Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I really need to tell it to people: sometimes I really hate windows.
And linux too!
But maybe I should really hate programmers: ere is the story:
I needed to edit a text file of 180MB so I started an editor on my windows laptop: after about half an hour I was greeted with a message stating that I had not enough virtual memory.
So I had a notebook with 512MB plus 1024MB of swap and this was not enough to view the file.
Which incredible memory allocation perversion drives the memory needed to load a text file to more than 7 times the file size?

So I thought: I'm a smart ass, I'll do it on linux.

And transfered the file on my mandrake 10.1 (updated to 10.2) and wrote "vi file" and I was greeted with a great news: vi is missing a required library from perl.
Why in the hell does vi in linux require perl? And how the f**king mandrake update screwed even the most basic tool?
Keep it simple is no longer a good programming principle after the Vic20 3.5KB of memory was increased to multy MB?
BTW somewhere in the machine there was the damned library.

Before going into killing rampage I decided to connect in vpn to the work and use a remote machine: on a sun vi almost worked with this file.
Almost because there was not enough space on /tmp and I had no way to increase this space.

It was really a bad day.

Marco/Sat

Satoru wrote: I really need to tell it to people: sometimes I really hate windows.
And linux too!
But maybe I should really hate programmers: ere is the story:
I needed to edit a text file of 180MB so I started an editor on my windows laptop: after about half an hour I was greeted with a message stating that I had not enough virtual memory.
So I had a notebook with 512MB plus 1024MB of swap and this was not enough to view the file.
Which incredible memory allocation perversion drives the memory needed to load a text file to more than 7 times the file size?

So I thought: I'm a smart ass, I'll do it on linux.

And transfered the file on my mandrake 10.1 (updated to 10.2) and wrote "vi file" and I was greeted with a great news: vi is missing a required library from perl.
Why in the hell does vi in linux require perl? And how the f**king mandrake update screwed even the most basic tool?
Keep it simple is no longer a good programming principle after the Vic20 3.5KB of memory was increased to multy MB?
BTW somewhere in the machine there was the damned library.

Before going into killing rampage I decided to connect in vpn to the work and use a remote machine: on a sun vi almost worked with this file.
Almost because there was not enough space on /tmp and I had no way to increase this space.

It was really a bad day.

Marco/Sat

Hmm - yeh, I know the feeling! Not surprised that your windows box didn't cut the mustard, but I'm shocked that your upgrade of Mandrake disabled vi. An often-overlooked fact is that if your editing operations are reasonably simple (something like a search and replace for example), you can ask sed to do it. It means being comfortable with regex's though, but great stuff if you're happy to just type a single command and then rest assured it will be done in seconds.

At the end of the day grep and | were my best friend.
Unfortunatly the log wasn't nice enough to have a tag on all the lines to find a given session, but with several subsequent grep I was able to get what I needed.

Marco/Sat

P.S: zgrep is even a better friend if the files are compressed all in hte same manner

last week i edited a 540mb text file with nedit. it took about 2 minutes to load but editing was not a prob at all
unthinkable with my x86

What did you use to edit the file in Windows? I've got out of memory errors just trying to open 2 or 3 mb files with Notepad.

In windows the best editor thet i've found for free is crimson editor.
It works fine up to 28-30MB on a 512MB notebook.
But as I wrote you need more than 1.5GB for a 180MB text file.
And swapping on a notebook disk is overdepressing.

Marco/Sat

P.S: Thinking about Solaris X86 instead of linux: any esperience?
Candidate machine SGI230

well, back in the days of 3.1 and later 95/98 you would just open command prompt (DOS) and type "edit" and be thrown to simple text editor, or for editiong specific file type "edit [filename]" however the whole thing cased functioning after 2000 release. Anyway, these days I'm celebrating exactly 6 months of being 100% non-MS user and except in public libraries I haven't seen Windows nor do I have any desire to return to their products ever. The decision is final. Conclusion is: Unix, BSD and Linux are all better than MS in all cases. The tools I rely on now are mwm, Vi-editor, C, Fortran, gnuplot, Latex, Lynx, Mozilla, Nedit, Gimp, Blender, opengl libs, xpdf etc. MS doesn't, cannot or don't want to offer any of those tools and so I just say bye-bye to them

..of-course, then there is also the virus/spyware issue

I have no complaints regarding all Unix and BSD versions. Unlike some comments I've seen, I actually like Unix CDE and even more mwm. As far as Linux goes, technically it's ok, the only thing I will never understand is whay the HELL does it have to be associated with stupid pinguin cartoons, hippies, hacking, criminal, nerds, geeks, cult following
It's actually the large portion of various so-called "Linux user groups" which want to enforce such image. THAT is so stupid that it's already becoming sad. I remember when I first rented a Debian CDs from library to get to know compilers, Latex, gnuplot etc. and I can't tell you the shame I was feeling when I placed the book with install CDs on renting machine There were all kinds of people in line behind me, journalists, scientists, other students, children, old ladies, engineers, lawyers, etc. and you should see their faces, hehe, I'll never forget that! They were all thinking this typical stereotype that they read in newspapers or Internet: "..just look at this guy, OMG, he's renting this thing called LINUX uggh, awful.. He must be some kind of junkie, drug dealer, hippie and is probably gonna go writing viruses and do criminal hacking against all of us "normal" Excel and Word users.."

Actually LaLora edit still works in XP/2003, I use it to write scripts for domains.

Though I seriously doubt it could handle such text file.

Stonent wrote: What did you use to edit the file in Windows? I've got out of memory errors just trying to open 2 or 3 mb files with Notepad.

use "UltraEdit" and you are done

LaLora,
I really think that is necessary not to overlook a detail: user requirements.
As an example I have the desire to occasionally play modern games on my computer.
And I have a satellite receiver that's a pain to make work in linux (like a lot of very custom or very new hardware)
And I have no longer a lot of free time to spend hammering things down on the system.

Each of those needs may have it's own solution alternative to have MS on the computer: point 1 buy a console, point 2 restrict the HW bought based on mature support in linux or buy external devices not tied to the computer, point 3 use proprietary HW with proprietary OS in a supported configuration.

Each of those solution has it's own drawback. money, space, power consumption whatever.

Unfortunatly no one-size-fits-all solution is available: it's good for you if you're able to do all you need without MS.
I, for myself, have to problem that the satellite card sits unused, that the mandrake installation has problems with my Radeon9500 so that textures are slower than in an O2 and broken.
"all better than MS in all cases" is quite a statement.

Marco/Sat

I needed to edit a text file of 180MB so I started an editor on my windows laptop: after about half an hour I was greeted with a message stating that I had not enough virtual memory.

Windows still contains a perfectly good tool for this, and has done since the early DOS days - EDLIN! It is a line editor, so less intuitive to use than more modern solutions, but it will work on very large files. All in the OS, no need for downloaded tools.

EDLIN can read and write a file of ANY length - it basically loads in as much of the file as will fit into 75% of available (to DOS) memory and then lets you work from there.

Use DOS FIND command to output the line number(s) you're interested in, then fire up EDLIN and jump to the relevant lines. Works really well in Windows with multiple DOS boxes open - one for FIND, one for EDLIN.

Look at http://home.earthlink.net/~rlively/MANUALS/COMMANDS/ for full syntax (since the DOS help stuff no longer works in XP).

All the best

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depressible,

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Go somewhere else to spam. You will find the mods here are NOT in the mood to tolerate useless off-topic crap.

I never had problems with a few mb's of tekst. About sizes: I even managed to render a fractal in the gimp with a resolution of 16.000x12.000, thats about 200 megapixel. I can't repeat it, nor can I view it properly, as it just crashes after one zoom-in attempt.
At least it's not as bad as at school, you'll get the out-of-memory even with 4 internet explorers. No way it will handle those large tekstfiles
But where the heck do you get such big files that are usefull? some log?

like the vi + perl problem; i've installed NO-GUI distributions, and ended up with a dependancy on X11 lib's with emacs. it gets really tiresome after a while. too much freedom can eat up your time! :)