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Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy My own personal advice is to stay away from Perl. It is unreadable and unmaintainable, has a non-context free syntax, and is fundamentally useless for anything serious. I personally think people who attempt to write large programs in Perl are just plain stupid, and I would never trust their judgment about anything. I'm rarely that blunt. Perl represents, in microcosm, everything that is wrong with computers.

Finally someone who agrees with me on perl! I thought I was the only one who thought it was an ugly hack of a language. It's sufficient for scripting, but for anything of moderate complexity, stay away.

 

[aos]

By the way for some reason "emege kde" worked yesterday. startx brought me into... gnome for some reason

. Still problem with ati-drivers blocking any kind of update operation on the system so I decided to take a hardline approach. I found that packagine info is in /var/db/pkg so I went into ati one, found file that listed automake and deleted that reference. The logic was, if it doesn't think that there's dependency, it won't complain, and will let me then to manually remove or update a package (portage seemed pretty much stuck otherwise). No change, but then I did "emerge --sync" and after that it didn't complain any more. Hopefully it'll download updated packages now...

Or I spoke too soon. It started update, worked for a while, than the machine went into hard freeze, no keyboard, no mouse.Hmmm.

 

[the_villain]

Well if you think Gentoo is waste of time then what is LFS (Linux from Scratch). I was able to set up A gentoo with all stage 1 packages in a day. To do that with LFS would require several days. And the reason for coping so fast (relatively) is that I started using linux with Slackware - the hard way - it makes you read and learn the linux inside. Things like how to setup cd writing, framebuffer etc manually.
Try using Slackware ( or any other distro) with checkinstall. It is an automatic installer, deinstaller and works very well.

 

[3lusiv3]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aos If I were choosing now, I'd stay away of IT or try to find a specialized company, unless you plan to use IT just as a mean to get into a company, and then plan to move out of it into management or sales or want to become independent consultant or own your own IT business (and are very confident that you have necessary soft skills, which most "real" IT people don't by the very nature of fascination with science and technology). It used to be fun 10 years ago but today it's becoming a by-the-numbers job, that has bad career prospects, doesn't pay well considering the massive amount of knowledge and experience required and especially cost of maintaining it, as well as lack of recognition that is pervasive in most companies. If you like programming it's better to have it as a hobby than try to make money out of it - because you may well end up hating it. They say the average life span (i.e. length of time a person stays in that role) of a software developer is 7 years.

I agree with all of that.

If you don't love working in IT you'll never be able to keep up with the knowledge that you need to acquire. The rate of needing to acquire knowledge seems to get faster and you run into the danger of burning out.

 

[rsaavedra]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy Smalltalk is really the ideal learning language, because so many of its concepts form the basis of the modern languages we use today and yet it was designed to be easy enough for children.

Recently I was particularly surprised to find out the MVC pattern (Model-View-Controller), so pervasive in current software engineering best practices, and used in most modern enterprise application designs, comes directly from Smalltalk.

 

[Stephonovich]

I don't really plan on getting into IT. Too much stress, and I have a feeling it's going to crash soon anyway. Computers are a fun hobby, but not something I want as my career.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy Modern programming shops generally do not work in C, unless they're writing embedded applications, systems level software, or device drivers. C is really just a hair away from assembly language, and the grizzled coders who swear by it are usually ancient sysadmins who haven't touched a large-scale application in fifteen years.

C != Assembly. One's a high level language, the other is not. (arguments against that aside; when compared to Assembly, C is high level) C code can be grasped fairly quickly with a cursory glance, Assembly can not. C is cross-platform capable, Assembly has to be re-written.

 

[Aman]

Perl is EXCELLENT at what it DOES. It is an EXTREMELY powerful language, just not versatile. In fact, I'd be daring to say that Perl is the most powerful language out there that is still used today.

Do you wonder why all main exploit programs hackers use are written in Perl? Because it's the only language that can do what they need it to.
Sure, it is terrible with anything but internet-based applications, but for internet-based applications it accels so far beyond any other language.. well.. you get the point.

 

[Welly Wu]

Hey, I still love my RHFC3 SELinux. Linux Journal gave it the ranking of number two Linux distribution last month, so don't knock it.

I was going through my linux textbooks and I even learned how to download, uncompress, and install Mozilla FireFox 1.0.1 and ThunderBird 1.0 without losing my preferences! Now, I'm more secure...and I'm loving it.

One bad thing did happen though: I lost all of the icons on my desktop. In fact, I can't even get a response from my desktop whenever I click on the second mouse button over my desktop. How do I fix it so I got all of the icons back on?

 

[MartinJ]

I am thinking of going Debian GNU/Linux as fast I get my Debian 3.x Biblbe : )

 

[wallijonn]

Welly,

Can you login into GNOME safe mode? It could be a priority thing or a messed up .gnome file (hidden foilder).

The first question to ask is: What did you do before it messed up?

 

[Stephonovich]

I just (well, it's finishing up as I write this) got SUSE 9.2 installed, so here's hoping for Yet Another Distro to pan out. I'm not a fan of it overall, but after seeing what it can do when tweaked, I wanted to give it another shot. I started with the minimal (bare-bones system plus Xorg) install, and added a few things I want. Still installed about 1GB total, but that's not really all that horrible for bloat. Next up, tweaking it. Shall do that tomorrow after 'tis done.

 

[Welly Wu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn Welly, Can you login into GNOME safe mode? It could be a priority thing or a messed up .gnome file (hidden foilder). The first question to ask is: What did you do before it messed up?

All I did was to download, decompress, and install Mozilla FireFox 1.0.1 and ThunderBird 1.0 into my /usr/lib directory and I changed the path to these programs in the Mozilla FireFox and ThunderBird quick launch icons in my drawer where I keep my favorite programs. I even re-booted and shut down my computer figuring that might solve my problem with the desktop.

I don't know how to boot into RHFC3 SELinux GNOME in safe mode. I checked my .gnome folder, but I don't know what to look for. How do I get my desktop to display the usual icons like the default settings?

 

[wallijonn]

Welly,

On the main login screen there should be a "Sessions" button. It usually will say "last login", "KDE", "GNOME", "XFC", etc. It may also say "Safe". That's the one you'd try.

Since I no longer do FC... it may be in the GNOME Preferences.. but you can't get there... which means that you'll need to change the boot init level to get into safe mode or to boot from the (safe) kernel.

It may not be FF so much as Thunderbird. Just changing the relative paths won't do it as there now probably broken hard symlinks for FF. So you'll now need to learn how to display all the links for all your apps from the command prompt.

Part of the problem may be Nautalus. Did it make the changes into your invisibile .gnome and .gnome2 folders? Working with .gnome and .gnome2 could be problematic - you'd backup those files then delete them from the desktop, reboot, and it should create new ones.

I'm sorry I couldn't help you more.

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Welly Wu All I did was to download, decompress, and install Mozilla FireFox 1.0.1 and ThunderBird 1.0 into my /usr/lib directory and I changed the path to these programs in the Mozilla FireFox and ThunderBird quick launch icons in my drawer where I keep my favorite programs.

I'm not a Linux guru by any means, but wouldn't it be better to do this kind of installation through the package manager system?

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy I'm not a Linux guru by any means, but wouldn't it be better to do this kind of installation through the package manager system?

Fedora Core's package manager, IMO, sucks majorly. Has trouble checking dependencies, and often times fails completely. At least, when I used it. Besides, the setup programs for Firefox/Thunderbird are very easy. Run 'em as root, tell it where to install (although I must question that - why /usr/lib? /usr/bin is the usual), and voila, done.