Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 22:20:50 -0700 From: Seth Kingsley <sethk@blue-shift.net> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Color ls Message-ID: <20000718222050.A67542@blue-shift.net> In-Reply-To: <20000719102137.A32398@physics.iisc.ernet.in>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 10:21:37AM %2B0530 References: <20000719041804.A52522@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007182027250.56461-100000@freefall.freebsd.org> <20000719044049.A52681@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <20000719102137.A32398@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 10:21:37AM +0530, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> j mckitrick said on Jul 19, 2000 at 04:40:49:
> > That's my point. When friends of mine who have been sysadmin's for years
> > complain about how plain-vanilla and generic the basic FreeBSD install is,
> > and how much work it is to get it dialed in and 'friendly', i really don't
> > know what to tell them.
>
> I don't believe they're experienced Unix sysadmins. I'm not,
> my first sysadmining exposure was on linux perhaps three years ago,
> but I still found freebsd's install a breeze.
>
> > if i had trouble getting color to work on cons25 or even an xterm, i
> > wouldn't be especially optimistic about something advanced, like playing
> > mpegs, or even sound. I spent 2 months getting sound and my zip drive to
>
> I'd never done sound on FreeBSD before (the machine I used before
> doesn't have a sound card). I helped a friend to install it recently,
> and just read some basic docs on the FreeBSD web page and turned on a
> couple of kernel options, and this guy was stunned at the way it
> autodetected his PCI sound card on the next bootup. He was even more
> impressed that it found his ethernet card (I forget which one) which
> even Red Hat 6.2 could not. Granted, not all sound/ethernet cards are
> so easy, but they aren't on linux either.
>
> But speaking of cons25: it's one of my pet peeves, because it's
> incompatible with vt100. What happens is, we have an environment with
> this, linux and commercial unix living together, and when you
> telnet/ssh from one machine to another you get a message like "unknown
> terminal type {dtterm/linux/cons25}". The quick workaround there is
> to set term=vt100 in your login file, which works on all the machines
> -- except the FreeBSD console.
>
> (Yes I know about copying termcap entries, but it looked like too much
> trouble since people run X most of the time anyway. No problem in
> an xterm. Also I know about pcvt but couldn't get it to work properly
> with X for some reason.)
>
> > To sum it all up, i get frustrated when 'progress' is alluded to as being a
> > crutch for 'lusers'. Computers are a tool to make life easier. Why the
> > hell does liking colors (which help the brain organize information better)
> > warrant being labeled as a luser?
>
> I agree. I'm not fond of color-ls, but if people want it, why not;
> and I found syntax-highlighting in vim to be a *huge* help. The way
> people tend to flame vim on this list, because of its alleged bloat
> and incompatibility with "traditional" vi (when in fact it's more
> compatible than nvi, which freebsd uses) is not funny.
But VIM comes installed by default with 'compatible with vi' settings,
so that you can customize it in any way that you want from there, which
in most people's cases includes syntax highlighting, but the idea is
that when you first install and run it, you are not bombarded with
loads of other people's customization already setup. This makes systems
like RedHat hard to get used to because they already include so much of
a default system that you find yourself having to remove it in order to
start setting things up the way that you would prefer. This leads to
more problems when things break and act strangely because parts of the
configuration are still lurking somewhere.
The most attractive thing about UNIX for me is that it provides a clean
palette for me to build whatever kind of environment is most efficent
and 'friendly' towards me, but I guess this only really applies to
people who are willing to spend the time with it, and who will not
necessarily like the kind of generalized, flashy things that are
designed to appeal to a wide audience.
I think that losing the separation of /bin/ls and the 'colorls' patches
port is fine, but only if the corresponding aliases to display lists
in color were _not_ added to the base shell startup files.
-Seth
--
// Seth Kingsley -- <sethk@blue-shift.net> //
// UNIX audio processing software et cetera //
// http://www.blue-shift.net/ //
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