On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:01:55 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>>>     I didn't say unix users have learned *all* tools via their
>>>>     manpages.
>>>> I just said it's the case with many (or even most) tools.
>>>
>>> YOU didn't, no. But Jim seemed to be strongly hinting at it.
>>
>> No, I didn't say that, nor did I hint at that.  I was relating my own
>> experience.
> 
> So saying "I learned everything I know about Unix just by reading the
> manpages" doesn't count as "strongly hinting that manpages are all you
> need"?

There's a difference between "I did this" and "everybody does this".  I !
= everbody.

I also had experience with various forms of Unix from my past, so I 
didn't need the introductory stuff, because I just adapted what I already 
knew.

>>> Just a few lines of example code could have helped me figure this out
>>> in a few minutes instead of several hours. (And this must surely be a
>>> VFAQ for shell scripting; it's just about the simplest task you could
>>> possibly want to script!)
>>
>> for name [ [ in [ word ... ] ] ; ] do list ; done
>>
>> That's in the man page.
> 
> Uh... why does that need three nested levels of brackets?

You're the one who pointed out that it's BNF formatting (though I'm not 
sure that's explicitly the case).

> Actually, suddenly I'm not sure I want to know the answer...
> 
>> To find a specific example, in my case, I'd grep through existing
>> scripts on the system, starting with the init scripts.
> 
> Presumably to do that I'd have to already know how to run grep over
> every file in a directory. :-P (Not to mention knowing how to operate
> grep - it's highly non-trivial, after all - as well as how to determine
> which files are Bash scripts...)

man grep gives you the information you need to use grep.

In my case:

grep -ri for /etc/init.d | less

The /etc/init.d scripts have the benefit of being exclusively bash 
scripts.  But if you want to know if it is, you just look for:

#!/bin/bash

as the first line of the script.

Jim

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On 23/10/2011 09:13 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> But even so, if I'm trying to figure out why the Internet isn't working,
>> and I need to run some tool to help me do that, the last thing I want is
>> to say "how do I work this tool? Oh, let me just Google it..."
>
>    You use your phone to google it.

Who the hell has internet access from a telephone?!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>>>>> Geez, dude. Third hit on google
>>>>
>>>> Yes, because the Internet is always accessible. Oh, wait...
>>>
>>> If you're in charge of administrating networks, then the answer ought
>>> to be "yes, yes it is."
>>
>> I was trying to set this up on my home PC. :-P
>
> Libraries.  Smart phones.  Dual-boot configurations.
>
> We've been over this before. ;)

I guess I just reject the idea that you should ever need to use Google 
to figure out how software works. It should be in the manual. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:44:51 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> On 23/10/2011 09:13 PM, Warp wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>>> But even so, if I'm trying to figure out why the Internet isn't
>>> working, and I need to run some tool to help me do that, the last
>>> thing I want is to say "how do I work this tool? Oh, let me just
>>> Google it..."
>>
>>    You use your phone to google it.
> 
> Who the hell has internet access from a telephone?!

Anyone with a smartphone.

Jim

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On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:45:32 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>>>>> Geez, dude. Third hit on google
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, because the Internet is always accessible. Oh, wait...
>>>>
>>>> If you're in charge of administrating networks, then the answer ought
>>>> to be "yes, yes it is."
>>>
>>> I was trying to set this up on my home PC. :-P
>>
>> Libraries.  Smart phones.  Dual-boot configurations.
>>
>> We've been over this before. ;)
> 
> I guess I just reject the idea that you should ever need to use Google
> to figure out how software works. It should be in the manual. :-P

It is in the manual.  The manual in Linux is called the man pages (or the 
info pages). :P

Jim

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>> It just urks me that I'm part of a team of so-called computer experts,
>> and everybody's answer to everything is "did you try rebooting it?" Not
>> "hey, let me engage my brain for 15 seconds and see if I can come up
>> with a real answer", just "did you try rebooting it?"
>
> That's a Windows answer to most problems, sadly.  That's not necessarily
> a function of your teammates or their nationality, it's the way Microsoft
> has trained people to "troubleshoot".

*sigh* Yeah, there is that...

>> And yes, being the only person in the team who works geographically
>> isolated really puts the "me" in "team".
>
> Of course I agree with that.  It can be done, but it takes effort on
> everyone's part, and it seems that your teammates don't think of you as
> part of the team or try to include you.

To be fair, I don't think they try to exclude me on purpose. It's just 
that they all work in the same room, and I don't.

> Finding another job would probably be a good way to do this, but you seem
> to lack the flexibility to make a change - you're rooted to a place and
> are unwilling to relocate, even if the money is far, far better.

Is it really worth abandoning everything I've ever cared about just to 
have more coins in my pocket?

That's not a rhetorical question. The answer I suppose depends on your 
priorities. If you value happiness more than money, then I guess that 
fixes the answer...

>> Of course, that's an exaggeration. But those guys do seem reluctant to
>> throw any real thought power at the problem when you can just replace
>> stuff and see if that fixes it. Maybe they're just busier than me...
>> seems to be a cultural thing though.
>
> No, it's not particularly cultural.  Just the type of people they've
> hired in your company's US organisation.

Well, I suppose there is something to be said for just replacing the 
entire car... It's potentially a lot quicker than a lot of complex 
troubleshooting. But to me, it just seems like the "wrong" answer.

>>> So it sounds to me like you're either stuck back in 1990, or you're
>>> still using an 8088 to compile with.
>>
>> No, this was on the same PC I'm using right now - AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+
>> 2.2 GHz with 3 GB RAM.
>
> What else was the system doing?

It was getting late at night. I told Gentoo to "emerge mozilla", and 
went to bed. By the morning, it has nerly finished compiling.

Note that at this point, I didn't even have an X server running. No 
services running. Nothing. I literally had a terminal screen running 
Bash and the build. It took many, many hours to finish. It actually 
quite surprises me that a mere web browser takes longer to compile than 
something complicated like X11. But there we are...

> I've got a similar system, and I'm sure
> it would compile FF faster than that if nothing else was using the
> system.

Hmm, OK. Apparently I imagined it then. o_O

>>> That's kinda the point of "Free Software"
>>
>> Sure. That's the general idea of a free license. But some licenses are
>> freer than others. And different distros have different ideas about
>> that. (See, again, Debian classifying POV-Ray as non-free.)
>
> But not when it comes to the GPL.  The kernel and many of the utilities
> and programs that make up a distribution also are.  I can't arbitrarily
> decide that you can't have access to it because I want to charge you for
> my particular collection.

Well, that's true enough. But without looking at the license for every 
single component in the OpenSUSE system, I don't know if there's some 
customer SUSE-only thing in it which has a less permissive license or 
something. So I was just asking.

>> Sure, but presumably they only *support* your products if you pay for an
>> expensive support package?
>
> It depends on the product.  You might look into it (there's no reason for
> me to do so for you, you can navigate the HP site as well as I can).

OK, well let me put it this way: I would be /surprised/ if HP are 
interested in helping anybody not paying for the priviledge.

>> The fact that I'm running from the standard ISO image of the live CD
>> tells you it doesn't have any VM tools installed. (Unless there are any
>> present on the disk itself.) I'll admit I forgot to include the version
>> numbers.
>
> "Standard ISO image of the live CD" doesn't tell me which one (there are
> at least two for openSUSE).

And I said somewhere earlier that I'd tried both the GNOME and KDE live CDs.

> I'd have to look, but the hardware detection
> may well see that it's in a VM and run the GPL'ed VMware tools (I'd have
> to look).

Well, yes at any rate, this is a question for the correct forum. 
Presumably there will be people there who don't even need to look this up.

>>> Computers don't tend to do things for "random" reasons.
>>
>> This is why it disturbs me so when a computer does something for no
>> apparent reason. Like booting the same VM multiple times, when it can
>> have no record of what happened before, and yet seeing a different
>> result each time...
>
> That can mean there's a hardware issue (e.g, bad memory), or in the
> program that's running in the VM there's a memory leak or some other
> oddity.

I would suspect it's a VMware glitch. Every other VM works just fine, so...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 23/10/2011 09:51 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:45:32 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>>>>>>> Geez, dude. Third hit on google
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, because the Internet is always accessible. Oh, wait...
>>>>>
>>>>> If you're in charge of administrating networks, then the answer ought
>>>>> to be "yes, yes it is."
>>>>
>>>> I was trying to set this up on my home PC. :-P
>>>
>>> Libraries.  Smart phones.  Dual-boot configurations.
>>>
>>> We've been over this before. ;)
>>
>> I guess I just reject the idea that you should ever need to use Google
>> to figure out how software works. It should be in the manual. :-P
>
> It is in the manual.  The manual in Linux is called the man pages (or the
> info pages). :P

No, it's on stackoverflow. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:59:04 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> On 23/10/2011 09:51 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:45:32 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>
>>>>>>>> Geez, dude. Third hit on google
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yes, because the Internet is always accessible. Oh, wait...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If you're in charge of administrating networks, then the answer
>>>>>> ought to be "yes, yes it is."
>>>>>
>>>>> I was trying to set this up on my home PC. :-P
>>>>
>>>> Libraries.  Smart phones.  Dual-boot configurations.
>>>>
>>>> We've been over this before. ;)
>>>
>>> I guess I just reject the idea that you should ever need to use Google
>>> to figure out how software works. It should be in the manual. :-P
>>
>> It is in the manual.  The manual in Linux is called the man pages (or
>> the info pages). :P
> 
> No, it's on stackoverflow. :-P

I think I see why you have problems with the "Linux community" - you're 
not asking them if you're going to stackoverflow. :P

Jim

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On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:57:53 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> And yes, being the only person in the team who works geographically
>>> isolated really puts the "me" in "team".
>>
>> Of course I agree with that.  It can be done, but it takes effort on
>> everyone's part, and it seems that your teammates don't think of you as
>> part of the team or try to include you.
> 
> To be fair, I don't think they try to exclude me on purpose. It's just
> that they all work in the same room, and I don't.

Right - when you have one remote member of a team, it does require a 
conscious effort to include them.

>> Finding another job would probably be a good way to do this, but you
>> seem to lack the flexibility to make a change - you're rooted to a
>> place and are unwilling to relocate, even if the money is far, far
>> better.
> 
> Is it really worth abandoning everything I've ever cared about just to
> have more coins in my pocket?
> 
> That's not a rhetorical question. The answer I suppose depends on your
> priorities. If you value happiness more than money, then I guess that
> fixes the answer...

Except that you don't seem particularly happy, either.  Maybe that's just 
what comes across here, but you often sound quite miserable and 
depressed.  You worry about people in your own town beating you up, you 
hate your job, your mom drives you crazy....About the only thing you've 
said you like is the way Milton Keynes is organised.  That seems like a 
very minor reason (to me, but hey, it may be very significant to you) to 
stay someplace you hate around people you can't stand to be with who 
don't respect you.

Leaving home, though, isn't "abandonment of everything you've ever cared 
about", though - I left my parents to go to college and to pursue a 
career.  I still am a major part of my mom's life (my dad having passed 
away a few years ago).

>>> Of course, that's an exaggeration. But those guys do seem reluctant to
>>> throw any real thought power at the problem when you can just replace
>>> stuff and see if that fixes it. Maybe they're just busier than me...
>>> seems to be a cultural thing though.
>>
>> No, it's not particularly cultural.  Just the type of people they've
>> hired in your company's US organisation.
> 
> Well, I suppose there is something to be said for just replacing the
> entire car... It's potentially a lot quicker than a lot of complex
> troubleshooting. But to me, it just seems like the "wrong" answer.

It also tends to be a lot more expensive, and to most businesses, saving 
money is a key part of survival.  And there's no guarantee that the new 
car you buy won't have the same problem, or a different - and more 
difficult - problem.

>>>> So it sounds to me like you're either stuck back in 1990, or you're
>>>> still using an 8088 to compile with.
>>>
>>> No, this was on the same PC I'm using right now - AMD Athlon64 X2
>>> 4200+ 2.2 GHz with 3 GB RAM.
>>
>> What else was the system doing?
> 
> It was getting late at night. I told Gentoo to "emerge mozilla", and
> went to bed. By the morning, it has nerly finished compiling.
> 
> Note that at this point, I didn't even have an X server running. No
> services running. Nothing. I literally had a terminal screen running
> Bash and the build. It took many, many hours to finish. It actually
> quite surprises me that a mere web browser takes longer to compile than
> something complicated like X11. But there we are...

So with gentoo, an emerge actually downloads the code needed to build, 
and it builds all the dependencies.  So you weren't just building 
Firefox, you were building the entire system.

That's just slightly different.

>> I've got a similar system, and I'm sure it would compile FF faster than
>> that if nothing else was using the system.
> 
> Hmm, OK. Apparently I imagined it then. o_O

No, but you did inadequately describe it.  You didn't "compile firefox", 
you "compiled everything needed to compile firefox, including all the 
tools and the libraries necessary to complete that task".

Building on Gentoo is very different from actually compiling software.  
Gentoo is intended as an "everything built from source, optimised for 
your system" distribution.  That's not actually the normal way Linux 
systems are built.

>>>> That's kinda the point of "Free Software"
>>>
>>> Sure. That's the general idea of a free license. But some licenses are
>>> freer than others. And different distros have different ideas about
>>> that. (See, again, Debian classifying POV-Ray as non-free.)
>>
>> But not when it comes to the GPL.  The kernel and many of the utilities
>> and programs that make up a distribution also are.  I can't arbitrarily
>> decide that you can't have access to it because I want to charge you
>> for my particular collection.
> 
> Well, that's true enough. But without looking at the license for every
> single component in the OpenSUSE system, I don't know if there's some
> customer SUSE-only thing in it which has a less permissive license or
> something. So I was just asking.

That's fair, and I was just answering.  :)

openSUSE has the "OSS" and "non-OSS" repositories.  The OSS repositories 
contain, as I recall, software that complies with the OSI's definition of 
"free".  By default, openSUSE only installs those packages (which is why 
closed-source video/wireless drivers aren't included - because those 
aren't distributed under an OSI-compliant 'free' license - also why 
proprietary codecs aren't included, or libdvdcss, or other such software).

>>> Sure, but presumably they only *support* your products if you pay for
>>> an expensive support package?
>>
>> It depends on the product.  You might look into it (there's no reason
>> for me to do so for you, you can navigate the HP site as well as I
>> can).
> 
> OK, well let me put it this way: I would be /surprised/ if HP are
> interested in helping anybody not paying for the priviledge.

If you bought the product, you've already paid for the privilege of 
getting at least fundamental setup help for the product.  If you can't 
get it to work, you're likely to return it, and returns cost them money.  
It's in their financial interest to support any product in at least a 
minimal fashion.

>>> The fact that I'm running from the standard ISO image of the live CD
>>> tells you it doesn't have any VM tools installed. (Unless there are
>>> any present on the disk itself.) I'll admit I forgot to include the
>>> version numbers.
>>
>> "Standard ISO image of the live CD" doesn't tell me which one (there
>> are at least two for openSUSE).
> 
> And I said somewhere earlier that I'd tried both the GNOME and KDE live
> CDs.

That's an important thing to include in the report - as you've mentioned, 
this particular thread has gotten quite long, and it's not really simple 
to keep track of all the assertions you've made about this particular 
problem. :)

But even then, you still haven't specified the version used. ;)

>> I'd have to look, but the hardware detection may well see that it's in
>> a VM and run the GPL'ed VMware tools (I'd have to look).
> 
> Well, yes at any rate, this is a question for the correct forum.
> Presumably there will be people there who don't even need to look this
> up.

Very likely. :)

>>>> Computers don't tend to do things for "random" reasons.
>>>
>>> This is why it disturbs me so when a computer does something for no
>>> apparent reason. Like booting the same VM multiple times, when it can
>>> have no record of what happened before, and yet seeing a different
>>> result each time...
>>
>> That can mean there's a hardware issue (e.g, bad memory), or in the
>> program that's running in the VM there's a memory leak or some other
>> oddity.
> 
> I would suspect it's a VMware glitch. Every other VM works just fine,
> so...

There again, though, read ESR's essay on asking questions - here you're 
assuming an answer, instead of describing the problem.  But you've also 
not specified the version of VMware used (I think you said it's running 
on a Windows host, but you didn't specify which release of Windows).  But 
you're not likely the only person who's trying to do this, and if it were 
an expected glitch, then there would probably be something in the VMware 
forums or the openSUSE forums about it.  If there isn't, either of those 
places may be appropriate to ask the question.

Jim

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On 23/10/2011 8:36 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> That's certainly true.  I know some who work on helpdesks who suggest it
> to buy time to research the issue.  Not always a good idea, though,
> because if the problem doesn't come back, then you have to wait for the
> next incidence in order to try to address it.:)
By then it might be someone else's problem. :-P

Seriously though, there are sp many things that can add up to a SNAFU 
that a power off reset is the simplest solution. Like. who test software 
100%, if it at all possible.

Yes I've fault found your problem and it is a memory leak so you can 
report it and wait for a fix or reboot when it happens. Your call! ;-)

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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