Quick tip I picked up this afternoon. If you try to extract a series of archives with unrar or unzip and you get this error:
% unzip *zip
caution: filename not matched
… you can get around it by escaping the asterisk.
% unzip \*zip
I wonder why it works like this when virtually nothing else does?
I’ve been using Unix-like operating systems for years and, much like programming languages, I’ve never been able to settle on one editor. Today I may have finally found the perfect one!
After using it as my primary editor for several weeks, I feel as though I can finally graduate from nvi. It was more challenging than I thought it would be when I first decided to learn it, but it was a fantastic learning experience.
Having fun with FreeBSD on my Libretto this afternoon, I didn’t have internet access to install Vim from ports so I decided to finally learn more about the bundled nvi editor. I missed syntax highlighting, but if you customise it right it’s still a nice, lightweight, capable editor.
Testing whether I got the NetBSD pkgsrc system installed properly on my MacBook Pro. Everything seems to be in order! Now to install Gnumeric and other free and open source goodness.
% uname -mrs Darwin 9.7.0 i386 % figlet Rubenerd ____ _ _ | _ \ _ _| |__ ___ _ __ ___ _ __ __| | | |_) | | | | '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ / _ \ '__/ _` | | _ <| |_| | |_) | __/ | | | __/ | | (_| | |_| \_\\__,_|_.__/ \___|_| |_|\___|_| \__,_|
Just finished polishing up the Herrie media player page on the Whole Wheat Radio wiki. Over time I’ve being going through each media player and adding instructions with screenshots so hopefully any new person who has never tuned in before can get up and running easily.
% herrie -xlisten.pls file by using your arrow keysA"
Tab" then press "X" to start playing!Q" to quitI think Jim really intended these pages to just be explanations for the players that appear on the Who’s listening page, but I figure if at least one person found the information helpful it was worth it. Heck I owe the existence of this blog to that philosophy… right? ^_^
Build options available for Alpine in MacPorts
I’ve been asked by a few people on Twitter how I installed the lightweight Alpine console based email client on my Mac. Alpine of course is the current version of the pine email software that addressed some concerns about licencing. I love Alpine, and the logo reminds me of the classic Altavista :).
As with most free and open source software, by far the easiest way to get it running is just to install it from a package manager. You can go ahead and fetch the source tarball and do the usual ./configure, make, make install and make clean, but it does have several dependencies which in turn have several dependencies. You know what I mean.
# port -v install alpine.
By entering # port variants alpine you can see all the custom options you can set. If you want to compile Alpine with one or more of these custom options, use the same install command above but append the options you want with plus signs. For example, if I wanted password files support I’d enter # port -v install alpine +passfile../mail/alpine directory in your pkgsrc tree. Once you’re in the right directory, it’s the usual routine of # bmake install clean clean-depends. As with all pkgsrc packages on OS X, remember to use bmake NOT make otherwise it won’t work.
If you’re interested in trying the sophisticated and elegant pkgsrc system on your Mac, I wrote up a tutorial in a previous post you can use to get yourself up and running with it.Happy emailing!
After the many troubles I encountered with running FreeBSD, Windows XP and Mac OS X Leopard in a triple boot configuration on my venerable Core Duo MacBook Pro (Brief flirtation with FreeBSD on my MacBook Pro is over) I thought while I had some time this afternoon I’d try using NetBSD instead.
The preliminary result? The experiment was a success! I have NetBSD 4.0.1 booting beautifully alongside Windows XP and Mac OS X Leopard without any of the problems FreeBSD 7.0 seemed to have, such as the persistent and downright bizarre several minute long stalling boot times for the system and for Xorg.
As I’ve said before, NetBSD was the first Unix-like system I really took seriously after only toying around with Red Hat Linux in the late 1990s. I moved all my non-Mac machines over to FreeBSD due to FreeBSD’s better graphics support and its generally higher levels of use which translates into more online documentation and such, but I’ve always had a soft spot for NetBSD.
I feel as though I’m reacquainting myself with an old friend, plus all my experimenting with pkgsrc on Mac OS X (Notes on using NetBSD’s pkgsrc on Mac OS X) means I already know the ins and out of package management on it too. Stay tuned for further developments.
If you’ve read my blog posts with regards to Microsoft here over the last few years, you many be under the impression that I hate them and their products. While I’ve certainly been guilty of perhaps using harsher language when talking about them here and on my show than what the situation warranted, I don’t hate Microsoft, I rather think I’m just disappointed.
WOW this picture takes me back! I used to see this every day!
The fact is despite my current talk about FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slackware Linux and Mac OS X, I only really moved off Microsoft operating systems and software as late as 2003. Our first home computer had MS-DOS and Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, later Windows 3.1. We had all the Microsoft Home titles such as the beautiful Microsoft Scenes software, Explorapedia and Bookshelf; we had all the Entertainment Packs with such gems as SkiFree and Chip’s Challenge. We bemoaned Microsoft’s removal of Reversi from Windows 3.1 and it’s Minesweeper replacement. Over the years our machines adopted Windows 95 (with Plus!), then 98, then 98 Second Edition. We skipped the Windows Me trainwreck and went to 2000.
I learned how to program using QuickBasic and QPascal. My first attempt at graphical programming was using Visual Basic 5.0. I used the first versions of Microsoft’s .NET framework and learned Visual Basic.NET and C#, even though I went back to Visual C++ 6.0 afterwards without telling anyone ;-). I remember watching VBTV with Chris and Ari and loving it! The Head In The Box! Genius!!!
Suffice to say, the licences did cost us a small fortune to run all this stuff, but we were mostly happy with our machines running such software. I had got an iMac for Christmas back in 2000 but I was decidely underwhelmed by Mac OS 8. A few years previously I had given Red Hat Linux a try but was put off by the user interface; at that point I didn’t understand that the graphical X server was independent of the OS and that I could swap out GNOME with KDE or something else.
My Windows XP desktop from around 2002
I don’t know exactly when it really started, but I guess around 2002 my opinion of Microsoft software started to change. I got my beloved iBook with Mac OS X around this time. Wanting to relive the glory days of DOS (aka black screens with blinking cursors!) I opened a Terminal window and started learning shell scripting. I actually got quite good at csh before I realised nobody else used it! Later in high school I learned Python and did some Java swing programming because I secretly loved the purple metal interfaces they generated :).
During this time I also picked up my first copy of NetBSD. I didn’t know at the time what the differences were between the different BSDs, or even between Linux and BSD, but the NetBSD installer and documentation looked more friendly to me, plus I read that people on the whole thought the BSDs were more stable and better written than Linux. I installed NetBSD on my now old iMac and got it working. I learned about Xorg, about Unix-like operating system directory structures, about file permissions and so forth. I was using desktop environments but swapping out the default terminals with rxvt and so forth. So forth and so forth.
It was crazy, but within a few years of this starting, by 2004 I was almost exclusively a Mac OS X and NetBSD (later FreeBSD) guy. In 2004 I also got my first proper job writing perl scripts to automate sever admin tasks at a company in Singapore. It irritated me that I couldn’t open a Terminal on my Windows XP box and use it the way I could with BSD and OS X. It also bothered me by that stage that the documents I was saving in Microsoft Office were bloated and non-standards conforming.
At that point I also began to question Microsoft’s direction from a usability standpoint. I didn’t appreciate being treated like a criminal with product activation in Windows XP. The applications in the Microsoft Office suite were getting harder and more complicated to use, not the other way around. Their internet offerings were a joke. As someone looking from the outside of the Windows ecosystem looking in for the first time, I could see so many faults and I was dismayed at how far their previously excellent user interface standards had slipped.
My Xfce desktop on FreeBSD 7.0-Release
Now we fast forward to the present. Windows Vista has been a mess (I know, I’ve had to fix and downgrade my fair share of them for people!), the "ribbon" in Office 2007 with its splattering of silly little icons can’t be turned off (text, why can’t we have text!?). My love of FreeBSD continues to blossom as I find new and exciting things I can do with it. Mac OS X and Apple computers are an absolute pleasure to use.
I’ve only touched on the issues of licensing as well as some of their dubious business practices, because as much as they have also affected my opinion of Microsoft to the general loathing I harbour for them now, what it all boils down to is a simple fact: Microsoft software isn’t nice to use anymore.
The Microsoft I grew up with in the early 90s has long gone, but what I want to know is, what happened? Had I started using Unix-like systems back in the early 90s would my opinion be different? I guess I may never know.
My current Leopard desktop taken a few minutes ago
As I said in my previous post about running NetBSD’s pkgsrc on Mac OS X, I hurriedly created a couple of desktop backgrounds for a fellow student and MacBook Pro user a few months ago who has since moved her entire machine over to NetBSD. It should have probably just stayed on my anime and show blog but I figure it’s tech enough to put here.
ASIDE: While I dabbled in Red Hat Linux 5.x at the time, NetBSD was the first Unix-like operating system I really used. I personally have since moved over to FreeBSD on my desktops, but NetBSD still holds a special place with me. And I am still an avid user of pkgsrc!
The orange flower is a photo I took from my wildflower photoset around Mawson Lakes here in Adelaide, Mai Tokiha is the protagonist from the My-HiME anime series which I have yet to watch but he thinks is trippy, and the logo is of course from the NetBSD Project. This was one of the only combinations of orange things I could find on such short notice; had her presentation been a few weeks later I could have probably created something a bit better!
The resolution is 1440×900, but if you’re a NetBSD desktop user, or a pkgsrc on Mac OS X (or Slackware, or Draco Linux, or…) user on a MacBook it would scale down just fine on 1280×800 too.
Colour version, 1.9MiB PNG
Achromatic version, 1.1MiB PNG
Hi! I'm Ruben Schade and this is my labour of love blog from beautiful Singapore and Sydney.
I also lurk on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
