Really the Biggest Albatross Crippling Ubuntu and Mint

I'm an old Unix guy. Unix worked. When I saw the opportunity to blow away Windows junk with Linux, I jumped at it thinking it would be a simpler, more reliable OS. In the '90s that was a correct assessment. Now, Linux distros are continuously chasing new features and thus becoming bloated with partly-working software. I'd prefer to find an OS where attention is paid to quality.

In the late '80s I taught intro CS on Macs, and they were utter crap. Cooperative multitasking? One-button mice? Give me a break. A former colleague used to say that a computer user's intelligence is directly proportional to the number of buttons on his mouse. I realize, as did he (I think), that the generalization doesn't hold, but copying and pasting in Windows is really clumsy due to the 2-button mouse limitation, and it's hard to imagine a Mac being any better. Of course, Macs still use one-button mice, and my early-learned disdain for Macs survives, though without any actual Mac usage in the past couple decades.

I've been married more recently than I've spent more than 10 minutes using a Mac.

Is Solaris any better? The word on the street suggests not, especially since Sun got bought out. How about BSD? I want the system to be invisible and let me do my work. I guess I want SunOS 4, but not really...

Emacs Spontaneously Shifting to DOS Mode. Yuck.

For some reason emacs (GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2010-03-26 on rothera, modified by Ubuntu) on Ubuntu 9.10 has been spontaneously deciding to use MS-DOS/Windows line endings rather than Unix. This is rather wasteful of space, and sometimes causes issues with other tools. It's also inconvenient, since I was killing the emacs buffer, running dos2unix on the file, and then loading the fixed file back into emacs. Looking for a fix, I stumbled across three blog entries of note:

1) http://www.debianadmin.com/flip-convert-text-file-line-endings-between-unix-and-dos-formats.html recommends a tool called flip. This makes no sense to me whatsoever since it does exactly what dos2unix and unix2dos do. It looks to me like someone's CS1 assignment that somehow got added to the Debian repositories.

2) http://www.sowbug.org/mt/2004/07/emacs-dos-line-endings.html has a good short-term fix, a bit more convenient than what I was doing. Within emacs, type the following key sequence: C-x [ENTER] f unix [ENTER]. This sets the "Coding system for saving file." Good enough.
Also, Sowbug.org has a great tagline: "If all you have is a Bloom filter, everything looks like a set whose membership you wish to test with a possibility of false positives."

3) Barriehie at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1375454 has the winner, a good, permanent, catch-all type solution. Essentially, modify .emacs to include:

;; Set ALL files to UNIX line endings
(add-hook 'find-file-hook 'find-file-check-line-endings)
(defun dos-file-endings-p ()
(string-match "dos" (symbol-name buffer-file-coding-system)))
(defun find-file-check-line-endings ()
(when (dos-file-endings-p)
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'iso-latin-1-unix t)
(set-buffer-modified-p nil)))

I've tested it just a bit, and it works beautifully.

Also, my .emacs is all in one file, and I prefer the way he splits it across multiple files. I'm using the .emacs that grad students were given at Ohio State ca. 1992 with many, many modifications. Following Barriehie's lead, I've split my .emacs it into multiple files, thus allowing me to keep my modifications separate from the stuff passed down from Brutus Buckeye.

Remembering SCO

In the '90s, when an assistant professor at Hood College, I was visited by representatives of SCO trying to convince me that we should be running SCO UNIX in our labs. When I mentioned Linux (we had a couple slackware servers and a number of Ultrix machines at the time) to them, they looked at each other as if encountering a tremendously naive user. They then proceeded to belittle Linux. Later while still at Hood and then in industry I had occasions to talk with SCO representatives, and they consistently dealt with Linux with belittling rather than rational argument, similar to the way Microsoft now spreads FUD when discussing open source, so consistently that I couldn't help but suspect this was how they were told to deal with Linux.

SCO was a fine product at the time, and at the heart of a number of voice servers installed by Microlog in my time with that company, but the sales reps were incapable of delineating advantages or disadvantages of SCO vs. Linux.

Now I have trouble seeing someone who went with Linux rather than SCO in the '90s as viewing that as a mistake. SCO may not be dead, but they're no longer relevant.

Linux, Unix, and all That

"Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly" --Henry Spencer "It seems few Linux developers understand Unix" -- me.