Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
And if they work great as dedicated word processors, that's a valid use. I do wonder how fast they are to boot, and how long LO takes to load, but if all is well once it's up, that's the critical part.
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Thanks Dennis. Yeah, they are slow to load but only 2 or 3 minutes. No biggie.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
You're checking Canonical's repositories for most stuff.
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This will be my next learning project.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Canonical offers Ubuntu in supported versions, so they'll be fussy about stuff in their official repos being stable, debugged versions, because they may have to support it. This means bleeding edge code won't get added. If you need bleeding edge, well, that's what PPAs are for.
You can install other repositories in the list apt uses to look for updates in, and can install packages directly outside of that interface, but for the most part, what the official repos have is adequate.
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So that would be adding them to "other software" then, right? (see screenshot)
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Links are one of the best parts of *nix. I first learned to use them in AT&T Unix System V Release 2, back before Linux was a gleam in Linus Torvald's eye.
The key to understanding them is the nature of the file system. Under *nix, a directory entry doesn't point to a file. It points to a kernel maintained construct called an inode. The inode holds metadata about the file, like what ID owns it, what group the owner is part of, and what the file's permissions are. It also holds the creation and last modified dates, the file's size, and pointers to the first blocks on disk it occupies.
Because of this, you can have the same file appear in more than one directory, or appear under several different names in the same directory. The directory entries all point to the same inode. The Unix vi editor is an example. Vi is the full screen editor. Ex is a line editor. View is a read-only file viewer. All are links to the same underlying executable. It uses the name it is called by to determine what personality to use.
When you remove a file, you are removing a link to it. The actual underlying file doesn't go away till you remove the last link.
Hard links are neat, but have a limitation - they can't span file systems. Hard linked files must all be on the same file system.
To get around that, *nix uses symbolic links. A symbolic link is similar in concept to a Windows shortcut. It's a tiny file that points to the real one. Symlinks can span file systems. *nix follows the symlink and runs the program (or opens the file, if it's not a program.)
The quirk with a symlink is that they can be broken. Removing the symlink doesn't remove the file it points to. But if you remove the file it points to, the symlink is still there. Trying to execute it will produce an error, because what it points to no longer exists.
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Yeah, symbolic links will be my second learning project. [/QUOTE]
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
That, and there are courtesy based limits on how much you want to impose on others, because they have things they should probably be doing instead, too. Learn as much as you can on your own first, then ask questions. People are far happier to help if you demonstrate you are trying to learn on your own.
I remember my confusion when I was first learning to deal with computers, and if I can dispel the confusion for others, I'll try to do so. The usual problem is determining what the other person I'm talking to already knows. I tend to err on the side of telling more than might be needed, simply to insure they'll have the context to understand the answer.
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Dennis
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I'm sure I was a royal pain in the butt when I first came around. I got banned from the Ubuntu forum for asking not well thought out enough questions! Ha ha. I didn't know how to ask tight questions. I was brand new!
Anyway, hopefully I've gotten just a little better.
Thanks.