The Linux Page

Help other users realize that everything is possible, especially avoiding Windows for their own personal use.

Welcome to The Linux Page


Fox Trot by Bill Amend. Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge

This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

RETURN statement in BASIC

Like many programmers, I switch between languages quite often.

I have worked with BASIC before since I had an Apple //c and used other Apple ][ computers that had some (really bad, early) BASIC language in their ROM.

At the time, the worst part was the line numbers. You had to write in BASIC as if you were writing assembly language. And I'll skip the numerous problems with memory...

To read files out of your repository via SSH, set your CVSROOT variable to something like this:

export CVSROOT=":ext:login-name@host//cvs/path/root"

What tells CVSROOT that it will get the data from an external host is the <em>:ext:</em> at the start of the URL.

The <em>login-name</em> is your name or whoever's login name you can use to connect to the computer.

It is assumed that you can already connect with SSH.

 

My Boring Story

Microsoft Office is making progress... or... is that really progress?!

I got a great little surprised when I met face to face with Access 2007 and all the menus were gone. I wasn't warned about that one! Not only are they gone, you MUST use little tiny icons in the place of menus so it takes you an awful long time to learn the icons, but not just that, YOU have to choose which icons will appear on your toolbar.

An RSS feed is very common on all new websites. It has been around for years now. As of today you could listen to thousands of RSS feeds and be totally swamped by all the news...

But what is an RSS feed?

The way users know about RSS feed is in the form of a URL. The URL points to a file on a website that includes data. That data file uses the specific RSS or RDF format, which uses XML as the base format.

So it is in fact very easy to generate an RSS feed. All you have to do is write an XML file with the proper tags and attributes as defined on the W3C and ...

PAD File Module for Drupal

Introduction

You can find my PAD File module on Drupal.

It is intended for any company and individual that has executable files for download but its customers and potential customers. The PAD File describes the content of such executable to the target machine (robots that spider the Internet for PAD Files).

With the module you can create, import, update and delete PAD Files as necessary. It automatically generates the XML files and maintains them on your website without you having to do anything about it.

It is also intended ...

Let's start with my rant!

I like Drupal, in general. But like most PHP code bases, if an "error" (mistake) occurs, nothing is reported.

I spent hours trying to make one of my menu work (Note that the "menu" module is also called the "links" module.) It just did not want to go. In order to have the nice breadcrumb and other such features, you need to have menus with sub-sub-menus...

One thing we do with lists on a website is to put a small image to replace the default bullet with something that looks nice in the theme.

If you are still reading the documentation on how to place an image in a list to replace the default bullet and what you read is some talks about list-style-image then you are in the wrong direction. Of course, this works great with Mozilla. But Internet Explorer does not understand the concept of list-style-image at all.

Introduction

Often, when you build a website, you want columns.

Common designs include

GIT

Drupal now offers git to access its source code and 3rd party modules, themes, etc.

The GIT system is interesting but it has a huge difference between the CVS and SVN scheme: it requires an action, such as commit, and a push. The push is what synchronize your copy with the repository. Without the push, all the actions you've been taking will have no effect (they only are on your hard drive.)

As you will see in each project, there is a Version Control tab at the top. Clicking on it gives you most of the instructions you need to know to work with Drupal git. I will not repeat them here. The only two things I often do is commit + push and tagging (to create new official versions.)

Pre-Pre-Scriptum: Please, look for the edll library. It is now available as a free library for MinGW.

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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