This week in the world of the Command Line; The Friday Round up!
3 February 2006
Package Management in Mac OS X... in Japanese!
A user has featured one of my posts with comments/criticisms in a post in a Japanese blog, I have no idea what he is saying, however Google Translator does attempt to make sense of it.
Gentoo VS Debian
Over at Martin's Notepad, Martin compares Gentoo to Debian:
> ...upgrading and finding out information about installed packages is surprisingly complicated. If an upgrade just works, your fine. But if it e.g. wants to remove some package you’d rather not see removed, ‘apt’ doesn’t tell you why. Plus, finding out which version a package is usually means first searching for the name of the package using apt-cache... Why is this so difficult? And why is it so easy with Gentoos “emerge� command? > > ...the whole init/rc system of Debian/Ubuntu is also a huge step backwards from Gentoos rc system. The command line tools are obscure, the user has to specify the start order manually...
I have tried all the major Linux distributions in my time, and I personally think that for technical users, Gentoo is the easiest to keep running. Of course, it is not very easy to learn the first time, and it takes a whole long evening to install, but everything in computing always boils down to a choice between pain now and pain later.
Of course, if you use Debian, feel free to write a comment and have your say!
Backup your partitions with Partimage
For most of us, a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) has not yet hit all systems, especially on the laptop or older desktop. Even with a RAID setup, disasters can still strike, disasters that are then propagated to the other disks!
Backing up is a vital part of responsible computing, I myself am less than blameless in that regard. Raoul's Blog, "Raoul's Land Reloaded!", featured a useful post, "Partition images with Partimage and Partimaged". The post is a comprehensive treatment of how to create and restore partition images using Partimage, which is well worth thinking about. It also includes tips about how to backup over a network, using a machine as a backup server.
Update: I just remembered that also on the topic of doing backups, Joel Padot's blog recently featured a "Simple Bash Script for Backups", this script allows to you to backup certain directories (e.g. /home/warrior/ ).
Back to the Future
David Kidd of PC Authority magazine argues in "`Command lines: Way of the Future`_" what I have believed for some time, that voice recognition and the command line make for a powerful combination:
> "The reliance on GUIs is an interim, and no amount of spinning, translucent 3D widows in Vista will drag it into the future. Keep the command line, focus on natural language, and throw some more weight behind voice recognition. That’s the future."
Even with just speech synthesis and a keyboard, a command-line based system is quite usable without a screen. With wireless Internet too, the idea of a portable computer, i.e. a laptop with no screen, that I can use while using my eyes for other tasks, such as not walking into lamp-posts or looking at nature, is very appealing.
URL-browser scripting in GUI-land.
Like Shel Holtz in "Browser Relief For Keyboard Fans", I cringe whenever I have to reach across for the mouse. Holtz points us to a cute little thing called yubnub which is a set of pre-written address-bar scripts for graphical web browsers. The idea is very similar to what I often do with elinks and wget, i.e. try to automate web tasks and download content in interesting ways.
The Synagogue of Bash
Finally I have noticed a new blog, Shell Shul by Goyishekop, which started in November. This blog is devoted to the Bash Shell, and includes a lot on shell scripting. The first post explains the aims of the blog. I have book-marked this site and I am currently reading through the first few months.
