Its a Linux thing. Linux is packaged up out of a huge number of components into actual systems known as 'distributions'. There are probably around 10-15 major distributions, and around 350 in total. A great many distributions are remixes of major ones for some specific purpose. Ubuntu is a distribution which originally was a Debian remix. Other major ones would be Fedora, Suse, Debian, Slackware. Distrowatch.com carries a complete listing.
The way a package gets into a distribution is that it has 'maintainers'. So they will take the source code and produce a Debian or Ubuntu package which the core team then accepts for a given release. When they do that, it goes into the repositories, which are online archives of all the packages. I don't know about Ubuntu, but Debian probably has some 20-30,000 packages in its repositories. When you install a package, its not normally a case of get a file and install it. You use a package manager, of which there are four or five variants. The usual one for Debian and Ubuntu is Synaptic, but there are others. Think of them as clients. One way to categorize distributions is by how packages are managed. So you have the 'apt' ones, of which Debian and Ubuntu are examples. 'rpm' derives from Red Hat and Suse and Fedora use it. If it helps, think of this a bit like email. Synaptic would be an email client, and there are others. The underlying system would be a bit like pop3 or some other mail service prototcol. You find the package in your package manager and tell it to do the installation. The package manager then finds all the stuff that it needs (so called 'dependencies') and installs them too, and it normally takes care of putting in menu entries and so on. You can also manually install packages - in the case of Debian and Ubuntu these will be so called '.deb' packages. And you can get the source code and compile and install it. If you do this, you have to take care of dependencies yourself, which can be tedious, and this is why package managers were developed. So that's what a repository is. The reason regex is a bit different in the Linux world, which would include Macs, these being derived from Unix, is that they are built into the command line utilties. That's the essence of Linux at a sophisticated user level. Of course, you can, and many people do, use it just like Windows or OSX, in which case its just a vehicle to your applications and files via a graphical interface, and you don't even have to realise that there are many different possible desktop environments, login managers and so on. The real point of Linux however in terms of features is the shell, and the thing about this is that regex is like the air in the shell. Its all around and being used all the time, and is accessible from anywhere. Any Linux editor will support them. Geany is what I use, but Kate is another. This is why I suggested awk to Richmond. Awk and Sed are old fashioned text manipulation utilties which are built into all Linux distributions - and txt2regex and regexxer are going to be in almost all the major repositories. If you need to hack around with text, the easiest and quickest way is to use the tools that have evolved to do it. They've evolved over 30+years in the hands of very bright and impatient people who just wanted to get certain jobs done as simply and quickly as possible, so they are really sophisticated and powerful. Nothing wrong with LiveCode, it does text excellently, but it depends what you are doing and whether you want to just use a command on a file, or actually write a program. The commands and the way they can be made to interact are just very quick, powerful and flexible ways of doing stuff with text, and after the initial learning curve, they are almost instant. A bit longer than I had meant. If you want to try a distribution, get the xfce version of PCLinuxOS to start. But Debian is where you will end up. -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/REGEX-and-Livecode-tp4658514p4658599.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
