OT-Which version of Linux is best?

Impact

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O.K. Perl was originated by the same fellow who wrote the newsreader trn -- Larry Wall. Back in the early days, in the man pages, near the front, he stated "PERL stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language". However, near the end, in the "BUGS" section (which used to be a standard part of all unix man pages), "Don't tell anyone, but PERL *really* stands for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". He took features of every language which he had used and rolled them all together into perl, making it possible for people to write almost reasonable programs in it based on what they knew of other languages. I remember one of the users who had taken a perl script and tried to make it do what she wanted (without noticing that it was in perl), had written using AWK syntax -- and it *almost* worked. :-)

It was first released in comp.unix.sources quite some time ago.

Emacs, IIRC, was written by RMS (Richard M Stallman) -- and the name comes from "Editor MACros", as it was first implemented as a set of macros for a different editor -- before it split off on its own.

Jove is a nice subset of emacs, with no built-in Lisp interpreter, and limited (unless you re-compile after editing the source) to line no longer than 2048 bytes long. Emacs will edit

*anything*, including binary files, and (if you have the proper privileges) even edit a raw directory to clean up bad characters in filenames -- such as '/' embedded in filenames by a Mac using a NFS filesystem from a unix server. (The only other *totally* illegal character in a filename is a null -- though there are some which can be quite inconvenient. :-)

And -- jove is close enough to emacs in the command set so switching back and forth is fairly painless.

I'm not sure what joe is like as an editor.

Enjoy, DoN.

Cool -

I noticed in the back of my Perl manual (an early one - nutshell) Larry Wall was at the time a programmer at the JPL. He authored rn and 'patch' and perl. metaconfig that writes config files as well. The last time I heard of Wall, he had just been sued by INTEL as he was a consultant to them on scripts and the internet - he showed the IT group how open their network was and got in hack several times. Then he flat broke in from the outside and showed them what was possible. He found out what would be done... Oh - I have a 'first printing' :-) My March 1987 Emacs - a sixth edition, version 18... GNU Emacs - Written in C and has a Lisp Interpreter. Like the LIFE 'game' that is bundled. I have emacs for windows - other computer now. It was in a download support site for Emacs and was still active a few years ago.

Martin

Martin Eastburn wrote: ...

... Wrong. Randal Schwartz (not Wall) was convicted of felonies at Intel. Schwartz was co-author with Wall on the first edition of "Programming perl". He is not a co-author on current edition.

Difficult question to answer, especially in a metalworking newsgroup, because different distros offer different capabilities, or strong points and weak points. Most people haven't tried all of the distros available so they can only offer you opinions about the ones they use. This always leads to arguments about which is "best."

You'd do better to read a site like

which has reviews on a number of different Linux distros with comparisons.

Thanks for the correction - I seem to recall that now. Now I'm surprised he was working with Intel. He wasn't a programmer of sorts - but an operator of sorts. Quote: "Randal L. Schwarz is an eclectic tradesman and entrepreneur, making his living through software design, technical writing, system administration, security consultation and video production." I suppose he could program and use computers from some of the jobs he held.

Martin