I just happened upon a post about a graphical disk usage program called gdmap.

Interesting program, but I'd prefer to see my disk usage in a tree view. On Windows, I really like TreeSize Free. Do you happen to know of anything like that for Linux?

I thought it might be interesting to check out the Plan 9 operating system, since it's sort of the sequel to UNIX and is supposed to have cool new features (like better support for the "everything is a file" concept of UNIX). Luckily, you can download an ISO file for a live/install CD, so I downloaded it and fired it up in QEMU....

It's pretty weird. It looks kind of like UNIX and Squeak had a child. The GUI is pretty strange and not very pretty, IMHO. A 3 button mouse is pretty much a necessity as they've mapped the buttons to different things. I tried to move a window by dragging the title bar of the window, but that caused it to resize rather than move. It seems that you have to use Button 3 to move windows. This was pretty excruciating, because I was on my PowerBook with a 1 button trackpad. For some reason, the scrollbars in apps were totally confusing and unusable to me. It looked inspired by Squeak, with touches like using one of the mouse buttons to execute the word under the cursor and even a cutesy mascot, Glenda the bunny, reminiscent of the Squeak mouse. I thought the shell, rc, might be interesting, but I lost interest when I saw that there seemed to be no filename completion, as least with the tab key.

The other day I realized that often when I'm using touch, I'd like it to have the ability to create ancestor directories that don't exist, a la mkdir -p. I quickly hacked together a shell script to do what I want.

Then I thought that this might be a generally useful extension to touch, so I thought I'd take a stab at adding it directly to the touch source code in GNU coreutils. Here's my patch, which I sent to the mailing list:

Well OS/2 does work in QEMU, though I guess you might say that I cheated a bit - I did this by doing the install in VMware Player and then using qemu-img to convert the file from a vmdk to a qcow.

I've sometimes wished that the UNIX touch command had the same -p option as mkdir. With a little bit of scripting, it can:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir="/bin/mkdir"
touch="/usr/bin/touch"

for arg in $*; do
    if [ "$arg" = "-p" ]; then
        opt_p=true
        continue
    fi
    if [ "$opt_p" = "true" ]; then
        $mkdir -p $(dirname $arg) && $touch $arg
    else
        $touch $arg
    fi
done

What a great idea! This site will highlight Debian/Ubuntu packages that you may not know about on a regular basis. I hope it keeps going.

http://debaday.debian.net/

The C++ programmers among you might be interested in this:

http://www.stlport.org/

STLport is an STL implementation that has some interesting features:

• Debug mode
• Thread safety
• Exception safety
• Portable to many platforms, including Windows/Visual C++

A pretty good article on bash from IBM developerWorks.

The following RPMs were built by downloading the 0.8.0 source RPMs from rpmforge, making a few minor mods, and then rebuilding:

Binary packages:

• qemu-0.8.2-1.1.el4.marc.i386.rpm
• qemu-debuginfo-0.8.2-1.1.el4.marc.i386.rpm

Source package:

• qemu-0.8.2-1.1.el4.marc.src.rpm

It's unfortunate that SKAS0 mode is poorly documented on the User Mode Linux (UML) web site. For example, this page about SKAS doesn't mention it. It is explained in Jeff Dike's UML book though.

I wish they would update the UML web site as it gives the impression that TT and SKAS3 are the only choices, which is no longer true, as SKAS0 was added to the kernel in version 2.6.13.