Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

The local library weekly booksale had the usual linux books (Corel, 
Essential System Administration) as well as Linux: I Didn't Know You Could 
Do That, which seems to be aimed at advanced users who want to read what 
the reviewers at amazon.com describe as humor and tips and tricks.

I found also the 'new' (2000 first ed) Linux Desk Reference, which got 
excellent reviews as being easier to understand than man pages, and better 
organized by categories, but in need of proofreading.  Scott Hawkins.

Amazon lists many used copies of the 2002 2nd ed (bug fixes?) for $1.21 to 
$3.50 plus shipping from the US.  First edition starts at $1, which is
what I paid without shipping.

Sorted into Parts and Chapters:

Part 1 System Structures - Files (permissions, symlinks, touch...), 
Processes (ps top kill), standard input/output (2> tee) with long sections 
on users and bash shell and filesystems and daemons and kernel

Part 2 Manipulating data and text files:  cat, less, diff, sort, troff, a 
small summary of vi, compression

Part 3 Common Tasks - init, startx, scheduling, find, grep, top, security 
(ipfwadm)

Part 4 Networking (tcp/ip, ftp ping tftp...), NIS and NFS, DOS (xcopy, 
mdel), mail (elm but not mutt or pine, sendmail, talk)

90% or more is new to me.

kbdrate - changes repeat rate and delay time up to 30 cps and down to 250 
ms.  (I have only done this in BIOS).

infocomp:  compares two termcaps or sets new values

date:  a typo of MHH for MMHH (1st ed - get the 2nd)
busybox date -h is too terse to understand

The index could be improved - page numbers are listed as
date:  393,394,395,396,397 not 393-397

Punctuation is also sloppy:  locales date and time (for locale's).

The reviews mentioned a lot of minor errors like this.

----------------------------------------------------

This book will be useful in configuring busybox.

BL2 busybox was lacking things that are in BL3 busybox (and the later ones 
compiled by me and Karolis) so needed the bin.tgz package from SW7.1. I 
just removed bin.tgz, keeping only: zless (script based on zcat = busybox 
gzip), splitvt, rpm2targz/rpmoffset, and cpio.


Busybox has an 'rpm' which will install rpm packages but I want to just 
pick pieces out of them after converting to .tar.gz and it appears to only 
rpm -i package.rpm (install not extract) - LDR helped explain the -h 
output.

David Moberg provided an rpm2tgz script, based on rpmoffset and the full 
cpio (it needs an option --makefile), as is rpm2targz.  It appears to
unpackage the rpm, not repackage it as a tar.gz.  I modified it 
slightly to make it a one-step not two-step process.  I don't know how to 
tar -zcvf the output and chop off the .rpm and add a .tgz in a script so I 
also kept rpm2targz.

http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/rpm2tgz


Mc has its own rpm to tgz convertor not based on rpmoffset or rpm (from 
busybox or elsewhere) but needing cpio (the screen turned red and I had to 
kill the process when I removed the /bin/cpio full version).

F2 Menu - Convert x.i386.rpm x.deb  x.slp to slackware x.tgz
          dep_rpm Extract x.rpm package to subdirectory


----------------------------------------

My busybox includes which sed patch gawk uuencode uudecode hdparm cpio (as 
in BL3).  I should remove cpio.  Are the busybox sed patch gawk adequate?


I replaced busybox tail (from txtutils) because the e3pi I compiled did 
not work with it.  Steven's e3pi (in BL3) is a different version which 
does not use compression and works without tail.  Do I need the full tail 
for anything?

I have removed packages gzip, bin from BL2, and added  /busybox132 to the 
path (ahead of the old /bin/busybox in case I forgot something).  Symlinks 
should be made to /bin and /usr/bin and maybe /sbin and /usr/sbin for a 
few of the programs in the new busybox (or simply replace the old one with 
it eventually) because some programs look in a specific place not just on 
the path.  busybox can install itself with symlinks.

LDR index p. 95 'path, modifying - add a line to 
.bash_profile (in our case /etc/profile).

PATH=$PATH:/sbin  (as an example).
In BL we have " " around the part after =

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/busybox132:/bin/busybox:."

(The . at the end means to look in the current directory if the executable 
is not found elsewhere, so I can try out things I compiled without 
installing them first on the path, and /usr/local/sbin is where I put my 
own scripts - is there a more standard location?).




keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org