Linux users?

[Peter]

Are there any other people in class who use Linux exclusively?

 

[doug reich]

I used to... are you asking about code or about life in general?

 

[alain]

I use all three. My windows box is usually only used for collecting my songs, pdf and software for my brother's office... and Excel. I use a Unix flavor (Ubuntu or Darwin) for everything else.

At work, my time is completely spent using Linux. That includes our tools to do financial modeling. The windows box is used for Outlook, listening to music and browsing the net.

 

[Stefan Zota]

Same here, except the music part
All the applications from systems management (back-end infrastructure) with one exception are in UNIX (solaris 8/10 and linux Redhat).
UNIX environment is dominant in all divisions except Investment Banking ...

 

[Peter]

Guess I just wanted to know who my fellow Linux users were. I'm surprised there's not more of us.

I use Linux (Debian) for everything except for Excel stuff and sometimes gaming. I can get most everything to run under wine. Biggest exception is VBA under Excel, which makes Excel useless for me. Some games are really stubborn under wine, so I play those on a Windows machine I keep around. Even my ITunes collection is on Linux, which exports the root-level mp3 directory as a CIFS/SAMBA share.

I'm not the zealot I used to be, but I can't comprehend why anyone would choose to program C++ under Windows, given the choice of platform to develop on.

Have been thinking of converting my main workstation to K/Ubuntu this summer. I was also thinking of taking that big fat huge bonus I got in January and using it to purchase new SATA cables for a multimedia system I want to build this summer. Haven't decided if the multimedia system will be Windows or Linux. MythTV looks interesting.

So I take it that I'm the only person in clas who does assignments on Linux? I'll basically be doing the final via putty to my livingroom server.

 

[Sanket Patel]

I've been primarily working in Ubuntu for the past couple years. I have a small XP partition for the times I need Excel/VBA and also for times when I just feel like p3wning noobs in Quake and Battlefield. :D

 

[doug reich]

I'm not the zealot I used to be, but I can't comprehend why anyone would choose to program C++ under Windows, given the choice of platform to develop on.

Not all of us have written books on debugging in unix. Otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly; I can code at least twice as fast on Linux using Emacs, grep, sed, etc. than I can in Windows. However, I never learned project management, makefiles (I knew a little once but definitely forget), or the debugger (also a short foray into perl debugging but never got the hang of it; I imagine ddd is a relative?).

I ALWAYS miss the kill buffer. It's a concept that is light years ahead of the "clipboard". Yes, I know I have emacs in windows, but I never much enjoyed it.

 

[satyag]

I use mac for homeworks. I like the xcode interface to debugging. At work I use solaris/emacs/vim for developing and dbx/workshop/totalview/ptools for debugging. Linux is used every where we deploy software as an appliace but I find debugging with gdb and ddd very painful. ddd always crashes and gdb is not as userfriendly as dbx though more powerful. Windows is used for bloomberg, outlook, browser and putty.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I HAD Ubuntu on a second drive on my Thinkpad that I dual boot. I'm a tweaker by nature but not a Linux guru by any mean. At that time, I was so buying into the whole "Linux is taking over the world soon", "Linux is so easy that every housewife will soon buy the nix box off the shelf and use it daily".
Fast forward sometime and while most of the stuff works off the batch, I still found myself googling, searching ubuntu forum for hours to find some absurd long command to correctly install some weird package so that my video codec works.
Everytime I miss type a letter in my "build kernel x789* mthsl wkhrlkjwerl --xxy *77**mm hit me here" command, it broke my machine and I have to reinstall again. Did I mention I'm a tweaker and it got me into some curious case of benjamin button more often than I can remember.
While I agree Linux is so much productive in the hand of some advanced people like Peter, I do not believe any Joe or Jill can take it and use it and be able to fix it when something is not working right.
I spend way more time in Win than in Nix and I don't think I came across anything that I miss in Linux. I'm productive as is in Win and I don't think spending my time tweaking things in Linux would gain me anything.

 

[doug reich]

I spend way more time in Win than in Nix and I don't think I came across anything that I miss in Linux. I'm productive as is in Win and I don't think spending my time tweaking things in Linux would gain me anything.

I wouldn't agree with that. I definitely miss the incredibly powerful conversion, filesystem, and text software. You want to print to PDF? Edit PDF? Link PDFs? Convert .ps to .pdf because someone else loves PS and you hate it? Those are one-liners. In windows, I have NEVER seen a program that joins PDFs into a single document, and if you find it... it will cost $30. THe list of conversion tools goes on and on. The file search can be somewhat awful, but it is still better than what you get in windows, including google desktop (not a fan!). And text search... just wow.

Of course, this it was a 5-year journey through awful linux solutions to appreciate that way, but if only it was a little easier to use out of the box...

 

[Peter]

Everytime I miss type a letter in my "build kernel x789* mthsl wkhrlkjwerl --xxy *77**mm hit me here" command, it broke my machine and I have to reinstall again.

That would be correct if you wanted to disable networking and video on the machine. Since I'm guessing you'd like video and networking to work, it should be:

"build kernel x789* mthsl wktrlkjwerl --xxy *77**Tm hit me here"

Obviously, "T" stands for the "network transport layer enabled" and "t" stands for "terminal video enabled". :D

 

[Sanket Patel]

some linux humor

 

[Carl]

Here's my experience as a new linux user:

I've been using linux at my internship. The only experience I've had with it before was in college, so it has been a painful week. I use a few different machines that are reset every night, which means that on some the backspace doesn't work at all, on others it deletes forward, and on others it works fine. The same goes for the delete and arrow keys. When following my boss' advice to use "stty erase <backspace>" on each session it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't.

It's annoying to have a coworker show me how to do something, frantically copy down a dozen separate commands in perfect syntax, and then not have it work when I try to do the same thing on my machine. I suppose it's my fault for missing a character somewhere.

When trying to navigate through the enormous directory tree, "ls" doesn't show every folder. Sometimes it doesn't show any. So, if I don't have the folder name exactly memorized, I can't navigate to with "cd". Of course, after I open the invisible folder it becomes visible for that session.

 

[doug reich]

Here’s my experience as a new linux user:

I've been using linux at my internship. The only experience I've had with it before was in college, so it has been a painful week. I use a few different machines that are reset every night, which means that on some the backspace doesn't work at all, on others it deletes forward, and on others it works fine. The same goes for the delete and arrow keys. When following my boss’ advice to use “stty erase <backspace>” on each session it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t.

Try adding that to your login .bashrc (or whatever) so you get more uniform behavior. If you google for this problem, you will find that it's a really stupid annoying thing that once you put the right commands in your login script should go away.

It’s annoying to have a coworker show me how to do something, frantically copy down a dozen separate commands in perfect syntax, and then not have it work when I try to do the same thing on my machine. I suppose it’s my fault for missing a character somewhere.

It depends. Sometime systems will have different default settings so if they assume certain settings on one and you go back to yours with another setting, the mismatch will cause unexpected behavior.

When trying to navigate through the enormous directory tree, “ls” doesn’t show every folder. Sometimes it doesn’t show any. So, if I don’t have the folder name exactly memorized, I can’t navigate to with “cd”. Of course, after I open the invisible folder it becomes visible for that session.

That is really weird. Try using "ls -a" which should show all the "hidden" folders. Alternatively, typing "cd " then <tab> (possibly multiple times) should give you a list of files and folders. (The <tab> is an autocompletion that is a little smarter, so you can use it to find commands, for example, "fire<tab>" will complete to "firefox". Go <tab> crazy!).

Like so many other things, after a certain point you memorize the commands and their useful switches in an incantation: "ls -lart" shows all the folders in chronological order with all their settings. "ps -aux" shows all running commands (there are a few ways to see similar information from "ps"). The learning curve is steep, but the view is quite nice from the top. A stupid metaphor, but hopefully you get the point.

 

[featips]

I am 80% in Linux (Ubuntu and Redhat), and 20% Vista. I am gradually giving up Windows, but may not 100% switch to Linux due to VBA. The reason I am still using Windows is, I am writting my PhD thesis. After I generate PDF file from Latex, I have to convert it to Word file so that my advisor can comment and modify on it.....

Personally I think Microsoft 'hopes to' makes its product 'complete' and 'fully functional', but indeed making them buggy and less stable. I have used MS visual studio to do C++ coding for several years, now switch to gcc with geany as IDE, feeling very cool.

 

[Stefan Zota]

Here’s my experience as a new linux user:

I've been using linux at my internship. The only experience I've had with it before was in college, so it has been a painful week. I use a few different machines that are reset every night, which means that on some the backspace doesn't work at all, on others it deletes forward, and on others it works fine. The same goes for the delete and arrow keys. When following my boss’ advice to use “stty erase <backspace>” on each session it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t.

It’s annoying to have a coworker show me how to do something, frantically copy down a dozen separate commands in perfect syntax, and then not have it work when I try to do the same thing on my machine. I suppose it’s my fault for missing a character somewhere.

When trying to navigate through the enormous directory tree, “ls” doesn’t show every folder. Sometimes it doesn’t show any. So, if I don’t have the folder name exactly memorized, I can’t navigate to with “cd”. Of course, after I open the invisible folder it becomes visible for that session.

Linux does have a steep learning curve. This is the reason why Windows will always be popular.
Using vi or emacs is not so obvious first time. However, if you spend some time to check the actual syntax, you will find it your second nature. Command line features of UNIX are far superior to any Windows version. If you get used them, you can work very quickly.

What does enourmous directory tree mean?
We can run ls against 15K inodes (files and directories) and it works fine. If some directories are not shown then you have an OS issue. Partition can be dumped and examine the links.

Most common ls format:
ls -altr

 

[Carl]

Here is an example. It just happened to me:

[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach ~]$ cd /apps[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach /apps]$ ls[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach /apps]$ cd kdevelop[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach kdevelop]$ cd /apps[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach /apps]$ ls[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana]kdevelop[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach /apps]$ cd branches[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach branches]$ cd /apps[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana][schmidt@glmach /apps]$ ls[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Verdana]branches  kdevelop[/FONT][/SIZE]

This is particularly frustrating when you are trying to reach a folder that is buried many levels in and don't have the path memorized.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

You can use type the first letter and then press [Tab] to complete. This comes very handy in case you don't know the exact name of the folder, file you are looking for.

 

[alain]

Carl, I don't think this has to do with Linux but with NFS. Talk to your Sysadmin to get this resolve. I think it has to do with the configuration of NFS and how it mounts filesystems. I don't know much about it. I can tell you that your /apps doesn't exist in your machine but in some NAS somewhere probably.

I have the same problem at work but I already memorize it. It's just a matter or getting used to it.

Since I bought the Macbook, my use of Windows is extremely limited. Most of my time is spent between OS X (~25%) and Linux (~75%) on VMWare. I use Linux at work 85-90% of the time.

 

[Carl]

I agree that it is useful, but only if it works. The tab key does nothing on that particular box. On the other machines I use, I don't run into these issues.