Computerphool confessions

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, vmartell22 said:

I assume you do embedded systems 

You assume correctly.

 

3 minutes ago, wgscott said:

Installing fink or macports can help a lot, and X11 is a must in my line of work as well.

Then you're basically running a second OS on top. Not as bad as Cygwin, but still many of the same issues.

[hsmeets]

a few years ago:

 

Build a 1U 19"  XEON based system, 16GB ECC-RAM, RAID-10 with 4 1TB 10K drives.....run ESX bare metal on it to have 3 VM's

1 FreeBSD to act as fileserver using ZFS

1 FreeBSD to run Postfix/Spamassasin connected with NFS to ZFS

1 Unbuntu to run SqueezeBoxServer connected with NFS to ZFS

 

Overkill is an Art :-).

 

Nowadays I have all my files on a simple USB3 harddisk, mail and such hosted at an service provider and SqueezeBoxServer runs on an RaspberryPi.....

[hsmeets]

many more years ago:

 

I spilled a can of Coca Cola in a DEC Teletypewriter.......and it didn't break down....good'ol'days 

 

 

[accwai]

1 minute ago, hsmeets said:

many more years ago: I spilled a can of Coca Cola in a DEC Teletypewriter.......and it didn't break down....good'ol'days.

 

Back when I was at university computing department, there was this one guy there that was collecting old DEC computer frames and peripherals in working condition. His reputation spread far and wide on Usenet after doing this for a long time. One time, Kernighan and Ritchie paid our department a visit and did a guest lecture at the university while they're with us. Turns out they need a specific model of tape drive to unload some tapes from the dawn of Unix, and our collector guy happened to have one of the very few surviving copy of such drive and suitable controlling computer all setup and working at home. Good old days indeed

[Bob Stern]

go.sysin dd *

[Samuel T Cogley]

1 hour ago, wgscott said:

 

You should be able to do any unixy thing on OS X with little to no drama, with the exception of some kernel-specific tasks.  Installing fink or macports can help a lot, and X11 is a must in my line of work as well.  The biggest PITA is Apple's fictional belief that FORTRAN is legacy.

 

Too much work.  Get a beefy Mac, and run whatever you want in VMs.  I typically run 1 Windows and 2 Linux (usually Ubuntu and Fedora) VMs concurrently.

[wgscott]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

Then you're basically running a second OS on top. Not as bad as Cygwin, but still many of the same issues.

 

No, not at all.  It is no different than installing third-party software into /usr/local.  It is the same OS, kernel and everything else. 

 

It just uses the debian package management system. It doesn't install Linux software.  In fact, it compiles it on the user's machine.  Here is a brief writeup I have.

 

If what you say was true, I wouldn't use OS X.

[wgscott]

6 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Too much work.  Get a beefy Mac, and run whatever you want in VMs.  I typically run 1 Windows and 2 Linux (usually Ubuntu and Fedora) VMs concurrently.

 

It is less work, and there is no need to use a VM (and no artificial sand-box restriction like a VM imposes).  I can set it up in less than 30 min.

[NOMBEDES]

As soon as I get a new computer I disable every option that I can find.   

[phosphorein]

5 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Back in the days of hard copy terminals, there were no curses based editors.  You haven't lived until you added new users to a UNIX system using only "ed" and "mkdir", and "chown". 

 

Ah, a "youngun." Back in the day there were no editors, only the 029 keypunch and card reader with our trusty IBM 1640.

[mansr]

20 minutes ago, wgscott said:

No, not at all.  It is no different than installing third-party software into /usr/local.  It is the same OS, kernel and everything else. 

 

It just uses the debian package management system. It doesn't install Linux software.  In fact, it compiles it on the user's machine.  Here is a brief writeup I have.

I know how it works, and I've done similar things on other systems. Sooner or later there is some weird conflict between your replacement stuff and the standard system libraries which you can't remove because then everything breaks. Or you have to edit every shell script since the system /bin/sh is broken (true on Solaris, don't know about OS X).

 

Anyway, use whatever works for you. I'm not here to argue about preferences.

[mansr]

17 minutes ago, phosphorein said:

Ah, a "youngun." Back in the day there were no editors, only the 029 keypunch and card reader with our trusty IBM 1640.

[wgscott]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

I know how it works, and I've done similar things on other systems. Sooner or later there is some weird conflict between your replacement stuff and the standard system libraries which you can't remove because then everything breaks. Or you have to edit every shell script since the system /bin/sh is broken (true on Solaris, don't know about OS X).

 

Anyway, use whatever works for you. I'm not here to argue about preferences.

 

Sorry.  I've been a fink maintainer for about 15 years, so I can get a bit evangelical.  

 

It was actually well thought-out from the beginning, and puts everything in its own root-level directory to avoid clobbering anything else.  The default system (which provides all of the core unix utilities) shouldn't even see it, unless you direct it to. 

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, wgscott said:

It was actually well thought-out from the beginning, and puts everything in its own root-level directory to avoid clobbering anything else.  The default system (which provides all of the core unix utilities) shouldn't even see it, unless you direct it to. 

Exactly, you're pretty much running a secondary OS on top of the main system. At that point you might as well ditch the unwanted lower layer.

[wgscott]

If you compile a bunch of stuff like gimp and stick it in /usr/local/bin, do you call what is in /usr/local/bin a secondary OS?

 

The point is you can't "ditch the unwanted lower layer" because it isn't being replaced.  It is being supplemented with non-essential components of an individual end-user's own choosing.

 

Everything in /usr/bin, /bin, /sbin, etc. installed by OS X is still there and is still used.

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, wgscott said:

If you compile a bunch of stuff like gimp and stick it in /usr/local/bin, do you call what is in /usr/local/bin a secondary OS?

To run the latest Gimp, you need the latest versions of all its dependencies too, recursively, and that soon explodes into something pretty damn close to a full OS.

 

2 minutes ago, wgscott said:

The point is you can't "ditch the unwanted lower layer" because it isn't being replaced.

And therein lies the problem.

 

2 minutes ago, wgscott said:

It is being supplemented with non-essential components of an individual end-user's own choosing.

 

Everything in /usr/bin, /bin, /sbin, etc. installed by OS X is still there and is still used.

In my opinion, what OS X ships in /bin, /usr/bin, etc is unusable, which is why you need to build all those extras in the first place.

 

If you like OS X, by all means keep using it. I don't like it, and therefore I don't use it.

[Ralf11]

[wgscott]

4 minutes ago, mansr said:

In my opinion, what OS X ships in /bin, /usr/bin, etc is unusable, which is why you need to build all those extras in the first place.

 

Here is how gimp links to one of the unusable libraries that ship with OS X:

 

otool -L /sw/bin/gimp-2.6 | grep -v sw/lib

/sw/bin/gimp-2.6:
    /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1226.10.1)

If this was a separate os, you could not do that.

[wgscott]

42 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

The PDP-11.  I learned VMS on that.

[Ralf11]

Shirley, you jest - it's a bit earlier...

 

that's ol' #2

 

I think some chick named Ada was involved with it...

[Bob Stern]

1 hour ago, wgscott said:

I've been a fink maintainer for about 15 years, so I can get a bit evangelical.

 

Why not brew/homebrew?

[wgscott]

4 minutes ago, Bob Stern said:

 

Why not brew/homebrew?

 

fink came along a lot sooner, back when I needed it for various scientific applications.  Also, it is far more comprehensive, and less likely to interfere with system functions.

 

OTOH, I am worried it is starting to fizzle out.  If that happens, I'll just use linux.

[gridlock74]

I have more computers that run headless than have a gui at home and haven't touched windows (other than work) for over 10 years. I also call my home made nas "the server" ... 

 

 

[phosphorein]

1 hour ago, wgscott said:

 

fink came along a lot sooner, back when I needed it for various scientific applications.  Also, it is far more comprehensive, and less likely to interfere with system functions.

 

OTOH, I am worried it is starting to fizzle out.  If that happens, I'll just use linux.

 

My solution has always been for *nix for simplicity, especially when coding real-time data collection routines.

[wgscott]

Drawin (OS X) is a variant of BSD unix.