Drawing in Linux

You did emphasize the *might* part.

But that stuff is AutoCAD.

Start him off confused and developing bad habits!

I suppose.. Then perhaps the QCad book. Price seems okay, about $30. The preview looks like the book is targetted towards newcomers.

"Part of" has subtle nuances here which we are obviously using at cross purposes.

I wouldn't know much about MS-Windows concepts since I've never owned a computer with that "OS" on it. I am however quite familiar with repositories. They are collection sites of Distribution specific, as well as third-party software checked and packaged for compatibility with whatever distribution maintains that collection.

QCad is not on the Ubuntu installation disk I used, nor on the Debian installation disk I used, nor on any of the other several dozen distribution installation CDs I've used. QCad is exactly a third-party add-on, in that Ubuntu does not own/maintain QCad. RibbonSoft does. For the most part, Ubuntu, being based on Debian, simply takes the Debian package, qcad_2.x.x.deb, insures it works on Ubuntu, and copies it from the Debian repository to the Ubuntu repository. On an Ubuntu system, the last line of the qcad man page:

Debian/GNU Linux February 2001 QCad(1)

Look at it this way. Let's say Google caches a story off the AP wire. Does that article then become "part of Google?" To me, it doesn't. The Google cache is just an easy/alternate way to find/retrieve a third party article. In that sense, Ubuntu does exactly the same thing as Google.

This is a really pointless semantic argument.

bash, sed and qcad are all parts of Ubuntu.

I have no interest in arguing what is a part of Google.

It's on the first DVD of the Debian set; the one you install from. There are something like 5 DVD's / 25 CD's to the set. QCad is in it.

Might be best to go here:

DVD's/CD's to fool with, everything is online. Ask for Lenny and tell him you want QCad.

Certainly not to the people who wrote the license under which qcad is released.

I do get your meaning, just pointing out that saying it that way is prone to misinterpretation, implying a relationship that doesn't exist.

Ok. That says loads.

Will debian.exe run under Wine?

No, *you* ask for Lenny and tell him you want tin, since this is a metalworking group, after all.

I would agree with that and point out that there is no special exclusive relationship between qcad and ubuntu.

Indeed so.

Sed has been a part of all unix distributions since at least version 7 unix -- and probably version 6 as well.

Saying that it is part of one specific distribution is a bit strange at least.

Bash is becoming more common -- even in the Sun Solaris 10 distribution -- but it is a superset of the Bourne shell (bash is an acronym for "Bourne Again SHell", FWIW.) It was developed back when the standard Bourne shell was still under a restrictive license from AT&T to take the place of sh (Bourne shell) in open source OS distributions.

Unfortunately, there are versions of various linux distributions which link "bash" to the name "sh" -- which works fine. But people develop scripts (including installation scripts) which assume that everything called "sh" has all of the extensions which bash has, and start the script with the:

#! /bin/sh

to invoke bash. This is fine until you move that script to a system which has a genuine Bourne shell, and at that point things fail -- and will continue to fail unless you know enough to edit that first line to read:

#! /bin/bash

(or whatever the path to bash on that particular system happens to be.) I've encountered this in an open source CAD program among other places to get it onto the current topic. :-)

And qcad often has to be downloaded as source and compiled to match a given system.

Enjoy, DoN.

If it is a part of all distributions, then surely it is a part of one?

Since about a year ago, I started being explicit about specifying #!/bin/bash in all my scripts. Saves a lot of grief.

Not on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu you install it as a distribution package, with one easy command.

sudo aptitude install qcad

That's why I said that qcad is a part of Ubuntu.

It may or may not be a part of other distributions.

i

I never had any luck with Wine. I did get a copy of Windows-XP with my laptop, and not otherwise needing it, installed it to a qemu image. It's handy for all those .EXE files people write (like Klotz's shop software), and the occasional oddball IE-specific webpage. XP boots up in a window, zoom it to full screen.

I use this script (sudo because of the soundcard, omit it):

#!/bin/sh sudo qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -soundhw all -net nic \ -net tap -net user -usb -hda ~/XP-img.hd0 $1 $2 $3 $4

English isn't Iggy's first language?

[ ... ]

And then there are the people who use that shebang in their scripts assuming it will be run only in the same environment they're using, not even considering that:

$ which bash /usr/local/bin/bash

There are binary rpm and deb packages, so the vast majority of Linux users don't have to build it if they don't want to... so, I don't know that "often" is a valid characterization (it's even available to FreeBSD users precompiled) but there's certainly always the choice to compile.

Now that I think about it, I don't know if the tools necessary to build it from source are part of Windows. Maybe Windows users don't have that choice after all.

In , on Mon, 09 Feb 2009

07:37:30 -0600, Ignoramus17377, ignoramus17377@NOSPAM.17377.invalid wrote: DoN ---->

Since about a year ago, I started being explicit about specifying

Creates a lot of grief for people installing on configurations different than yours.

$ which bash /usr/local/bin/bash

DoN ---->

Not on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu you install it as a distribution package,

portinstall qcad

is an even easier FreeBSD command. It checks for dependencies, downloads the source for them from their respective web/ftp repositories (e.g., trolltech), builds and installs them, then downloads the qcad source from RibbonSoft, applies any FreeBSD-specific patches, and builds and installs that.

By your definition, is qcad part of FreeBSD? I mean, you can't get a simpler command than that.

portinstall -P qcad

is still pretty easy. It checks for dependencies, downloads the dependency binaries from the FreeBSD repository and installs them, then downloads the binary qcad package, also from the FreeBSD repository and installs it (pretty much identical to your Ubuntu command).

Does that make a difference? Is qcad now/still part of FreeBSD?

If your portinstall works consistently, then yes, I think that qcad is a part of freebsd.

Yes, it is still in the ports collection. Of course what we mean when we say that is not that QCAD is part of FreeBSD, but rather the code to fetch and build it is in the ports collection.

And, most importantly, qcad compiles successfuly under freebsd, does not require any features that are not available on freebsd, etc. If it had a statement like

#ifndef LINUX #error This code compiles under Linux only #endif

then it would not be able to be available under freebsd.

[ ... ]

:-)

[ ... ]

Good! I wish that others would do so.

Well ... For Sun's Solaris 10 (and many earlier versions), there is a "Software Companion" CD-ROM which contains a collection of pre-compiled open source packages. You simply say:

pkgadd path-to-package-name-on-CDROM

to install a single one of them, or if you want to install them all, the README documents the creation of a small text file which will bypass a lot of interaction with the pkgadd program.

*Nobody* claims that these are a part of Solaris. The collection of pre-compiled programs is simply provided as a convenience, and a note indicates that some of the packages may have their own license which you need to observe. Among these is emacs. There are a total of 658 programs in /opt/sfw/bin (where the Software_Companion packages get installed). Of course, many of the packages install multiple binaries, so I don't know how manu packages total. But *none* of these are claimed to be part of Sun's Solaris 10, even though they are provided pre-compiled for the user's convenience.

For that matter, gcc (the Cnu C Compiler) is included on the system distribution DVD-ROM -- (it and a bunch of other open source programs (298) are in /usr/sfw/bin as a result of tne normal installation, and nobody claims that these are a part of Sun's Solaris.

Look at the GPL (Gnu Public License) for information as to who they belong to. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

It is easier to diagnose the trouble with a mis-specified path to bash (or any other shell) than to have the script specifying the path to /bin/sh -- or not specifying anything and allowing /bin/sh to be invoked by default -- when the script uses some features which are only present in bash. It will work fine on systems where /bin/sh is a link (hard or symlink) to /bin/bash, but on systems with a genuine Bourne shell as /bin/sh it will result in puzzling failures. Granted, the error message could be a bit more explicit than simply:

file not found

but it is still pretty easy to figure out -- if you know enough to first check whether it is a script or not. :-) If the script is expecting bash, and specifies nothing, it may take a lot of reading through it to find what is failing and to determine that it was something not present in the Bourne shell -- just in bash.

Or -- simply say to oneself "Hmm ... this came from a linux system. What happens if I add:

#! /bin/bash

(or whatever path is needed) to the start of the file.

I've got two copies of bash -- one in /bin, and the other in /usr/local/bin, so Iggy's choice would work for me at last. :

Enjoy, DoN.