(OT) Which flavour of Linux?

[Bob Martin]

Yep, 46 years since I wrote my first 1401 program.

[Huge]

Well, that sure beats me, since it was ~1970 when I wrote my first program. In FORTRAN.

[Mike Clarke]

Same here except that I prefer perl for scripting.

[Tim Watts]

Mike Clarke wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 09:58

Perl rules. Though I can see the merits of Python for the same basic reasons. AFAIAC, shell (any traditional flavour) stinks for more than the most trivial scripting. The fact is though that every system has a shell of some short, but not every system has perl (embedded for example) so it is ubiquitous.

But I don't see why that non embedded systems don't switch to using perl - it would probably be more efficient as you wouldn't be spawning hundreds of processes running cut and grep and so on during system startup.

[The Natural Philosopher]

1968 FORTRAN

But not under *nix, cos it didnt exist!

[The Natural Philosopher]

PERL is neither fish nor fowl nor fresh red herring. Just foul.

Its a tool for sysadmins with pretensions towards programing.

Real programmers use a compiler.

[Bob Eager]

34 years since my first Unix program!

[Tim Watts]

The Natural Philosopher wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 11:53

Don't be silly. Are you going to write sysadmin scripts in C/C++/Java/Go/D/FORTRAN/whatever then compile them evertime you need to tweak something?

I've written a whole server applications set (several daemons) in perl. The CPU spent about 1% of its time running these despite them being in heavy use processing lots of network data from dozens of clients. Most of the load was in the RDBMS as I expected. Why would I torture myself with, say C, when I can get regex, memory management and proper arrays and associative arrays for free, and without the need to bother compiling?

Not to mention a comprehensive set of libraries (CPAN). Hell of a lot easier to drop a quick print statement in here and there for debugging too.

[dennis]

We saved > 50% of the boot time for unix by taking the bits of source from the various startup programs that were run and compiling it into one process. Not bad for a couple of hours work.

[Clive George]

Perl is great. It's possible to use it in a foul manner, but it's also possible to use sensibly.

It's a great tool for programmers doing sysadmin type tasks, as well as little problems.

programmers use the appropriate tool for the job.

[dennis]

I wrote my first FORTRAN program in primary school. Square roots by successive approximation not "hello world". It was run on a cdc machine (IIRC) at Imperial college after sending the cards in the post. That would be sometime around 1966. I still remember the porta punches we had to use.

[Another Dave]

This is clearly an irony-free zone; I'm well aware what a terminal is.

All this talk about sudo this and sudo that is simply proving my point that recent versions of Ubuntu are as user-friendly as a cornered rat and that Mint has taken over the niche that Ubuntu used to grace until the Taliban took over.

Another Dave

[Adrian]

Another Dave gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Yet you don't think that a kid who's clearly interested will find it...?

Not sure about that. TBH, I don't know why any of the suggested "just dip to terminal" stuff actually needs to - it's all available through GUI, for the point-and-drool brigade who can't think beyond a nice friendly wizard that'll let you do things this way, this way, or this way. But if you want to do it THAT way, you're SoL.

[Bernard Peek]

Although it looks confusing to an outsider you shouldn't worry too much about which version. Ubuntu is the latest mainstream distro to release a new version and that's as good as any other criterion for choosing. It helps that it's also a relatively newbie-friendly system. You should encourage him to try several others in due course.

Running Linux in a separate machine is preferable to dual-booting because that's a bit complicated to fix if it goes pear-shaped.

The other criterion that I might consider using is the availability of a local expert who would be available to help out. If you have one of those available then choosing whatever system they are familiar with could be a good choice.

[Jethro]

FORTRAN IV

[Bob Eager]

Would be a waste of effort here, given the infrequent reboots.

[Jules Richardson]

Find out.

Does he want to learn how Linux works, or does he want to just dive in and use something that's relatively painless to get up and running but isn't Windows?

If the former, something like Slackware. If the latter, something like Ubuntu.

It all depends on your type of mind, I think. I tend to like stuff that's clear and concise and just does one task rather than trying to do a million things at once; I got started with SLS in 1993 (which later became Slackware) and it all just Made Sense - all the various bits had well-defined jobs, configuration was quick and easy and not at all confusing.

These days I look at something like Ubuntu, and I just don't get on with it - everything seems unwieldy and bloated and confusing to me (in other words, it retains many of the faults of MS Windows). It's the wrong choice for me, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad...

Other options are to use the windows box as a remote GUI - or, if he just wants to learn Linux/UNIX, don't even bother with the GUI at all and just telnet or ssh to the Linux machine from the windows one via a DOS window.

cheers

Jules

[The Natural Philosopher]

see. Sysdamin scripts are not programs. Just crap hacks.

And yes, why not?

editing and typing 'make' is not actually very hard...

Shudder. I've seen scripts like that. you need to buy a new CPU just to run them.

The

Why indeed. Obviously you haven't seen the reasons.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Which is almost never PERL.

[T i m]

It's funny, I installed the Mint flavour of Ubuntu yesterday and whilst it all worked fairly well it seems more confusing than Ubuntu.

Maybe it's because I'm more used to the layout of Ubuntu and when I'm in Liniux I'm not thinking Windows / OSXand Mint seems / looks more like Windows than Ubuntu does.

However, when it comes to connecting to stuff and making it work it (or more probably I) don't seem to have that much luck.

Like, I've spent a couple of days trying to get a Freecom USB DTV stick working under Ubuntu / Mint and so far have failed. It works on the same machine under X?/Vista 'easily'. Same with my new Fuji Z53 camera. Plug it into Windows and it 'just works', Linux can't even see it?

This was a similar experience with OSX. It generally works well enough, if it works at all. If it doesn't my only reliable way out has been to go out and buy expressly OSX / Linux friendly kit. Not always possible or affordable.

For yer typical 'youth' user Ubuntu does Facebook, general IM, plays music and can sync with yer iPod (if not the Apple iTunes store) and isn't typically the same risk to bad things as an unprotected Windows machine (often unprotected because they can't be bothered to do the updates nor pay to have it fixed when it goes belly up).

So, whilst I keep giving this Linux stuff a go (and think it's really coming along now) it's not yet a Windows replacement for me.

Cheers, T i m