with existing software, not all that much based on a previous pbutt with many fewer archives, where about 90% installed but only about half of it would then run.

I've another, more modern Linux release promised (thanks Lenore) to be on the way, with which I may overwrite MEPIS

'Though I'm in love with:

- The X Windows 11 cut and paste text terminal window interface, as upgraded with a right mouse button menu; - the MEPIS "Komander" and "Konsole" KDE interface tools; - being logged in as "xanthian" and as "root" in two separate desktop sessions at once, swappable with just a hotkey keystroke, and with potentially many desktops per session; Cygwin is amazing, and makes using MS-Windows "just slightly more painful than a root canal that took five shots of novocaine", instead of "much more painful than a root canal without anesthetic", but it only gives you the *nix (how about "SPLATnix" as the "spoken name for generic GUI interface buttortment "out of the box"; - having my optical three button wheel-mouse and IOmega 256 GibiByte USB external hard drive and 100 MibiByte Zip drive suddenly (after 18 tries) "just work"; - having bash back again, and discovering its infinitely useful "select" automatic text menu command, an old friend from the Korn shell I didn't know bash implemented; - having all those MSWin OS crashes suddenly not happen any more, despite that I'm doing way spookier "blue smoke and mirrors" stuff with the OS now,

or instead again steal all from it I can, into MEPIS, depending on my mood.

"Mood": installing MEPIS was "interesting". It took me, by actual count, 18 tries about 45 CDROM-gronking minutes long each, before I got past all the hardware and media issues to the point where I could click on the "Install Me" icon (three days in real "depressive mode" time) for the very first time, and with a probably with a strip of masking tape, threating to eat the media at any moment. I'm not all that keen to repeat the experience.

I'm a bit offput by all the stuff MEPIS took away (from Fedora), mostly the many, many games I was winning -- "get a job, Kent") and would like lots of it back again (life without NetHack (from earlier) and Spider solitaire (from Fedora), both which I've played for decades isn't really worth living). When I get back on the Net (see "get a job", above, but really, I am trying), that will be easy, but now I'm reduced to scavanger mode, eating from rotted software corpses for what nourishment they can provide. Luckily, I have Red Hat 6.0, Mandrake 9.0, current MEPIS, and some old Knoppix from which to feed. A friend (thanks, Mark) at FSU two years back dumped all his outdated software CD-ROMS on me. This was also lucky for another reason, because the textured back of the cloth zipper case of plastic CD sleeves in which he gave them to me is also my mouse pad; it seems even an optical mouse has trouble with a very smooth faux marble table top, mostly black, as a motion detection foreground for its optics.

The net result is that I'm eating hard drive space like a colony of starved army ants on the march, which has me worried.

So, I decided to do something about that, mainly watch it happen so I could worry faster and more effectively. This little dandy script, line wrapped shell script style to make it fit in a Usenet article, but with original single line spaces and command separating semicolons preserved:

while "`sleep 300`" == ; do echo "`date` `df . grep dev sed -e '{s *-g}'`"; done

is the tool that does the job: in a loop, sleeping for five minutes, then printing a line showing the current day and date, and the more important line of the two line output of the check on the amount of hard drive used-still-available. The output from start to "now" (as I'm typing this), where I've reached "o" in the alphabet doing the archives in alphabetical order, and skipping the intermediate lines, looks like:

Mon Aug 1 23:30:09 EDT 2005dev-hda2 19078000 2949396 15159484 17% ... Tue Aug 2 15:51:36 EDT 2005dev-hda2 19078000 3397584 14711296 19%

where the fourth from the end "word" shows the number of disk blocks used, and the third from the end "word" the quanbreasty still available. That's already a pretty wide line, but it would have been much wider with the original spaces from the output of "df", used to make it line up with an omitted header line not shown here ("grep" got rid of it), so the part of the loop script running above starting at "sed" compresses all multiple spaces within the line to single spaces, to make the output prettier.

The point of this tedious excursion into the niche of bizarrity known as "Unix geek" is the snippet of that script that looks like

}'`";

(for those of you using non-ASCII, non-"C"-standard computer alphabets, who might see that set of glyphs displayed differently depending on the "locale" setting in your computer, that's a closing curly brace, a right apostrophe ("single quote", "tic"), a left apostrophe ("back single quote", "back tic"), a (non-directional) double quote, and a semicolon).

I've been mostly, except for my WELL email account, away from Unix for 4.5 years. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling in my second full day (yesterday) of Linux use to produce something as a single command line that has three different kinds of quotes consecutively, and five pieces of punctuation in a row, without an escape needed, a pure wonk mode creation. Of such trivia is self-esteem built, and faith in oneself as still "with it" reconstructed.

Now if I could just get past level 70 of FrozenBubble, a level designed by a demon from hell having a bad, bad day.

Sigh.

xanthian. Life is "not so easy in practice". ObAttr: Robert Lynn Asprin, A Phule and His Money.

No chirping about the script, please, there are surely many other ways to do the same thing, I just liked the glamor of making the test condition in the while loop exist purely for its side effect.

Somewhere along the way (incredulous that SimplyMEPIS included neither vim nor emacs, only vi), I built the most recent "vim" I could find, from scratch, release 6.1, I seem to recall (it felt like being missing a limb not to have vim), so I can still create at least software written by others (and someday I have hopes of being prosperous enough to contribute to Bram's Uganda charity). Now if I could only figure out how a "gvim" for *nix gets built, the Makefile does them only for Windows32, yet somehow I got one anyway, in an archive, but it is linking with the wrong (more recent) MEPIS distribution's dynamic libraries, to no evident harm except for a bunch of annoying error messages when it kicks off. It is easy enough to replace it with a script that opens a terminal and then uses vim, but I'd rather rebuild gvim so my fingers can do what they do in automatic mode, and I can have any "special stuff" gvim does that the usual terminal window might not.

I notice in reviewing the above that production of my Net-renowned "Kentish prose" is somehow related to my being bone dead tired from having SPLATnix to abuse again. Life is therefore good.

Umm, and if anyone in the Linux community knows to where Elias E. "Tad" Guy has disappeared, drop me a line. I miss him a lot from our days at ODU sharing upkeep responsibilities for xanth.odu.edu, where I first learned Unix, mostly from him and Kyle Jones.

Written at home, posted from a rented Internet box, days later.