no recursive diff?

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 02 September 2006 12:53 pm, Rogelio Serrano wrote:
> > > things i hate about my linux pc:
> >
> > Do you really need a 7 line signature?  I'm going to treat this as content 
in
> > the message, I think.
> >
> > > 1. it takes more than a second to boot up
> >
> > There are people who have fixed that, your distro/bios/kernel config is at
> > fault.
> >
> 
> yes i know. the vga bios ruined it for me. going into vga text mode
> and initializing it and waiting for x takes time. 3 seconds from
> switch on to a login screen is good enough actually. intel efi guys
> are able to boot servers in 5 seconds. so guys who want to beat that
> must able to boot up in 3 sec or less.

Ever heard of linuxbios?  There are people doing fraction of a second boot 
times with Linux all the time.  In the embedded space.  The knoppix guys 
don't bother because your average Dell laptop is wasting ten seconds after 
power on trying to figure out how to say "duh?" before handing control off to 
something competent.
 
> > > 2. keeps asking about filenames and directories
> >
> > Yes, computers care about filenames and directories.  You may want to get 
out
> > of the computer business if files and directories strike you as a bad way 
of
> > organizing information.
> >
> 
> well for the system yes its ok but i tend to forget which filenames i
> used for that small snippet of info that i got over the phone.

And in real life you probably lose the post-it-note you wrote it on.  This is 
not my problem.

> i tend 
> to remember long lines easily but not cryptic super short filenames.
> most people i asked say the same thing.

The macintosh has "finder" for this.  Linux has nautilus and beagle and 
someday will hopefully have a third attempt that doesn't suck.  (C#?  Are 
they _crazy_?  Unfortunately, the answer appears to be "yes".)  Nobody said 
your filenames had to be cryptic super short, although it's up to you to type 
them if you're using the command line.

This is, again, not my problem.  It's a question of what you're trying to do 
and what tools you choose to use.  People who type filenames from the command 
line use short names to save typing.  People who work through the gui use 
long filenames and click on them with the mouse.

> > > 3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday
> >
> > Mine does.  Software Suspend is fairly cool.
> >
> 
> yes i would like to try that as a remedy.

You can also run under QEMU with vnc and use the "snapshot" feature with a 
copy-on-write block device.  There are a number of approaches to this.

> > > 4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made
> >
> > Yes, finite storage space is also a bit of a bother.  However, when I 
wandered
> > from the Amiga to the PC world in 1990 I bought a 120 megabyte hard drive 
for
> > my first PC, and my current laptop has 60 gigabytes, which is somewhere 
over
> > 250 times that.  I have tarballs on here of a half-dozen entire previous
> > systems, which I've been meaning to go through and clean up (or at least 
get
> > on a properly indexted series of DVD-ROMs or something).  And yesterday, I
> > rsynced my entire laptop to another machine because I only needed 60 gigs 
of
> > free space to image the whole thing and on a desktop system that's not 
that
> > impressive these days...
> >
> 
> well i dont want to do the indexing myself.

I'm not doing it for you.

> im not good with filenames and tarballs reduce entire volumes to a single
> filename. 

Konqueror used to let you browse the contents of Tarballs.  This worked for me 
right up until the current version of Ubuntu broke it.  I really miss that 
feature.

> > > 5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself
> >
> > Never played with Knoppix, have you?  Modern distros are actually pretty 
good
> > at this.
> >
> 
> no i havent. i have been using debian.

There's your problem then.

I can't figure out what Debian is for anymore.  If you want a technical 
research platform you grab Gentoo, if you want an end user desktop system you 
grab Ubuntu, if you want something flashy and portable to demo you can grab 
Knoppix, and if you're a business being ISO9002 compliant you skip Fedora 
Core entirely and grab Red Hat enterprise.  (And if your ISO9002 procedure 
requires a second source for competitive bidding you grab SuSE.)  And if you 
want to roll your own you grab BuildRoot or Linux From Scratch or one of the 
8 gazillion other variants out there.

There are still a few debian installations on servers, but I've seen servers 
running Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and SuSe all in the same shop.  At work we 
recently got rid of a server running Red Hat 6.

> why cant we just
> copy the files over and the system can just run it when its needed
> without me telling it to.

You'd _like_ your computer to be part of a botnet sending spam then?

> -- 
> things i hate about my linux pc:
> 
> 1. it takes more than a second to boot up
> 2. keeps asking about filenames and directories
> 3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday
> 4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made
> 5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself

Trim the sig file please.  It is too long.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.