Subject: Linux-Misc Digest #889
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 94 14:13:41 EDT

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: [email-masked] (Joseph Stanley (Joe) Wisniewski)
Subject: Re: which is better: Mitsumi or Panasonic CDROM?
Date: 6 Oct 1994 14:02:26 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Heiko Schlittermann) writes:
|> In article <[email-masked]>,
|> Teemu Kilpivuori <[email-masked]> 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.
[email-masked] |  "any color you want -- as long as it's black"

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Wayne Hodgen)
Subject: Re: Fidonet s/w for linux?
Date: 6 Oct 1994 09:15:38 GMT
Reply-To: [email-masked]

|> 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   | [email-masked] | #include <ridiculouslylong
Uni Koblenz,   | or Fight-o-net 2:2454/518.42     | legalesemumbojumbodisclaim
Rheinau 1,     | Voice: +49 261 9119-645          | er||stupidasciipictureover
56075 Koblenz. | Fax:   +49 261 9119-499          | 20linestoannoythenet.cops>

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Ross Boswell)
Subject: Re: DOSEMU/Linux 1.1.51
Date: 6 Oct 1994 14:33:48 GMT

Oz Dror ([email-masked]) 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 : [email-masked]          |
| 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: [email-masked] (Josef Dalcolmo)
Crossposted-To: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux?
Date: 5 Oct 1994 19:23:58 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, MacGyver <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Piet Ruyssinck ([email-masked]) wrote:
>: Nick Kralevich ([email-masked]) 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: [email-masked] (Adam Jacobs)
Crossposted-To: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Word (Text) processors for Linux?
Date: 5 Oct 1994 19:24:08 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Richard L. Goerwitz <[email-masked]> 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              [email-masked]
>   [email-masked]          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
[email-masked]
<http://amacrine.berkeley.edu/homepages/ajk/english.html>

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (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   ([email-masked]) |
|   Lehrstuhl f. Exp. Physik V                          |
|   Universitaet Dortmund                               |
|   Tel. ++49-231-755-4519                              |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (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
    [email-masked]  [email-masked]  [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: New Linux Distribution
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 15:01:31 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (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  //  [email-masked]   //  GW4PTS@GB7SWN.#45.GBR.EU  //
 ``----------'`----------------------------'`----------------------------''

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Richard Stone)
Subject: Re: Mystery Chip...AMD
Date: 6 Oct 1994 05:08:40 GMT

[email-masked] 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!"
[email-masked]                                               [email-masked]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
/* 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: [email-masked] (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: [email-masked] (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
[email-masked]

------------------------------

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