From: Andy Armstrong Date: 13:07 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Excessively grandiose product names Sensible operating systems have had powerful shells for decades. They have names like 'sh', 'bash', 'tcsh'. Modest names. So why, when Windows finally does a bit of catching up, does the shell have to be called 'PowerShell'? They were going to call it Monad. Not a bad name that. A bit enigmatic and interesting sounding. Obviously that wasn't sexy enough though so now it's <voice class="hollywood">PowerShell</voice>. Hear it roar! Of course if you can work out what the fuck the cygwin installer (which should probably be the topic of another post) is trying to do you can just install bash instead.
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 15:32 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) > Of course if you can work out what the fuck the cygwin installer (which > should probably be the topic of another post) is trying to do you can > just install bash instead. > OK, I'll make it the topic of this post. A collegue of mine have recently wandered into the following in his desperate attempts to work out what the fuck cygwin is trying to do (from http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html): Please don't send any questions to the cygwin mailing list to ask questions about this page as it seems to provoke them severely. They considered and declared the instructions on this page "broken" and "random" but won't constructively say what is "broken"; instead some went on launching personal attacks. The information here is provided "as is, in good faith" with no guarantee it will work. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. Don't send any questions to the Cygwin mailing list to ask why and provoke them. If you must go to Cygwin mailing list to ask, you better completely remove Cygwin before you go to the mailing list to ask questions and don't even mention that you have looked at this web page (to avoid pissing them off). P.S. Didn't Microsoft plan to call their "shell of the future" (?) msh? Or did they hack up several shells so they can be incompatible to each other for compatibility with the tradition of shells?
From: Peter da Silva Date: 15:42 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) I think you can still get SFU 3.5 from Microsoft. Just install the "Interix" component. It's not as linuxy as cygwin. You may have to work a bit harder getting "portable means it works on Red Hat 6 *and* Red Hat 7" software working. But it has the great advantage that it actually works.
From: H.Merijn Brand Date: 16:05 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:42:00 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > I think you can still get SFU 3.5 from Microsoft. > > Just install the "Interix" component. If I may believe http://www.interix.com/ Interix is not *FREE* Worse, all the useful parts have to be bought separate. * Their forum based support sucks. * No easy downloads * no easy upgrades Cygwin sucks in their own league, but at least it offers full development, full X11 server and client, and all major open source projects. > It's not as linuxy as cygwin. You may have to work a bit harder getting > "portable means it works on Red Hat 6 *and* Red Hat 7" software > working. But it has the great advantage that it actually works. Never came that far. Stopped screaming way before I had everything in its place. (BTW that system is dead and buried now, so I cannot check exactly what was installed and where it came from)
From: Peter da Silva Date: 17:02 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On Jan 24, 2007, at 10:05 AM, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:42:00 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> > wrote: >> I think you can still get SFU 3.5 from Microsoft. >> >> Just install the "Interix" component. > If I may believe http://www.interix.com/ Interix is not *FREE* If you want your OS free-as-in-speech you lost out as soon as you installed Windows. I got Interix free-as-in-beer from Microsoft, and it still seems to be there: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx > Worse, all the useful parts have to be bought separate. I have never purchased anything from Interop Systems. All the useful parts I ever need are open source and compile on Interix with minimal poking. The only thing missing is an X server (it's got the client libraries), and X servers are fungible. There's several available for Windows, from prices starting as low as free, and if all else fails you can use one of the bundled just-enough-cygwin-to-run-XFree86 combinations. You don't have to hate cygwin directly at all. You do still have to hate X11 and Win32, but I don't think there's a window system in the world that isn't hateful.
From: H.Merijn Brand Date: 19:01 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:02:22 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > On Jan 24, 2007, at 10:05 AM, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > > On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:42:00 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> > > wrote: > >> I think you can still get SFU 3.5 from Microsoft. > >> > >> Just install the "Interix" component. > > > If I may believe http://www.interix.com/ Interix is not *FREE* > > If you want your OS free-as-in-speech you lost out as soon as you > installed Windows. I got Interix free-as-in-beer from Microsoft, and it > still seems to be there: > > http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx I'll try that, and promise not to complain about it before I tried. (Unless of course it is about the installation of the missing or misleading documentation about the installation, might that happen) > > Worse, all the useful parts have to be bought separate. > > I have never purchased anything from Interop Systems. All the useful > parts I ever need are open source and compile on Interix with minimal > poking. I never found this link. All links I found referred to the link I posted > The only thing missing is an X server (it's got the client libraries), > and X servers are fungible. I would love to see KDE running on it :) (Yes, that is what I run on Cygwin) > There's several available for Windows, from prices starting as low > as free, and if all else fails you can use one of the bundled > just-enough-cygwin-to-run-XFree86 combinations. You don't have to hate > cygwin directly at all. > > You do still have to hate X11 and Win32, but I don't think there's a > window system in the world that isn't hateful.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 20:08 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On Jan 24, 2007, at 1:01 PM, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:02:22 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> > wrote: >> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/ >> default.mspx > I'll try that, and promise not to complain about it before I tried. > (Unless of course it is about the installation of the missing or > misleading documentation about the installation, might that happen) Or broken links, or whatever, right. > I would love to see KDE running on it :) I would hesitate to try and get that running on FreeBSD or Mac OSX if I didn't have a port already, and I suspect Interix is less of a Linux lookalike than either. If that's your requirement, you'll probably have to stick with Cygwin. Linux is UNIX, but UNIX is not Linux.
From: Phil Pennock Date: 03:51 on 27 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On 2007-01-24 at 20:01 +0100, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > I would love to see KDE running on it :) > (Yes, that is what I run on Cygwin) > On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:02:22 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > There's several available for Windows, from prices starting as low > > as free, and if all else fails you can use one of the bundled > > just-enough-cygwin-to-run-XFree86 combinations. You don't have to hate > > cygwin directly at all. I tried dealing with Cygwin and the way that having "real Cygwin" installed would break software which ships with "minimal Cygwin libraries to work" and gave up to go do something more productive, like getting drunk. So for X11, I ended up going with one of the "cheap but not free" options for Windows, Mi/X from MicroImages; what makes it relevant here is that it has one or more[*] bug-compatibility options to make KDE work better, including stuff with the cut&paste integration. So it might work for Merijn. There's stuff I dislike in Mi/X, but it's try-before-you-buy and it was $25, so I at least knew it would work for my purposes. You need to explicitly fiddle with the settings to make it run rootless (ie, X applications appear on the Win32 desktop) and to make it not exit when the last application using it quits, but then it was okay, at the time. Of course, since then GTK has continued its slide towards requiring X11 extensions without checking in advance that they're present or gracefulll degrading, so various programs which used to work really well with Mi/X no longer do so, because security updates to the underlaying GUI toolkit library broke things for people using X11 as a remote windowing toolkit. You know, that thing it was vaguely designed to do. I miss Xt; it was butt-ugly but it worked, reliably and portably. It was cool to be able to aim viewres at something and figure out how to configure it without having to fight whatever limited options the programmer might have exposed. I'm probably forgetting a lot of pain, though. Mi/X: http://www.microimages.com/mix/ (Only relationship is that I'm a satisfied customer) [*] I'm using a Mac laptop now, so can't double-check easily
From: Adam Atlas Date: 22:50 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names) On 24 Jan 2007, at 12.02, Peter da Silva wrote: > If you want your OS free-as-in-speech you lost out as soon as you > installed Windows. I got Interix free-as-in-beer from Microsoft, > and it still seems to be there: I want to start a Free Software conspiracy: "Free as in Masonry, not as in beer!"
From: H.Merijn Brand Date: 15:51 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: cygwin (braindead installer) On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:32:40 +0200, Yossi Kreinin <yossi.kreinin@xxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > Of course if you can work out what the fuck the cygwin installer (which > > should probably be the topic of another post) is trying to do you can > > just install bash instead. Their installer has NO idea whatsoever about versioning information. If you choose more than one installation source, be baffled with the suggested updates. I have absolutely no idea what the installer uses to tell me that some-util-3.9.68-1 is newer than some-util-5.1.0-8. This makes me have to interpret the suggestions on a line-by-line basis Worse, you will have to select "keep" if you do not want the suggested `upgrade', but keep is not the first entry when you click. First all the other available versions come along (and that may be many if you have more than a few installation sources), so first line is 7 clicks to KEEP the right one, second line is 2 clicks, third is 4, fifth is a correct suggestion, no click, 6th is 1 click only and so on and so on. It is that I like to have Cygwin around to check if the OpenSource stuff I work on also compiles and works in this environment, but they've by now way passed the state of "FUN" :(
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 01:17 on 25 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: Excessively grandiose product names * Andy Armstrong <andy@xxxxxx.xxx> [2007-01-24 14:10]: > So why, when Windows finally does a bit of catching up, does > the shell have to be called 'PowerShell'? I have a weird mental habit or maybe compulsion wherein I sometimes my brain will spontaneously start spoonerising things I just read or heard. For "Powershell," that resulted in "shower pell." I think that's about right. Regards,
Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi