No Topic Thread

[argon]

I reckon there should be another option in that poll Schooey...

i concur
option e - grab a couple of handfuls

 

[schooey]

suddenly 'tickle me elmo' just became a whole lot dirtier..

 

[Katherine]

That is so degrading to women.....

 

[schooey]

The poll or elmo?

 

[argon]

That is so degrading to women.....

no.. just the one

 

[Katherine]

Im joking...

 

[Katherine]

no.. just the one

LOL true

 

[jonocarroll]

Now, now - she's a perfectly innocent young woman [sNSFW]... well, one of those words was probably accurate.

 

[schooey]

Ben Elton, dying slowly on channel 9!

Worst. Comedy. Show. Ever!

 

[Muggus]

Ben Elton, dying slowly on channel 9!

Worst. Comedy. Show. Ever!

I turned off the TV as soon as it came on. And i'm a Ben Elton fan...absolutely love his books!

 

[bum]

Struggling with trying to get my head around UNIX at the moment. Then I have to move on to Vim (amongst many others, I am sure).

Urgh. Urgh. Urgh.

 

[goomboogo]

Struggling with trying to get my head around UNIX at the moment. Then I have to move on to Vim (amongst many others, I am sure).

Urgh. Urgh. Urgh.

And this is just the start. At least it's only another few years to go.

 

[bum]

I know, believe me. It's too early to be wondering if I've done the right thing but I'm doing it anyway...

Managed to get a few scripts written on my PC at home to run on the UNIX server at uni this morning so it must be making more sense now...? :blink:

 

[jonocarroll]

Struggling with trying to get my head around UNIX at the moment. Then I have to move on to Vim (amongst many others, I am sure).

Urgh. Urgh. Urgh.

But seriously, I hate vim. emacs in a shell for me.

Get yourself the O'Reilly Linux Pocket Guide - written with Fedora in mind, but 95% useful for any *nix system. Has most of the basic stuff you need to really work with a system. My only pet hate is the distinct lack of regex in it, which would otherwise make it complete. Great to have on the desk as a faster way to find the important part of a 'man' page.

Get [download] an Ubuntu LiveCD to run at home if you want a sandbox to play in but don't want to commit to an install just yet.

 

[Airgead]

I know, believe me. It's too early to be wondering if I've done the right thing but I'm doing it anyway...

Managed to get a few scripts written on my PC at home to run on the UNIX server at uni this morning so it must be making more sense now...? :blink:

Go the whole hog and install linux at home. Nothing like total immersion to learn something quickly...

 

[bum]

I'm looking into setting up my laptop to dual boot but I'll have heaps of time on campus so I'm not sure it'll be warranted. Also considering getting a second (cheap) machine instead of going dual boot. I'll sit on it until I have a better idea of what I'll need. I must admit I hadn't even thought of running Linux from a disk - I'll definitely play around with that in the interim, thanks.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll have a look for it if I'm still struggling once the real classes start. Right now all I've done is a rough session on simple file system stuff, making files more compatible between WIN and UNIX and started playing around with some very simple scripts from home - which took some real head scratching on my part. Once I worked out the permissions stuff it took me ages to work out that carriage returns were breaking my scripts as I can't (work out how to) open a UNIX text file on the uni server from my terminal. I've started using Notepad++ now, instead of Notepad, so hopefully the carriage return thing shouldn't be an issue again.

 

[bum]

Go the whole hog and install linux at home. Nothing like total immersion to learn something quickly...

Yeah, I see the truth in that but much of what we were shown the other day was about reliably transferring between Windows and UNIX so I'm guessing I'll still need a Windows machine for some stuff. Next few weeks will tell, I guess.

 

[jonocarroll]

it took me ages to work out that carriage returns were breaking my scripts

I once lost an entire day trying to figure out what was breaking a FORTRAN66 input (yes, written for punch cards, translated to text files). Holding a working and borked printout of the input file up to the light showed zero differences... answer was a carriage return on the last line. This was when I was starting out of course, and I now know 'diff' should have been the way to solve it.

as I can't (work out how to) open a UNIX text file on the uni server from my terminal. I've started using Notepad++ now, instead of Notepad, so hopefully the carriage return thing shouldn't be an issue again.

I presume you're using Cygwin or something? god help you if you're doing this in the windows terminal. From an actual terminal,

ssh -x user@machine

will forward x-windows, but that's very slow. Once you're in via ssh, natively doing things in the terminal is best;

emacs -nw ~/remote_file

will open emacs to edit the remote file in the shell. Oh, and if you transfer windows files to UNIX, get used to the

dos2unix

command. Strips all the ^M characters from end-of-lines, though I can't recommend copying files back and forth between edits. If you are going to do that though, scp is a good option [WinSCP if you want to do things graphically].

Of course, from Linux you could mount a remote directory and play with it GUI-style, but you'll find that if you can work a terminal well you'll already be a mile in front of others. The time-saving you can get from good terminal usage is amazing. I'm pretty sure all I've mentioned above is covered in that book, too.

 

[bum]

I'm using PuTTy for the terminal stuff, not the windows terminal. I'm going to try to keep everything I do in the terminal so I can get out of the GUI-mindset (although I did get FileZilla for my file transfers - I have some limited ftp client experience so I'll save myself some time and stick with what I know there).

I don't know a lot about emacs but so far the material covered has had us use Nedit for the simple stuff and says we'll be moving onto Vim (or Gvim if we prefer) for the real stuff. To be honest I'm only assuming these are comparable applications and have no idea if my comparison is even relevant.

Yeah, I had a play with dos2unix (one of the scripts I made was for converting multiple files at once) the only problem I was having with it was that it was giving me some error about not being able to recognise the keyboard type or something and I couldn't open them from here once converted to see what they looked like - saving as UNIX .sh in Notepad++ took care of both issues and the program is much nicer than Notepad to work with anyway.

Currently running Ubuntu from cd. Pretty fast - but then most of it is sitting in RAM, huh? I'm not sure yet what benefit I'd see using it full-time, tbh. So far all I can see is it saves me from running an app for ssh which is something I'm going to have to do from most labs at uni anyway so I may as well keep doing it at home to keep things uniform. Of course, I do recognise being familiar with more OS will help me in the long run.

[EDIT: FUBAR'd a TLA]

 

[jonocarroll]

I'm using PuTTy for the terminal stuff
Currently running Ubuntu from cd.
<snip>
I'm not sure yet what benefit I'd see using it full-time, tbh. So far all I can see is it saves me from running an app for ssh

PuTTy opens a ssh (or other protocol) session to a remote computer, which is sometimes all you want. If however you want to actually run those scripts locally to see what the output is, see what the errors are, or see how a command works, you need some functionality locally.

One *could* do all their work on a server *from* a remote location, but then you're dependent on the connection, the server load (type who to see how many sessions are currently running) and the privileges you have on that machine. You may need to install different compilers, different libraries, different programs, which you can't do if you don't have elevated privilege.

Have fun - pretty soon you'll want to change every second L to an F in a file (except when followed by a J), realise that windows just doesn't have that flexibility, and be very happy.