Comments on: Linux hurts my brain.

By: charles

charles — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:08:04 +0000

I agree uname is somewhat usable with only the “–help” option, or the man or info pages which contain only the same information. Contrast this with the Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uname which includes sample output for the different systems. That necessary information doesn’t have a capture method in core Unix systems.

By: Michael C. Berch

Michael C. Berch — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:24:56 +0000

“Man” does not come from Linux; it’s a UNIX thing and is at *least* 30 years old. (And yes, I was using it 30 years ago.) It comes from the era of text-only, 24×80 terminals. There is a highly-structured format; it’s just that some man pages are better written than others.

As for “uname”, also available on pretty much all UNIX and UNIX-like systems, it seems to function pretty much as advertised, and the fields are more or less self-explanatory.

On my Linux system:
penguin [3] % uname -a
Linux penguin.postmodern.com 2.4.18-14 #1 Wed Sep 4 13:35:50 EDT 2002 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

On my Mac:
michael-c-berchs-computer [10] % uname -a
Darwin heathrow.postmodern.com 8.10.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.10.0: Wed May 23 16:50:59 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.21.3~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

uname -p work on both, as well.

By: charles

charles — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 19:34:47 +0000

I agree that online sources are better, and that Wikipedia is likely to become the default reference. Wikipedia also handles the coaching so that a 5 year old *can* go forward. A good plan would be to release a wikipedia snapshot of the relevant commands with the release. Hmmm…

I did update Wikipedia to have the correct uname info for Ubuntu.

By: Richard Chapman

Richard Chapman — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:48:15 +0000

I’m not sure why you are not getting what you expect from Linux but I got the following:

$ uname -p
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz

I don’t use ‘info’ at the command line, I use it in konqueror as in ‘info:grep’ as a URL. It gives me a mini table of contents with clickable links, one of which is ‘examples’. And if Linux was easy enough for a 5 year old, without coaching, then it would be a security nightmare, kind of like that other operating system that makes most of your decisions for you.