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[ Home ] [ Archive ] [ ] [ Previous ] [ Next ] +---[ Issue 10
| 25th July 99 ]----+
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The Linux Bits
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http://www.thebits.co.uk
------[ CONTENTS ----[ EDITORIAL I'd like to apologise for not sending newsletters for the last few weeks. I've been far too busy with the site. As a sign that the site's now getting bigger, it now has what you could call staff, albeit unpaid staff. :) Since my duty is to the Newbie's Linux Manual, I now leave the newsletter in the more than capable hands of my "net-buddy" Bill Turner a.k.a. Wild Bill.
----[ OP-ED PIECE For those who've read my other pieces you already know a bit of my history. For those who've not done that yet I'll just say a short bit about myself since this is my first time ever to be the Editor of a newsletter of any kind, and so perhaps you would like to know what qualifications I bring to the job. I've been around computers in one form or another for about 20 years. In school, working for others, working for myself, and almost all of that time has been using the x86 PC, as much of it as possible, staying as far away from Microsoft Windows as I could, and still manage to pay the rent... smile. I first learned about Linux (and the Internet) in January of this year. Yes, I knew about the Internet, I've not been living under a rock or anything. But I'd never used it before. I had rather found myself running a BBS as a hobby and using such networks as FidoNet, and a whole host of smaller networks as well. So although I have what could be considered a fair amount of computer experience, I'm a "newbie" to the core with Linux and the Internet. Which is how I met up with Laurence actually. Right now I have no system of my own, and have my Internet access through a local (Seattle, WA, USA) Internet cafe called the Speakeasy Cafe and have learned a lot in the short time I've had my account there. I have a shell account that lets me do pretty much as I want, with the main exception being I can't readily do an install of a program, since I don't have the required access in most cases. That will be changing soon. I have my eye on a system that will soon be mine and then I can live out the dream I've had for the last few months... learning about Linux pretty much 24/7 since I'll no longer be restricted to the hours that someone may, or may not, be open. Because of my rather unique situation I find myself using a VT-100 terminal quite a bit. Either at one of the sites that are part of the Speakeasy network, or when I use Telnet to get to my account from the Seattle Public Library or maybe even from work (on break of course - smile). You see, when you use Telnet to access your account, even if you use it from a PC running Windows, Telnet just simply does not "do" graphics. Period. It's a fact of life that has to be dealt with. So that being the case I've learned how to make this lowly VT-100 do some pretty amazing things, like having true multi-tasking of multiple programs. It's just like running a normal session under X, without all the pretty graphics. So that's why I've made the subject of this weeks Linux Tips section "Amazing VT-100 Tricks" and that's why you should care. If for no other reason than the odd chance you might have to use Telnet one of these days... and sooner or later it's almost a certainly that you will. I haven't posted an article in quite a while but will try and get something up this week on the "State of the Art?" of the computer industry. At least that's my plan if all goes well... smile. Because I'm putting so much effort into the "Big Story" of the week, this issue might seem a little "skimpy" so far as variety is concerned. Never fear. Next week there will be plenty of variety! Also, I'd like to publicly thank Laurence for having the faith in me to allow me this chance at being such a public part of his efforts here at The Bits, to help bring Linux "to the masses". You'll not regret it bro!
----[ THIS WEEK'S TOP STORY I'm sure I've mentioned how much stuff flows through my Inbox weekly. Newsletters about Linux. About Windows 9x. About the poor sods doing the beta testing for Win 2000. The odd mailing list for interesting projects I want to keep track of. I also, from time to time, actually get something through "snail mail" that is worth taking note of. This week that actually proved to be the source of the "Big Story", which is... The O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention You'll want to visit the above link to get the full details if you don't plan to attend - or if you do - because I simply can't do justice to all the things they have going on in those 4 days! Why? Consider this... they have conferences on:
...and last but certainly not least: The Open Source Business Track, that covers a bit of this and that - everything from primers on Open Source and Community Licenses to "How to Launch an Open Source Company", and "Open Source Trends."
SO WHO IS O'REILLY? So you may be asking yourself, who this "O'Reilly" entity is that's putting on the conference. The answer is O'Reilly and Associates are the publishers of - quite literally - all the best reference works sitting on the bookshelf of any self-respecting "hacker". You don't have to be a "hacker" to use them of course, but do a bit of checking around (in the newsgroups for instance) and see which publisher people most often recommend when someone is looking for a "gonna keep this one for a while" reference book, and you'll find O'Reilly mentioned a lot, and always in a positive context. In fact, about the only negative comment I've ever read about them is that their works might be "too technical" for the raw beginner. They're most famous for their "In a Nutshell" series, covering every possible aspect of Unix, Linux, and programming.If you have an idea of what you want to do then O'Reilly has a book to cover it, especially if it's concerning Unix or Linux. Systems Administration, programming, they run the whole gamut. And, although they don't normally get credit for it, they have some titles that are not strictly for the "hacker" among us. The first book I used to learn about Unix was written by O'Reilly and was a thin book that gave me pretty much the "basics" (and not much else) about how to use a Unix system. Simple things like how to put a job into the background are there. As are brief discussions about file ownership and how to change the rights of a file, how to find out what directory you're in (pwd), how to "kill" a job gone "wrong" or just not meant to be started yet or whatever. But it was an easy book to read and not anything like the rep O'Reilly has for just publishing "tech manuals for geeks". I'm using a book right now by O'Reilly to learn about using GNU Emacs. Emacs is the "editor of choice" for myself (and hordes of other current and would-be Unix/Linux programmers) since it has "modes" quite specifically for the C/C++ programmer and can hook "seamlessly" into the GNU Debugger and Compiler. Emacs has features I wasn't even aware of until I got this book. You can read email in it, browse the newsgroups, program, Telnet, FTP, and even browse the web! I'm really just starting to explore the surface, but already know that you might as well just cut off my right arm as tell me to try (emphasis on the word "try") to learn the Vi editor. At least Emacs has menus to help you out until you get comfortable with the keystrokes. Vi just leaves you staring at a blank screen. Ugh! And who in their right mind has time to even try to remember if they're in "command" or "insert" mode. Certainly not me. I'd rather be writing code. But I digress... have no fear, I'll be coming back to Emacs in the future, and probably more than once. So in short, if someone tells you to get a book by O'Reilly on "whatever" then rest assured that you're going to end up with something worth the price you paid for it, since it will almost certainly be well-written and a book that you refer back to, again and again. I'm quite sure Linus has some O'Reilly books on his shelves.
THE CONFERENCE Ok, what I'll do here is just try and give a brief (knowing me, probably not "brief" but certainly not like the paper I received) synopsis of what will be going on at the conference, then a bit on the "Amazing VT-100", and then I'll leave it to the capable hands of Laurence to fill up the rest and to make it all look pretty... smile. So, what do you get at this Open Source Conference anyway? "Six concurrent conferences with one registration fee" for one thing. You pick and choose what you want to do while you're there. You'll get four days of technical depth... including tutorials, invited talks, "birds-of-a-feather" sessions, and GREAT PARTIES - beer bashes, pizza parties, and more! Keynote Speakers Guy Kawasaki "Rules For Revolutionaries - Some Practical Advice For The Open Source Movement" Guy Kawaski is CEO and Chairman of Garage.com, a Silicon Valley based firm that assists high-tech startups finding seed capital using the Internet. Guy is former "chief evangelist" of Apple Computer. Yeah, you might want to listen to this guy, what do you think?Bill Joy "From BSD to Jini: Adventures in Technology, Openness, and Community" Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsytems, Inc., is a co-founder of the company and member of the Executive Committee. Bill was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX (BSD), which became the standard in education and research and was notable for introducing virtual memory and internetworking using TCP/IP to UNIX. I don't know, seems like you just might want to listen to what this guy has to say... smile. The Perl Conference 3.0 Larry Wall (creator of Perl) gives the keynote address: "3rd State of the Onion" speech. A whole host of Perl movers and shakers will be there. Will you? The Linux Conference Keynote Addresses:
A little something for everyone. It looks like if it's not in here it's certainly not because they didn't TRY to get it in here... smile. The Apache Conference It runs over half the web servers on the planet, need I say more?? The Python Conference See the best Python applications and learn about the latest developments. I'll admit to some (actually a great deal) of ignorance here. I know that Python exists but only because I happened upon a script that needed Python to run. I'm sure that once I have my own system that will change... smile. The Sendmail Conference Sendmail powers over 75% of the Internet's mail servers. Virtually everyone who has used email has had mail handled by Sendmail. I think that just about says it all... The Tcl/Tk Conference Keynote: John Ousterhout, author of Tcl and CEO of Scriptics Corp., which offers an advanced Tcl/Tk programming environment on where Tcl is headed. How-to talks from leaders in the Tcl/Tk community on topics ranging from the Tcl Object System to Creating Web Sites with XML and Tcl. The Open Source Business Track A little bit about everything from Open Source and Community Licenses to Open Source Trends...good info here I would think. Big Story Wrap-up Well, that's some idea of what's happening at the big doings down in Monterey the latter part of August...you want more info, go to the website and check it out for yourself.
----[ LINUX TIPS: THE AMAZING VT-100! Neat tricks to know for using the VT-100 - when you have to... There's nothing really mystical about what I'll be telling you, but I had no one to tell me about most of them, and have learned them through a combination of trial and error. Stumbling across something neat in a Unix (or Linux) book from the library, and the occasional tip passed along by someone else. So I thought I'd pass along what I've learned and hopefully you'll be able to put them to good use. I suppose I should point out that I use the TCSH shell (not BASH), and so some of this stuff may not work. But quite honestly I don't see that it would make a difference with anything other than the possible exception of the trick with helping you find out what programs you have installed on your system. So far as the Screen and Script programs are concerned they couldn't care less what shell you run them under, and either you have them (and can use them) or you don't.
MULTI-TASKING WITH THE VT-100 Linux is of course, a multi-tasking, multi-user OS which is one of the reasons I've grown to love it. It's also "rock-solid" as many other people have reported. What I really like about it is that even with a VT-100 you can do "true multi-tasking", if you know how. I'm not talking now about simply being able to run a task in the background while you do something else, that's nice of course, but there's other ways to be much more "productive", even with the undeniably limited resources of the VT-100. The Screen Program I found out about the Screen program by accident. What it will let you do, is have multiple sessions running on the VT-100. Just like running X11 but without the graphics of course. To use it, you type screen at the prompt and hit Enter. The copyright screen pops up and you just hit Enter again and you're back at the Linux prompt. Now's when the fun begins... smile. The "command" key for Screen is, by default, ^A (Ctrl-A), and that is the key sequence to start all other commands. You can change it to something else if you'd like, but I'm trying to learn Emacs right now and since I don't know what all the keystrokes are in Emacs (does anybody?) I've left it be, since the ^A sequence is mapped to the "beginning of line" function for that (and just about every other Linux program I know about, come to think of it). But that's not a function that will be too troublesome if it's not around. Now that you have Screen started you can start up another "session" anytime you want to by hitting the ^A combo followed by C for create. One thing to know about the Screen program is that you have a separate "shell" for each "session". So if you do something in one session it doesn't necessarily have any effect on other sessions. A good example would be an alias that you've just created. Even if you have made changes to your .cshrc file and made the changes active by using the source .cshrc command, it still has no effect on shells other than the current one. To "switch" to a different session you use the command key ^A followed by the number of the session you want to switch to starting with 0 (zero) - the number for the first session created. To exit from one of the Screen sessions you simply quit whatever program you're running (Pine for instance) and type the exit command. Pretty basic stuff really. One of the really "cool" things you can do with Screen is to copy between sessions, and although it took me some time to figure out, I'll let you know right now just how incredibly simple it really is. Let's say for instance that you have a URL you want to copy from Pine over to another session, and use that as an argument for starting Lynx (the browser). Here's what you'd do if Pine was in window 0 (zero) and Lynx was going to run in window 1: In Pine hit ^A and then [. You should see a message telling you to start the copy process. Move to the data you want to copy and hit the Spacebar to mark the beginning of the area, then move to the end of the data to be copied and hit the Spacebar again. You should see a message about "n characters copied into the buffer" or something along that line. Now you need to switch to the session you want to copy the data to by using the ^A 1 sequence, and move to where you want the data copied. In this case assume that you are at the command prompt with: lynx typed in and waiting for the URL of the site to go to on startup. Move the cursor to the command line and hit the ^A ] sequence. As if by magic, the data is copied to the command line! This will work for copying just about anything between sessions. So you may not have graphics on the VT-100 but you can run multiple-sessions and copy data between them, just like under X and without the aid of a mouse. And there you have it folks! The "Amazing VT-100!"... smile. Bet you didn't know you could do that did you? Bet you thought that if you wanted to run more than one program with a VT-100 you just had the "put the job in the background" option huh? So did I until I stumbled across the Screen program... So far as I know, it's a part of all Linux distributions. Here's how to find out if you have it on your system or not... Get to a shell prompt and type scr then hit ^D (Ctrl-D) and just like magic on the screen you should see every executable program on your system that starts with scr! I had someone turn me on to that little trick and think it's kind of cool... not the sort of thing you'll see in a book most likely. The Script Program And the last little "neat trick" for this week, is a program called Script. What Script will do is to make a copy of any screen output to a file. This comes in handy for things like testing programs you've written (or other things too, use your imagination!). Here's how it works: Type script filename and press Enter. The filename mentioned above is the name of the file you want the captured output to go into. If you just type script and press Enter, the output defaults to a file named typescript. Run whatever programs or commands you want. When you're done just hit ^D to end the Script program and you're all done. I've found this to be very useful for capturing the commands (and output of course) from a series of commands that I'm wanting to transfer over to an alias or a simple shell script. You just run the normal sequence of commands and it's all "capped" for you in a file that you can read into Pico (or the editor of your choice) to modify your .cshrc file (for aliases) or to just read into the new script file you're making. And that as they say, is that. Nothing earth-shattering about these tips, but as I say I had no one to say "hey, Bill, you know, there's an easier way...".
----[ WRAP-UP Well, as I said, the "variety" this week wasn't perhaps what it could have been but I thought the Open Source Conference of sufficient importance to warrant a large chunk of space - for at least one week. Next week I'll have more stuff - I promise! :) So, how'd I do? Bear in mind I've never done this before...the Editor thing I mean...let me know what you thought and if you have anything you'd like to see discussed in here in future issues let me (or Laurence) know...it's as much your newsletter as it is mine after all. I'm not some God standing "on high" and dispensing wisdom. Just someone who has a bit of experience with other OS's and is trying to learn Linux - like all of you - and wanting it to be made as simple as possible. I'm thinking about starting up a regular section about Emacs for a couple of reasons. Yes, it's a "programming tool" - undeniably it is that - but as I've discovered it's also a "jack-of-all-trades" it would seem. I knew, vaguely, that it had a Usenet News reader in it (Gnus) but until I tried it out, I didn't know that it was actually _better_ in a lot of ways than the one I'd been using (Tin) and so I've switched over to using the Gnus portion of Emacs to read my newsgroups now. It's a LOT faster than TIN is (was) when I'd made absolutely NO changes to my config at all. Also, so far as I have been able to determine, Gnus was able to use the "kill" files that I'd already created in Tin so that's a nice touch too. Another big reason to perhaps start an Emacs section is that it's on every Linux distribution. Don't get me wrong, I like Emacs, but for a "quick and dirty" text editing job I still use trusty old Pico - what I learned first - because you don't need a sledgehammer to kill a cockroach do you? But I use Emacs to do my long text editing jobs because it has a very nice "autosave" feature that I like. I also use it to do the HTML coding for my website (that reminds me...it needs work!) because it has a built-in "mode" that helps you check your HTML syntax as you write it...not a bad thing to have when you're still a stone rookie at website design as I am...smile And that's all until next week...
----[ CREDITS This week's The Linux Bits has been brought to you by:
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