[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 15 April 2019

[jim]

I prefer the dash shell mainly because of its man page
$ man dash
which is the best man page I have encountered.
The dash man page is clearly written, and because
the dash shell is lean, the man page has only to
describe what is there, and that makes the dash
man page a great introduction (for intermediate
level readers) to shells in general. Compare the
dash man page to the bash man page; it's kind of
like comparing a portion of brocolli on a plate to a
large salad spilt on a floor.

What we did to try to find dash was
$ which dash
I could not read the screen (I was too far away and
at a bad angle), but given what Bobbie reported,
the which command did not return a path to a
dash shell.

We tried
$ which bash
and Bobbie reported that the which command
returned  /bin/bash

We did not think simply to peruse the output of
$ ls /bin
to see if  dash  is in the listing.


I thought that Fedora used rpm (the redhat package
manager). Is it really true that Fedora uses the  apt
tools for package management??


On 4/16/19 1:27 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):
>
>> AV Linux has a multitude of audio and video editing
>> tools.
> Sure.  It's a bundle of Debian Stable with multimedia packages from the
> KXStudio repositories, and Debian's XFCE4 packages with some small
> modifications.  So, _of course_ it has a multitude of AV tools, and
> access to all the other ones in the Debian repo.
>
>> I don't think this is really a distro for a laptop even one with 8 GB
>> but for 32 GB and i7 with 6 cores or the new AMD multicore CPUs it
>> might blaze along.
> Um, no.  Nonsense.
>
> Any reasonable and fairly recent x86_64 wtih 4GB RAM will do, and even a
> maxed out i386 machine with 4GB would.  Part of the reason you tend to
> get this wrong is that you keep trying to judge distributions based on
> 'live' non-installed operation, which is for obvious reasons slower and
> much more demanding of system resources including RAM.
>
> That's not to mention that, if one _did_ find an installed version to be
> RAM-constrained, the obvious remedy would be to reconfigure to use
> something more thrifty than XFCE4, and to spend some time paring down
> unwanted startup processes.
>
>> It uses Synaptic for software
> It uses apt/dpkg for software.  Synaptic is not a package manger; it's a
> gtk front-end to a package manager.
>
>
>> I also demoed the Fedora 30 beta with KDE for him and showed him the
>> alternate menu styles available on KDE.  Jim was not happy with the
>> terminal available preferring the Dash terminal.
> Someone's probably confused, here.
>
> I'm guessing that Jim was unhappy with the Fedora 30 KDE (beta) spin's
> default graphical terminal tool, which I'm guessing is Konsole.
>
> 'dash' is not a graphical terminal tool, but rather a shell,
> specifically the Debian Almquist SHell (thus 'dash').  This in turn is a
> Debian-centric variant of Kenneth Almquist's 'ash' shell, which is a
> very lightweight Bourne compatible shell suitable for the superuser
> account and for system scripting.  I would be enormously surprised if
> Jim has a preference for dash/ash (or any other lightweight, minimalist
> Unix shell), though if he says so, more power to him, I guess.  (It's
> more likely he didn't like the graphical terminal app available by
> default, not the shell.  Fedora's default shell is bash.)
>
> https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-linux-binbash-vs-bindash-vs-binshshell/
>
> If Jim's serious, then dash version 0.5.10.2 is packaged in Fedora as
> package 'dash'.  I don't know what search you did exactly, but it's
> right there to find.
>
> https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=1185464
>
>
>> So I fired up the DNF Dragora update tool and did a search for it.  No
>> Luck.  It is easy to get Fedora online.  DNF Dragora used a lot of CPU
>> and time to give minimal results.
> Feh.  Just use dnf.  Seriously, Bobbie.  This ain't brain surgery.
>
> $ dnf search dash
>