Computers

MicroMac

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Been playing a bit, installed editors/ uemacs, qemacs, em, mg, jove, and emacs.

uemacs is a simple MicroEMACS 4.0 set up, looks good for learning. I.e. a Pico/Nano style shortcut buffer on top.

qemacs wouldn’t start, so much for quick emacs

em is a modified MicroEMACS 3.x/4.0 with an ID of uEmacs/PK-TOY 4.0.17

jove is Johnatons Own Version of Emacs, looks like my favorite so far. It asks “Some buffers haven’t been saved; leave anyway? ” rather then a save y/n, modified buffers exist still leave yes or no and please say exactly yes or no blah blah like GNU Emacs. em & uemacs share joves trate here as well but mg takes after emacs proper. Only mg won’t ask before exit if its the stratch buffer.

emacs, well is GNU Emacs. Slow loading bukly bastard with a 4.5MB binary !! Compare to the others which are smaller then nvi/nex but bigger then ed. I suppose the fact that its the only emacsen in this list that has X11/GUI support warrents its bulk… maybe

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/emacs                                   8:04
4.5M    /usr/local/bin/emacs

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/jove                                    8:05
148K    /usr/local/bin/jove

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/bin/nex                                           8:05
304K    /usr/bin/nex

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/bin/vi                                            8:05
304K    /usr/bin/vi

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/uemacs                                  8:06
124K    /usr/local/bin/uemacs

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/em                                      8:06
 84K    /usr/local/bin/em

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/mg                                      8:06
 98K    /usr/local/bin/mg

Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/vim                                     8:06
1.4M    /usr/local/bin/vim

As you can see, em is the smallest and emacs the fatest. So far, I think I like Jove but they all seem to lack GNU/X Emacs self-documentational nature. Personally I prefer nVi or Vim, but Jove is pretty nice. All of these emacsen do support multiple editing buffers, which is one thing I did like ’bout emacs back when I used to use XEmacs as my primary editor.

mg is a variant of MicroEMACS maintained by the OpenBSD people, nice little editor. I’ve never used OpenBSD and have little expirence with NetBSD so I don’t know if they have an easyeditor like FreeBSD’s ee but I’d reckon mg could serve the same purpose. I generally use ‘vi’ on systems lacking vim though, so I dunno. So far in my travels the only editor I can’t use well, has got to be ed and emacs. Why? Because ed’s ‘?’ error message annoys me and GNU Emacs just pisses me off by its very nature.I can use Emacs pretty well, I just choose not to (again I prever Vi)

One mad Spider !

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For the first time, the PC-BSD project has irk’d the wrong button on my panel. In what appears to be issues with commerical software being able to abide the same quality standards and “short-commings” of the PBI system that joe packager has to deal with. Pkg_add of the main program is now allowed in a PBI. So I guess if I wanted to make a PBI of Xine I could force pkg_add Xine and no one would care weather or not that pkg_add’d the xine lib(s) used in Kaffine and then deleted them when forcing a pkg_delete ! (Still in the hypo-theory field here). Still I find this un acceptible. Such a change should have been made all of 3 weeks after PBI’s started installing into /Programs instead of another area prefixed with My 🙂

In short they have had a lot of time to deside this but they do it now why ? To me it feels as if it’s because compiled Win4BSD can’t run that way or because with the PBI system as it is (now was) breaks it. Win4BSD does not look open source to me and I have no other problem with paying for such a program. If the program needs to be changed internally to run on PC-BSD as a PBI *They should do the Frigging work*. If it can’t just work right with the way a PBI installed program is supposed to because of the PBI system rather then the program. * PC-BSD is flibbing late about making changs to fix this ! *. In short I’m very annoyed that it looks as if a commercial project can make an Open Source Operating System bow down to cater to it in order to put their product on the offical PBI directory with a stamp of approval. It would seem Win4BSD Distribute the product only in binary form. The Win4BSD people all ready offer the Schweine of a PBI for download on their own mirror. Why should PC-BSD bend over backwards to get a pkg_add frontend PBI of a commerical product on offical mirrors. It makes no sense !!

PBI were ment to be easy to install/uninstall and not touch the system directly. Allowing oen to uss a pkg_add of say konversation but not adding qt/kde pkg’s via the PBI is one thing if done right. You also have to remove any lib’s from the pkg used in the PBI before using it e.t.c. to make sure which is another level of work on a PBI Developer. * a frigging nightmare for PBI testers as well if they ever forget to read the scripts before installing *. If you want a front end to pkg_add theres no reason to PBI it. Just use a KDialog ina install.sh file…

I’ve Contemplated removing all of my PBI installs (reinstall via ports) and demanding my XMMS, Megamek, and Blackbox+BBKeys+BBConf+BBPager+Docker PBIs removed from pbidir but what good would any of it do ? I’m only a PC-BSD user, a mighty annoyed one at that. I’m not the kind of person to “jump ship” when stung but this irks me. I’ve all ready tried to distance my self from PBI Development for my own issues but this is beyond issue. How to wage a war for principals slain by it’s founders? I’m not sure yet… Find a way I very well may. All I can say is I learned a very good phrase in German to day for what I have to say to them.

/* retracted */

This is not the last time my voice will speak.

BPM

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I’ve been busy doing a few things with my laptops installed PBI’s today, got a chance to try out BPM. That is the Bsd Ports Manipulator. It’s a development build and warns you as such on start up.

During the install it prompts you if you want to install the ports collection, I think it should only ask if you have not installed ports but it asked me any way. Reminds me I need to cvsup later. One fatal flaw in the BPM PBIs script is that it does not work on the PC-BSD 1.3Beta which changed from cvsup to csup. I posted on the forums about it. If some one needs to install the ports tree they can use the PC-BSD System program to fetch ports (via the “tasks” tab). K-Menu->Settings->System Administration if you care. There is also the portsnap method and CVSUP/CSUP for command line usage.

portsnap fetch extract

OR

cvsup -L 2 /root/ports-supfile

csup seems to be the same as cvsup on basic usuage aside from the name. On regular FreeBSD systems you can use a copy of the supfile in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ if you set the mirror. PC-BSD prepairs you one for ports and one for system sources but theres more in that ^^ directory. Back to BPM

BPM offers us no configuration that I can find and seems to use a GTK+ interface. I personally think GTK is a nice look & feel but it doesn’t intregrate well with KDE which uses QT. All thats pointless to most users, just remember BPM dun’t look as pretty as Konqueror for all intents and purposes. It offers a quick check of all ports available, all installed ports, e.t.c. as well as the catagories in a left plane. A top right plane shows the ports in the catagory and the bottom right plane shows discriptions. Works pretty nice and looks sorta like ones E-Mail clients. One can also run a simple search. It’s just a standard search afaik no support for regex which also is not of importance to most users !

To install the program just select it and click the instal botton. You can break it into steps if you only want to do parts of it. I.E. fetch, checksum check, build, install, and clean. Just checking install does it all. You can click details to get a embedded console out put and even open a terminal from the app. It also supports uninstalling the thing. It’s very nice but lacks in a few areas.

No support for portupgrading/downgrading
No support that I know of yet for packages (maybe a plus actually 😛 )
No support that I know of yet for searching with Regular expressions

It does however give you a very nice simple interface to make installing software the FreeBSD way very easy. I admit for once I did sorta skip the EULA basically so I don’t remember the licensing terms other then it’s free to use. If it is open source it might be worth my while to look into this application more.

food time.