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#unix

61 posts42 participants9 posts today
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Kusalananda

I've gotten so used to running my everyday Unix system as a VM on top of various host systems that I notice myself hesitating to install it on bare metal. It feels unsafe. With a VM, I can back up the disk image(es) in various ways (wholesale or incremental snapshots), move it to new hardware, transfer it to a completely different environment and have it up and running in no time. On a bare metal machine, I feel "stuck". Does that make sense to anyone out there?

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Zenie

I've been thinking about #Emacs and computing in the 80s lately. I was a #UNIX dev.

Emacs wasn't publicly available until 1985, version 13. We all used vi. It was always there, reliable.
Emacs circulated like a rumour in the user groups and news groups.

Emacs took effort. Slow modem downloads, compiling, then a huge system that seemed overly large for an editor. We played with it as a curiosity. Made fun of it for eating memory and causing the machines to swap way too much.

I didn't switch to Emacs until 1995. Emacs 18. It came with all sorts of corporate bells and whistles. The first thing I did was install viper, the vi emulator at the time.

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Dave Fischer

I've long claimed that the most recent addition to *nix that I like is mmap(). (ie: nothing worthwhile has been added since the 80s.) BUT... I've been playing with mount namespaces on linux recently and it's GRRRRRREAT! I don't like putting everything in isolated containers, but a LITTLE bit of control along those lines is fantastic.

(I set up my compute batch queues to have a different /tmp than the rest of the system. Everything else is the same. Killer.)

A VT100 displaying a PDP-11 boot screen. There is an open RL02 disk drive in the foreground.
#Unix#Linux#Luddite
Public
TronNerd82

Calling all oldheads who worked with UUCP. I was flipping through an old O'Reilly book of mine and found this. Being younger, I never used UUCP, so forgive me if I understand poorly, but basically UUNET, as an ISP, had publicly accessible UUCP servers that they treated like FTP, correct?

That's cool and all, but what I wanna know is if there's any more such services available these days. I'm fascinated by UUCP and need an excuse to try it.

A page screenshot from O'Reilly Media's "Learning the Korn Shell" by Bill Rosenblatt. The page shows a command example of how you would've acquired a copy of the Korn Shell over UUCP via the old internet service provider UUNET (long since defunct, ergo the command is useless today, since UUNET no longer exists and this book was published in 1993). Around the command, I have edited a red oval to highlight and draw more attention to it (the YouTuber method) in GIMP.
#UUCP#UUNET#OReillyMedia
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Bhavani Shankar 💭
@amoroso @ramin_hal9001 @sacha @screwtape I too really enjoyed the post. I have a question though.

But Isn't this a semantic game? Aren't the definitions of "one thing", what this one thing is and "doing well" so flexible that we can apply to anything? For example, a set of n items is one thing too.

Can we say electron or the js ecosystem fulfils the unix philosophy too because it does the one thing of quickly building cross platform apps really well?

#philosophy #emacs #lisp #unix
#unix
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