From: Digestifier To: Linux-Misc@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Misc@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Date: Thu, 6 Oct 94 14:13:41 EDT Subject: Linux-Misc Digest #889 Linux-Misc Digest #889, Volume #2 Thu, 6 Oct 94 14:13:41 EDT Contents: Re: which is better: Mitsumi or Panasonic CDROM? (Joseph Stanley (Joe Wisniewski)) Re: Fidonet s/w for linux? (Wayne Hodgen) Re: DOSEMU/Linux 1.1.51 (Ross Boswell) Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? (Josef Dalcolmo) Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? (Adam Jacobs) Disk Quotas - limiting space (G. Browning) 386/486 weirdness (Michael Dirkmann) Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? (Danial Rubin) Re: New Linux Distribution (Alan Cox) Re: Mystery Chip...AMD (Richard Stone) Linux doesn't like my cache (David Flood) Gnuplot and XWindows ? (Jon Nash) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: wiz@rcsg30.eld.ford.com (Joseph Stanley (Joe) Wisniewski) Subject: Re: which is better: Mitsumi or Panasonic CDROM? Date: 6 Oct 1994 14:02:26 GMT In article , heiko@lotte.sax.de (Heiko Schlittermann) writes: |> In article , |> Teemu Kilpivuori wrote: |> >: What evidence do you have for that ? |> >Yeah,what. As I understand, Panasonic doesn't use IRQ nor DMA, only software |> >polling, which makes it slower,and it causes more CPU-load than Mitsumi with |> >IRQ and DMA enabled. I have tested both drives, and seen that myself, which |> >is why I bought a Mitsumi. |> |> As far as I know the Mitsumi driver doesn't use either irq nor dma. |> |> -- heiko The Mitsumi drivers use (and require) both DMA and an IRQ. Just look at the source code. Someone with no sense of humor changed the default interrupt for Mitsumi controllers from 11 to 10 somewhere between kernal 1.0.6 and 1.1.18 so it took me a couple of hours to figure out why my CD-ROM died after a Slackware upgrade a couple of months ago. At least the new Linux default IRQ matches the Mitsumi default IRQ. I believe the Panasonic uses IRQ and DMA with a Panasonic interface card, but polls when used on a SoundBlaster CD-ROM port. The kernal I'm running only supports Panasonic drives on a SoundBlaster. Maybe a newer kernal.... -- Joseph S. Wisniewski | The views expressed are purely my own, and do not Ford Motor Company | reflect those of the Ford Motor Company, or any of Project Sapphire | its affiliates. wiz@rcsg30.eld.ford.com | "any color you want -- as long as it's black" ------------------------------ From: hodgen@informatik.uni-koblenz.de (Wayne Hodgen) Subject: Re: Fidonet s/w for linux? Date: 6 Oct 1994 09:15:38 GMT Reply-To: hodgen@infko.uni-koblenz.de |> The subject line says it all. I am interested in hooking up to Fidonet. Is the |> necessary software available for Linux? For a point system, yes. I've been trying to upload it to sunsite for the Author (Oliver Graf) for 2 days but first I couldn't get in at all. Then I lost contact after 3 files and today i get "Address already in use" when I try to upload. The FEddi system is a patch to binkly to use FEddi nodelists, a scanner, tosser, utility and editor. This is the first net release, 0.8. I and some 10 other points in Koblenz have been testing it for 2 or 3 months. I'll try again this afternoon. The next time Olli is at the Uni, we'll sit down and write something for "comp.os.linux.announce" -- Wayne Hodgen | hodgen@informatik.uni-koblenz.de | #include ------------------------------ From: drb@chem.canterbury.ac.nz (Ross Boswell) Subject: Re: DOSEMU/Linux 1.1.51 Date: 6 Oct 1994 14:33:48 GMT Oz Dror (dror@netcom.com) wrote: : Linux 1.1.51 : DOSEMU Pre0.53pl25 : . . . : there is at least one problem. Only root can run it. I check permission : of dos it seems OK. : 9 -rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 9079 Oct 3 19:57 /usr/bin/dos : when a user type dos no error is printed, but also dos is not entered. I have this problem too. Any solutions? -- | Ross Boswell | Email : drb@chmeds.ac.nz | | Department of Pathology | FAX : +64 3 364 0525 | | Christchurch School of Medicine | Phone : +64 3 364 0590 | | NEW ZEALAND | Post : PO Box 4345, Christchurch | ------------------------------ From: josefd@albert.ssl.berkeley.edu (Josef Dalcolmo) Crossposted-To: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? Date: 5 Oct 1994 19:23:58 GMT In article <36useq$d05@venus.mcs.com>, MacGyver wrote: >Piet Ruyssinck (pruyss@nessy.rug.ac.be) wrote: >: Nick Kralevich (nickkral@po.EECS.Berkeley.EDU) wrote: >: : Greetings. > >: : I'm attempting to find a word processor for Linux. >: stop attempting, install TeX/LaTeX >: : One that will allow me to create reports >: LaTeX does that >: : and type up documents. >: LaTeX does that > >Ok...LaTeX has all this stuff....however, is it at least WYSIWYG? ie: >Is there an editor for X designed that I can use and have it generate >the appropriate LaTex or dvi output? Ok, so it sounds like what I'm >asking for is similar to MS Word or something...and it is. I LIKE not >having to worry about settings or something, and just type up a >document, view how it looks, and THEN play with the formatting if I >don't like it. If LaTex can do some/most/all of these things, I'll be >on that bandwagon as fast as I can be. So...can it? If so where can >I get it for Linux? > >HJD. Well. Latex is not a WYSIWYG editor. Latex allows you for example to make labeled references to figures, tables, different paragraphs etc. forward and backward and will automatically generate the appropriate paragraph numbers, figure numbers, table of contents, table of figures etc. Because of this, and more, latex is well suited to produce large documents, even though you are editing a source file and have to run it through a previewer or print it to see what exactly you will get. You can just type quickly text in Latex (most of it is just ASCII) and then worry about the formatting later. As a matter of fact, most of the time Latex will produce reasonable output without much formatting, because it has defaults for almost everything, and will do a pretty good job to format the document for you. You just have to intervene if you want something in a particular diffent way. You can even define your own default styles to use for all your documents. If all you do is type occational one to two page documents, you are better off with some other product though. Where to get Latex? I got mine with the Slackware distribution. Try sunsite.unc.edu or ask archie. Josef ------------------------------ From: ajk@garnet.berkeley.edu (Adam Jacobs) Crossposted-To: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? Date: 5 Oct 1994 19:24:08 GMT In article <1994Oct5.140028.5759@midway.uchicago.edu>, Richard L. Goerwitz wrote: > >For me WYSIWYG is critical. Critical. Like many scholars in the humanities, >I'm citing documents in languages other than English, and it's terribly irk- >some to have to enter text in these languages using a cumbersome nonnative >notation. I just use a WYSIWYG editor that lets me change keyboards on the >fly. One minute I'm touch typing English. Another I'm entering Arabic or >Hebrew or whatever I need. And I see what I'm typing as it normally should >be seen, i.e., without all the formatting crap and with foreign characters >in the correct font. Note though that you don't really >need< a full `WYSIWYG' word processor (with all the page formatting, etc.) to happily type away in N different languages. For that a good text editor with font and keyboard support is all that's required. I run (Lucid) EMACS under X (mostly under Linux nowadays) and can with the invocation of single-key commands write extended text in English, Hungarian, German, French, and Russian, plus glosses in other languages, as well as sundry IPA symbols. All the fonts are there on the screen, and I have my key bindings set up in the (idiosyncratic) manner that I prefer for each language -- of course nothing would prevent me using the `standard' keyboards, inasmuch as one exists, but I'm used to my own system. (It's true that all the languages I mentioned are European and all but Russian are written with the Roman alphabet, left-to-right. I can't comment on writing in Arabic or Hebrew script, though it seems to me that I've heard of EMACS modes that facilitate even that, along with all the niceties involved: juncture forms, vowel marks, etc. Anyone know more?) Whatever the language, I write in TeX, inserting the necessary formatting macros quite instinctively, and including various header files and macro collections that I've accumulated over the years so that I don't have to do much work to get a document to look the way I'd like it to. I tend to agree with the former poster who cited studies indicating that WYSIWYG word processing is liable to cause some people to waste lots of time because they are unable to resist futzing with formatting options when they should be writing! -- but the time you gain being able to type `straight through' without being distracted by the formatting probably will be counterbalanced by the period you spend fiddling around at the end to get it Just Right. The main reason, other than sheer familiarity, that I prefer TeX over any word processor I've ever used is simply that TeX's Just Right looks better, in my opinion, than a word processor's. There's no inherent reason why WYSIWYG word processors couldn't achieve the same quality of output. When I first used TeX, almost ten years ago, they couldn't; but we have much more computing power at our disposal now. Perhaps there are, by now, WYSIWYG word processors that I'm not aware of which compete with TeX for output quality; and I'm sure high-powered desktop publishing packages do. I might well start using one, if it gives me (1) fully-configurable multilingual writing, (2) full support for mathematical equations, (3) all the numerous formatting styles that I use, (4) complete control over the 'littlest details' if necessary to tune things up at the end. Oh, and it should run under Linux and not cost a fortune :-). I still find that the combination of an EMACS with font and keyboard support and TeX with all the trimmings makes an incredibly efficient writing tool for me. What's more, these programs, and the operating system I now run it on are as free as the air around us, which has resulted in their worldwide adoption; the resulting community `support' (for supposedly unguaranteed, unsupported software) is much, much better than anything the software giants have managed to come up with yet. One of my colleagues was almost ripping his hair out the other day as the latest version of WordPerfect for Windows freaked out on him. I certainly wasn't too impressed with the solution the technical support line gave him when he finally got through (shades of the old patient-doctor conversation: "It hurts when I do... this!" "Well, then, don't do THAT!") As a free-UNIX-and-free-software user almost exclusively, I've just been bug-eyed at the problems he and the rest of my colleagues, who are DOS/Windows users, seem to take for granted with the two major applications, WPFW and CorelDraw, that get the most use in this lab. Everyone has learned what sequences of functions have to be avoided because they crash the system (can you imagine? an >application< crashing the system!!), screw up the printer, or you name it. And then every time we install a new release they have to learn all over again. Corel alone has sent us three upgrades in the past few months. In contrast, because of the untrammeled distribution of free software and the massive user community, most of the glaring bugs are ironed out soon after the code is released. And because the source code to packages such as EMACS and TeX is just as freely available as the executables, and they are built with seamless extensibility in mind so that new features can be distributed as (macro, elisp, etc.) packages without requiring a new 'release', >everyone< (who wants to take the time and effort) is empowered to fix things, make improvements, add new features, and so on. Of course, in order to do that, a user needs to get some expertise about how the insides of the package work -- but, unlike the situation with locked-up commercial software (where, if you have a problem or would like a feature added, you're out of luck unless the enough people complain to the company to prompt a new release) at least free software makes this as easy as possible. So if you want to add, let's say, Gilyak language support to your system, WordPerfect Corporation is liable to tell you to shove off. But, even as an EMACS/TeX novice, you're liable to find it not too difficult to accomplish if you look through similar, publically available packages for other languages. You can get it Just Right and then have the pride of distributing your Gilyak package to all the other free-software-loving Gilyakologists out there :-). Of course many happy EMACS/LaTeX users have no desire to learn elisp, or raw TeX, or whatever, and do just fine without ever learning the 'programming' side of these packages. Many of the needs of people working in fields somewhat larger than Gilyakology are covered by stable, freely available code. Anyway, I certainly don't mean this all as an argument against WYSIWYG. The edit-TeX-preview style of writing takes some getting used to, as does writing in TeX in the first place. (LaTeX makes it a lot easier for most people; I find myself using it more and more for new work despite the fact that I'm more familiar with plain TeX and my favorite macros are all built upon the latter. One big advantage of LaTeX for the uninitiated is that you can write your whole document, hardly entering a single LaTeX macro except for the section headers etc., and then learn the subtle points as you refine the formatting at the end.) But for people who will do a lot of writing for publication, need real versatility, and are serious about finding a tool and sticking with it, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend giving the combination a try. One thing to keep in mind, if you expect to keep using free software, is that -- when WYSIWYG becomes available in free software guise, it's likely to retain many of the conventions of major standards in the free software world, such as (surprise) EMACS and TeX. I see Xemacs (LUCID, etc.) evolving in that direction, though it has a long way to go. And I can easily imagine a WYSIWYG word processor that produces as output a stream of TeX. It would almost certainly be easier to undertake a WYSIWYG interface using TeX as its back-end typesetting engine than to try to do the whole thing from scratch. At this point average per-workstation computing resources are probably already powerful enough to implement the whole thing as a real-time, per page TeX->dvi->bitmap front end, though some trickery would be necessary. So even if you prefer a WYSIWYG interface it might not be a bad idea to become familiar with these packages. > >Of course, this is all moot for Linux, since there *is* no multilingual word >processor for Unix (though some stabs are being made in that direction). It >seems that the programming/engineering/CS community is pretty much a mono- >lingual culture (at least here in the US). > >So maybe for them ASCII-based typesetters are fine. >-- > > -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet > goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer Maybe. One thing to keep in mind is that the "programming/engineering/CS community," whatever nation is is in and whether it speaks English or another language, has to do a lot of writing in a "language" that is at least as demanding to typeset as most natural ones: mathematics. TeX is outstanding at that difficult job (not surprising, as it was one of the original design goals. In any case I wouldn't call TeX an "ASCII- based typesetter" except in the sense that its input can be coded in ASCII (needn't be; that's a function of the operating system that you it was compiled on). Certainly it can be set up to take input coded in ASCII-variants corresponding to non-English character sets. Adam Jacobs ajk@garnet.berkeley.edu ------------------------------ From: gbrownin@sun1.iusb.indiana.edu (G. Browning) Subject: Disk Quotas - limiting space Date: Tue, 4 Oct 1994 23:27:19 GMT Hello all, Here is a misc. question for ya, if quota going to become available soon? I remember quota (and I used it) back with kernels up to 1.1.37, but since then I haven't been able to use it. Are there any new ports? Anyone working on one? Thanx -Gary ------------------------------ From: michael@geiger.Physik.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Michael Dirkmann) Subject: 386/486 weirdness Date: 6 Oct 1994 07:29:29 GMT Hallo! I have a program which was compile using the f77-script. 'time' gives the following output: 159.8real 2.2user .... this was on a 386/25 (no chache); 8MB RAM On a 486/50;16MB user time is about 0.6 and the real time is not much larger. I tried compiling with '-m386' on the 386/25. But there was no significant change. Can anybody explain this to me? I do not think it is because of the memory. The 386/25 does NOT swap. Thanks and ciao Michael +-------------------------------------------------------+ | Michael Dirkmann (michael@physik.uni-dortmund.de) | | Lehrstuhl f. Exp. Physik V | | Universitaet Dortmund | | Tel. ++49-231-755-4519 | +-------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ From: rubin@infinet.com (Danial Rubin) Crossposted-To: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux? Date: 5 Oct 1994 11:47:52 -0400 >Actually, almost every study I have ever seen shows that WYSIWYG significantly >reduces the productivity of a person trying to get serious writing done. I >believe that these were studies of documentation producers and that they found >that users of WYSIWYG spend a lot of time formatting and reformatting to get >visual appearance when they should be writing content. In other words, the >process of wrting content then formatting is more productive that formatting as >you go and WYSIWYG tends to lead people to format as they go. I would have to say it depends on how productive the person is. I use Frame and after I had set up all the templates for the documents I write actually using them is effortless. I cannot see how formatting would hamper a person using templates unless they are the type of person who would rather fiddle with the look of the doc instead of writing it. I would have to say for most playing with a WYSIWYG word processor is fun while writing the meat of the document is not... - Dan -- Daniel Rubin (614) 860-4265 (614) 766-6901 Keane, Inc., 2715 Tuller Parkway Dr., Dublin, Ohio rubin@infinet.com rubin@atlas.cb.att.com rubin@cis.ohio-state.edu ------------------------------ From: iialan@iifeak.swan.ac.uk (Alan Cox) Subject: Re: New Linux Distribution Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 15:01:31 GMT In article <36e374$sji@gandalf.rutgers.edu> madrid@gandalf.rutgers.edu (Juana Moreno) writes: >I did not change my mind about keeping the distribution tiny, stripping >many Unix utilities. Even if the distribution looks similar to WinDos it >won't be. Even with only enough utilities to match Microsoft's ones users >will have the following advantages: This is hopelessly naive - bundle vi - remember to include termcap - remember /bin/sh is useless without all the related shell script tools. Now of course dc uses bc... etc. > - Powerful shell scripting. I do not want to prevent users to use it, >I just want to make it easier for them. One of the points of the .BAT->.sh >translator is that users will be able to look at the .sh output and learn >the basic .sh commands that way. And it seems so easy to make! Nice toy - and potentially useful. Of course its useless if you haven't bundled all the shell tools then its useless. > - Powerful automation of tasks via batch and cron. For example, running >updatedb every night beats the fastest DosWin file finder by orders of >magnitude. Cron ? - oh so you are going to bundle all of cron, crontab, at and its related tools and run in multi user mode - and syslog and email. YOu need ALL of those for cron to work properly. > - Multiple users. OK, I changed my mind on this one, mainly because >I realized that accounts make it easy to have different background bitmaps >for different moods :-) I really don't buy the claim that having root >access is dangerous since DosWin users have root access all the time. It's >not that bad, it just demystifies the unix sysadmin work. It just means that sysadmin are sick to death of reinstalling a windows program that got deleted by mistake. Thats the point of priviledges. Even Win/NT has this much sense in it. > - Dos-like and Windows-like utilities > - Grep, awk, sed, bash > - Slip client and Mosaic Mosaic+SLIP of course needs telnet, xv, xterm, dip, ifconfig, route etc. >So thanks to all of you who made suggestions. I'd like to have more. Figure out what applications use what stuff. Better still go and download mcc and print out its nice manual and then add the basic X stuff to that. Mcc is only 5 disks which + X ought to give you a 7 disk set including compilers. Drop the compilers and you are aiming at about 5 disks - nice and convenient. I think one thing is a good idea - the handly little tools to set your background and stuff like that - there are tons of those little widgets begging to get sorted out in X windows. Alan -- ..-----------,,----------------------------,,----------------------------,, // Alan Cox // iialan@www.linux.org.uk // GW4PTS@GB7SWN.#45.GBR.EU // ``----------'`----------------------------'`----------------------------'' ------------------------------ From: rstone@infi.net (Richard Stone) Subject: Re: Mystery Chip...AMD Date: 6 Oct 1994 05:08:40 GMT scott@minotaur.alve.com wrote: : i486DX2-66. As far as I know, there are no 'real' 66 MHz chips. The pin-out : is identical to the Intel; it is supposed to work in Intel 486-compatible The Pentiums come in 50, 60, 66, 90 and 100 flavors. But anything over the (now fairly rare) DX50 is a clock-doubled or -tripled chip in the 486 class. -- Richard S. Stone Network Engineer The Engineering Design Group "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" "If it *is* broke, pay us to fix it!" 2-FOR-1 DEAL: "We'll break it for you and then fix it; for one low price!" rstone@edgp.com rstone@infi.net -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- /* disclaimer.h */ printf("The opinions expressed above are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the Engineering Design Group or its affiliates.\n") -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------ From: dcflood@u.washington.edu (David Flood) Subject: Linux doesn't like my cache Date: 6 Oct 1994 17:24:52 GMT I recently upgraded my mother board and memory from a 386sx16 w/ 4M to a 386dx40 with 5M. This new bard has a 128K cache on it that when enabled, an attempted recompile of the kernel will bomb out with several errors that a restart of the compile will run right by until another error occurs. But with the cache disabled, everything runs just fine. Also, with the cache, I get a lot faster response and speed with a BogoMip rating of around 7.8-7.9. Without it it is closer to 4.0. How can I keep the cache and (perhaps more importantly) does anyone know of a program to test cache memory incase I have a bad chip? ------------------------------ From: tesla@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Jon Nash) Subject: Gnuplot and XWindows ? Date: 5 Oct 1994 10:02:23 -0600 I must be very confused! I have gnuplot... I open an xterm window and try to run gnuplot. It says that I don't have a graphics display terminal type (or something like that). I _thought_ gnuplot ran under X ?! Does it? What do I need to do? Thanks for any help you can give! Jon Nash Colorado State University Physics Department Tesla@Lamar.ColoState.EDU ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is: Internet: Linux-Misc-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux.misc) via: Internet: Linux-Misc@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites: nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux sunsite.unc.edu pub/Linux End of Linux-Misc Digest ******************************