Slitaz: Please include link to LinuxCommand.org in Documentation folder

["Frank Anderson, AC0XL" <fafree@xxxxxxxxx>]

August 13. 2013

    Please at least make a link in the Documentation folder for
LinuxCommand.org. I have been searching for over 20 years for documentation
on the Linux commands and downloaded and printed the pdf file for "The Linux
Command Line" by William Shotts. I happened to find copies of the section
on writing shell scripts buried in the SliTaz online documentation. At least
MS-Dos 6.2 came with a "Technical Reference Manual" which described the
commands and their usage. Unix and Linux has been a different story, trying
to get information on the commands and what they do has been next to
impossible until I finally found this book. Then we wonder why over 90
percent of the people who use Linux don't contribute to the cause! I know I
would like to contribute, but I know I need to learn a lot more than what I
know to be of any help.

    A year or so ago I needed a Linux driver and codec for a Texas
Instruments audio chip which is built into the Linux Kernel. I was finally
told I would have to recompile the kernel for SliTaz to get it included. My
first attempt was to use the "make oldconfig" option which took around 4-5
hours to compile on my netbook using an Intel N270 Atom processor running at
1.60 GHz. Of course this didn't include the driver I needed so I tried using
"make allmodconfig" which only took around 10 hours to compile and when I
tried to run it, it came to a halt when it was time to load the drives
because I had no idea what modules I needed to load the drives. The next
attempt was to try "make allyesconfig" which only took around 11 hours to
compile. When I tried to run it, it died before it got to loading the
drives. The solution for now, use Ubuntu which has the driver built-in.

    I am not very impressed with the "C Programming Language"! On the
contrary, I am very depressed!!! In "The C Programming Language" by Brian
W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, Copyright 1978 by Bell Telephone
Laboratories, Inc. at the bottom of page 1 (Chapter 0: Introduction) I
quote: "A compiler for C can be simple and compact. Compilers are also
easily written; using current technology, one can expect to prepare a
compiler for a new machine in a couple of months, and to find that 80
percent of the code of a new compiler is common with existing ones." Compare
this with a couple of programming languages from the same relative time
period. "[One] could port an entire development environment to a new
computer in about two weeks," and another, "Developing a port might take six
months for another language but can take less than a week for ...." In both
of the latter cases, one wrote, debugged, and compiled just a few lines of
code at a time in what were termed: functions, routines, or sub-routines.
One didn't have to wait and try to compile the whole program at once with
its hundreds, thousands or today millions of lines of code! and then try to
figure out where everything blew up!

    In the thread on "Nimrod the Great" I saw that SliTaz was supposed 
to be
a new Linux from scratch, which was being built using "ash scripts." Now
that I have some documentation on the "Bash script," I would like to know
what SliTaz files/programs are written in script. I feel it would be a great
help to be able to read through them as I try to learn the command line
scripting language.

    Thanks again for the list of SliTaz files/programs that are written in
script. I am looking forward to hopefully being able to finally contribute
to the SliTaz project!

Frank Anderson, AC0XL

PS August 16, 2013

    Well I finally made it through the book "The Linux Command Line" by
William Shotts. What a FANTASTIC book!!! I can see now the difference
between MS Dos and Linux is that MS Dos commands are mostly for wandering
around the file system and one can use "batch" to group some command lines
together. One can include "QBASIC" programs in the batch file, while Linux
uses a shell script which is actually a more or less complete programming
language. The book leads one from the beginning by weaving a program a step
at a time until by the end of the book one has a complete program all made
from the command prompt. What a fantastic journey!!!

AC0XL


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