UNIX SIG Notes
By Christopher J. Fearnley

Linux Tidbits

Linux kernel releases 1.2.0 - 1.2.5 are out and are very stable.
Though 1.2.1 may be the one to go for right now. I suspect 1.2.6
will take care of the problems a few people are having, but for the
most part each of the 1.2 kernels are very stable.

Dosemu (the DOS emulator under Linux) 0.60 is out and it's much
improved. There is some DPMI support which has enabled some
users to use Ami Pro under Windows! Unfortunately, you need a
licensed copy of DOS to use dosemu. And as a result the installation
is rather unpleasant. Although I haven't compiled it yet, I am more
worried about all the video and serial hacking that must be done to
the config files to get the DPMI apps to work correctly.

Linux may be the best OS (that is, it's cheap, straightforward to set
up, gives excellent performance and is very stable) for accessing the
Internet. I don't know of anyone who can't get their Linux system on
the net, but there are several Mac and Windows problems that are
virtually impossible to puzzle out and resolve (maybe 1% of the
Mac/Windows crowd can't get it working and some 10% get bizarre crashes
and hangups - numbers are very rough guesses). Pretty much all you need
to do to get Linux speaking SLIP is to edit /etc/hosts, etc/resolv.conf
and modify a dip script that I could e-mail to anyone interested. It's
all rather trivial (well, you do need to install the networking software
and configure the kernel properly, of course!). Linux has been
benchmarked as faster than Windows SLIP as well. So if you need a
high-performance network connection, look at Linux first.

What's bash?

Last month I went through the bash(1) (the Bourne Again SHell) man page
highlighting some of my favorite features. Bash's command, filename,
etc. completion facilities are probably what users will like and learn
first about bash. So I chose to focus on lesser known features. For
example, setting the CDPATH environment variable can make it easy to
jump around the filesystem. You might also want to familiarize yourself
with bash's readline editing features (search for the string "READLINE"
in the man page). readline(3) is a programming library used by ncftp,
gdb and other programs to give a consistent vi- or emacs-style editing
facility across applications. You can customize readline through the
.inputrc file. Finally, bash offers help on all its builtin functions -
try "help help" to get started. We will continue discussing bash at the
May 20th SIG meeting. I hope to bring a script or two which might even
lead us into other aspects of the synergetic Unix system.

What is "NetNews?"

"NetNews" is the Internet's BBS. It is sometimes called "USENET News" or
"Newsgroups." NetNews is arranged hierarchically. There is a comp
hierarchy for computer related discussion, a sci hierarchy for
scientific discussions, an alt hierarchy where anything goes and several
others. For example the newsgroup sci.chem is for discussion about
chemistry. Some groups are pretty noisy (little content, lot's of
endless discussion). The *.answers groups are the least noisy. "*" is a
Unix shell wildcard character meaning "matches any character" or in this
case matches any of the news hierarchies. All of the major hierarchies
have a .answers newsgroup and several subhierarchies have their own
.answers group (for example, comp.os.linux.answers is for postings of
reference material about the Linux operating system). news.answers is
the most comprehensive of the *.answers groups. Like all the *.answers
groups it is moderated which means that only appropriate material will
be posted. This means that news.answers consists entirely of reference
type material -- so called FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). Browsing
through news.answers will give you some sense as to the size, breadth
and offerings available on the Internet. All postings to news.answers
are archived on the ftp site rtfm.mit.edu (rtfm stands for Read The Fine
Manual). So if you remember seeing a posting in news.answers you can
retrieve the latest version by ftp.