• SSHFS mounts SSH-accessible remote filesystems, locally on your PC with transparent read-write access. Since I have shell accounts with the University Linux system (which I use for backup), and with the SRCF (where this website is hosted), this could be rather useful.
• WikipediaFS is similarly just what it implies – mount Wikipedia locally with read-write access to the pages (you need to know the MediaWiki markup tags). However, it can be used with any MediaWiki installation… so if I was to set up a personal wiki, this might make it rather more useful for notetaking, etc.

When I have a functional linux system of my own again – probably a dual-boot laptop – I’ll have a play with these and perhaps mention how they work here! Thanks to FOSSwire for the heads-up on these…

Oh, and a bit of an update on life in general will follow at some point; suffice to say that I’ve been busy!

Solution (assuming you use bash):

for inMyPath in `echo $PATH | sed -e 's/:/\\t/g'`;
do
find $inMyPath -name MISSING_FILE;
done


MISSING_FILE is the name of the script (or whatever) that you’re after. This is fairly trivial, I admit, but it took me a while to work out how to do it right (mainly sedding PATH correctly). I’m about to put it into a script of its own for future use.

I have worked out a potential means of fixing the laptop, though. What’s broken, I believe, is that I don’t have either of Gnome or K desktop managers installed, only XDM, which I think Fluxbox doesn’t really support. So I have a window manager with nothing behind the scenes to take control when I actually *click* on a menu item. If I can reinstall GDM or KDM, I might be OK, but without an optical drive or means of internet connectivity (also broken), I can only see one (comical) solution. Download the DPKG on another machine, and transfer via USB stick or floppy disk (!), then install locally. Great. I’m not even going to bother, I’ll just spend hours faffing when I could just be doing all my research analysis and report-writing elsewhere.

Result: I’ve installed MiKTeX on my XP desktop, and intend to ssh to pip.srcf for certain necessary operations. And now I’m going to get on and try to actually view computers as means again, rather than ends…

(FYI, I’ve been running a heavily bastardised *buntu-based linux installation on my oldish Dell C640 for some time. I’ve messed around with the packaging way too much to call it Ubuntu or Kubuntu – indeed, at various times I’ve tried not just the GNOME and KDE packages, but Xfce as well (Xubuntu), and then settled on Fluxbox with GDM underneath. This was before the concept of Fluxbuntu existed. After spending a lot of time yesterday customising the Fluxbox interface, I succeeded (somehow) in removing all display managers. I then put XDM on, and now Fluxbox comes up, but without functional menus… so I can’t even launch a virtual terminal. Ah well…)

My longer term aim is to actually build a linux install from the ground up – I want Fluxbox, but I probably don’t want a lot of what comes with Fluxbuntu. This might signal my first change from *buntu for some years…

Oh yeah, and to conclude my previous post, Airset is vastly overengineered for my needs, but does sync well to Palm devices, so I’m using that. I plan to set up some complicated iCal sharing at some point between Airset, facebook, Google Calendar/Mail, and other webapps, which could be quite cool.

Yup, I feel that’s quite an impressively long sed argument. It is probably possible to write something more succinct that will have the same effect, but it’d only be even more obfuscated stuart.out is the data collected from me running myself as a subject for my Part II Psychology project: it’s generated by a C program running on DOS 6.2 . I only need three numbers and a word per condition tested – but the program spews out huge amounts of supplementary text, and isn’t totally regular about where newlines get inserted (I had to forced-close the program a number of times). The greps eliminate incomplete session records, and wipe a handful of unnecessary lines from each blockl; the sed statement gets rid of words in between my precious numbers, and makes the textfile look like a csv.

I’m still working on the sed part of the pipe… it needs a final clause to strip certain, but not all, newlines. I need to match every first and second newline out of three, but not the third, in this file (effectively concatenating three lines together onto one line, and repeating for the next three lines). If anybody can lend any hints, please do – not only is my sed-fu weak, but my google-fu seems to be on the blink as well.

Why am I up late doing this? The gutsy upgrade stalled when my net connection broke inexplicably a few hours ago – and I only noticed recently. Only another hour of downloads to go, then the real fun will begin

Notably, the first time I’ve actually dared use sed for anything remotely system-critical – and I did have a little help from teh internets. Practicing with sed and grep (essentially, practicing arbitrary regexp usage) is my early New Year’s Resolution on the Linux side of life – I’m at a stage where if I want to get “better” at Linux, this is the one thing that’s really going to make a big difference to my commandline-foo.

Anyways, aptitude is jumping around between around 5 and 10 hours of upgrading to be done… w00t. Shall have to see how many more times I need to invoke aptitude to get a functional system again!

What does one do whilst waiting for said updates? Hack around on the desktop PC, of course. I now have a (pretty much pointless) installation of Horde on my domain, and a copy of PINE on pip, the SRCF’s linux box, appropriately set up to read my Google Apps email account via IMAP.

This will probably now solve all possible need-to-check-email scenarios; I fully intend to never be too far from my USB stick with Portable PuTTY, if I think I might not have access to a terminal of some description. Of course, in the majority of places, Firefox will do nicely, Thank You Very Much: the web interface is, for me, far superior to PINE (which doesn’t support things like starring messages, and deals awkwardly with labels, and the general “never delete a message” philosophy). But for those situations when bandwidth/memory/time are really short, PINE is a good thing!

Oh, and Napoleon Dynamite is, to be completely honest, not as fantastic a film as I’d been led to believe. The famous dance sequence is hilarious, but other than that, it’s pretty forgettable, and takes forever to get going (arguably, never getting beyond first gear, but then subtlety-of-plot is a valid artistic idea). Just not my kind of humour, I suppose.

Of course, what’s really interesting about gOS as an OS (rather than simply as a component of the now-famous $200 Wal-Mart system) is it’s total reliance on web applications, specifically Google ones. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest, with how little they’ve integrated these into the experience – the icons that relate to web rather than hard-drive based apps (all except for media player and config utils, IIRC) simply open a bog-standard Firefox window at that page, rather than integrating as if it were a desktop app. Anybody could do this – sure, it’d take a little tweaking in places, but for me, it’s far easier to have one FF window open right from the start of my session, with all the apps/pages I use the most in a bookmarks toolbar, and just go from there. Being Linux, all the other aspects of it could be fairly easily recreated by apt-get downloading the relevant things, so gOS is certainly not going to be replacing my Kubuntu partition any time soon. It’s a brilliant concept, and just right for a dirt-cheap PC bundle that should, hopefully, increase mainstream awareness of Linux in the US – but poorly executed.

One thing I will say for it – Firefox sure loads fast. Possibly just because it has no extensions – but I think it loads even faster than a clean install would on my machine. Anybody know what they’ve tweaked?

Puppy Linux is a very lightweight linux distro designed to be run from USB memory sticks. It still currently uses traditional desktop applications, though.

I have acquired a (free) 512Mb memory stick, of a pretty decent build-quality and a very keychain-able size (more on how and when will be explained in a future post, once I have a bit more to add to it), and want something to do with it. I already have a similar-sized one which I use for general carrying of files between home, the department, etc, and running a few Portable Apps such as a customised Firefox, when I’m out and about. I need to read up on how exactly to make one’s own USB-bootable flash-stored OS, but I think I see a holiday project here