Unix: October 2005 Archives

I've install Solaris 10 on an old machine donated by a friend (cheers Craig!) in preparation for starting my new job. I bought a KVM so I can use my glorious 19" Belinea monitor (cheers Andy!) and my 'pass the earplugs' Model M keyboard (cheers eBay!). I've got a separate mouse for each machine, as the KVM knocks out the scroll wheel and extra buttons on my various mice, and to be honest anyone living without a scroll wheel in this day and age should be ashamed of themselves.
The install went quite smoothly, if slowly (the machine's only a K6-533 with 184MB RAM and a 24X CD drive). The graphical install's a bit of a joke, as it consists of the text installer, but in a window. Nice one, what was the point of that?
Speaking of irritations, Emacs isn't included in the base install, so I'm having to use the dreaded vi to edit files. Seriously, that editor is brain damaged - having to change modes to move the cursor around is nuts. I'd imagine it'd be marginally better if the esc key wasn't so far from the home keys. I'll have Emacs in as soon as the network switch arrives (only one network connection in the room) so I can download the package. Also, the default shell is the old-skool POSIX Bourne shell. Easily fixed, but when you hit tab expecting a filename to complete, and you actually get 6 characters of whitespace, it's a bit weird.
I'm starting to think Linux has been too kind to me all these years.

The problem with the Sourceforge releases is resolved: all files across all releases must have unique names (there was already a file named 'multiburn' in a previous release). I must have known this when I released version 1.41, but by the time I got to releasing version 1.42 (which had turned into 1.43 by the time I got this problem resolved), I had forgotten, and I still can't see any mention of this requirement anywhere on the Sourceforge site. It looks like each project is assigned a single directory on a server somewhere, and new releases don't get subdirectoried.
Apparently, I'm not the only person that finds this annoying.

In reference to 2005/10/12: I got the job! I'll be a support engineer for a rather large Unix vendor. Yay!

If you've been watching the front page, you'll know that I was recently offered a job at a certain Unix vendor. I am very happy.
Also, I'm having a bit of trouble getting new versions of multiburn onto my sourceforge page. It's a bit weird. The script is just a text file, but I can't associate it with the project. I've sent a support request, so we'll see. It's probably my fault...