Building Erlang 23.3.4.3 on Devuan/Debian/Ubuntu

Erlang R24 is out! …but there are, as usual with a version X.0 release, a few rough edges (enough of them around the important-but-annoying WX and OpenGL updates that I’ll be writing another post about that shortly…). In the meantime, R23.3.4.3 is excellent and quite reliable. The steps for building with kerl are nearly identical […]

Erlang: Video tutorial HOWTO on installing Erlang and ZX from scratch on Ubuntu Linux

I’m flattered to find that Dr. Kumar made a tutorial video of how to install Erlang and ZX on a fresh Ubuntu system and check that it is working by playing Erltris. It is sort of a video version of previous instructionals and the ZX quickstart docs all in one place. Big thanks to Dr. […]

Building Erlang R22.2 on Debian/Ubuntu

As an update to my previous notes on building R22, my current notes for building Erlang R22.2 and installing ZX using kerl on a fresh system (Kubuntu 18.04.3 LTS) follow: sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install \ gcc curl g++ dpkg-dev build-essential automake autoconf \ libncurses5-dev libssl-dev flex xsltproc libwxgtk3.0-dev \ wget […]

Zombies

IRC will never die.It will never die because its minimal implementation is useful. Windows will die, but only after rotting all the way through.It will continue to persist for the next few decades not because its minimal definition is useful (there is no minimal definition), but as a consequence of deliberate strategic choices that were […]

How to Exit Vim (or vi)

I never thought I would write a post about this, but evidently it is a problem, so here we go. The Procedure Realize you’re in a parallel universe where “bogomips” is a word and computrons and thunks are the competing currencies. Freak out, probably pressing something awkward in the process, and then in a paralyzed […]

Interview from Another Dimension

I was asked if I was interested in covering a temporary administration position a few days ago because finding bilingual Unix people is pretty hard here in Japan. It sounded marginally interesting and stood a chance of getting me in touch with the local Unix community, so I said sure, have the interviewer give me […]

Fedora: A Study in Featuritis

Its a creeping featurism! No, its a feeping creaturism! No, its an infestation of Feature Faeries! No, its Fedora! I’ve been passively watching this thread (link to thread list) on the Fedora development list and I just can’t take anymore. I can’t bring myself to add to the symphony, either, because it won’t do any […]

Racing to remove the last Nix

This post was prompted by a discussion on ScientificLinuxForum. The subject of this post diverts significantly from the original discussion, so I’ve placed it here instead. The thread was initially about the release of RHEL 6.3, but discussions there have a tendency to wander, particularly since many are worried we are in the last days […]