August 23, 2013 Dear Gerald, I ran across a fantastic book in pdf format called "The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts, which I am attaching. I am also attaching FifthCovers.pdf and FifthTutor.pdf which I rebuilt with more contrast and made a couple of corrections. I am also enclosing the text I sent to SliTaz.org describing the book and the text I sent to Paul Snow on the Fifth programming language. I hope all is well with you and your family. Happy reading and looking forward to hearing how you are coming on the computer front. In Christ, Frank Anderson August 13. 2013 Please at least make a link in the Documentation folder for LinuxCommand.org. I have been searching for over 20 years for documentation on the Linux commands and downloaded and printed the pdf file for "The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts. I happened to find copies of the section on writing shell scripts buried in the SliTaz online documentation. At least MS-Dos 6.2 came with a "Technical Reference Manual" which described the commands and their usage. Unix and Linux has been a different story, trying to get information on the commands and what they do has been next to impossible until I finally found this book. Then we wonder why over 90 percent of the people who use Linux don't contribute to the cause! I know I would like to contribute, but I know I need to learn a lot more than what I know to be of any help. A year or so ago I needed a Linux driver and codec for a Texas Instruments audio chip which is built into the Linux Kernel. I was finally told I would have to recompile the kernel for SliTaz to get it included. My first attempt was to use the "make oldconfig" option which took around 4-5 hours to compile on my netbook using an Intel N270 Atom processor running at 1.60 GHz. Of course this didn't include the driver I needed so I tried using "make allmodconfig" which only took around 10 hours to compile and when I tried to run it, it came to a halt when it was time to load the drives because I had no idea what modules I needed to load the drives. The next attempt was to try "make allyesconfig" which only took around 11 hours to compile. When I tried to run it, it died before it got to loading the drives. The solution for now, use Ubuntu which has the driver built-in. I am not very impressed with the "C Programming Language"! On the contrary, I am very depressed!!! In "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, Copyright 1978 by Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. at the bottom of page 1 (Chapter 0: Introduction) I quote: "A compiler for C can be simple and compact. Compilers are also easily written; using current technology, one can expect to prepare a compiler for a new machine in a couple of months, and to find that 80 percent of the code of a new compiler is common with existing ones." Compare this with a couple of programming languages from the same relative time period. "[One] could port an entire development environment to a new computer in about two weeks," and another, "Developing a port might take six months for another language but can take less than a week for ...." In both of the latter cases, one wrote, debugged, and compiled just a few lines of code at a time in what were termed: functions, routines, or sub-routines. One didn't have to wait and try to compile the whole program at once with its hundreds, thousands or today millions of lines of code! and then try to figure out where everything blew up! In the thread on "Nimrod the Great" I saw that SliTaz was supposed to be a new Linux from scratch, which was being built using "ash scripts." Now that I have some documentation on the "Bash script," I would like to know what SliTaz files/programs are written in script. I feel it would be a great help to be able to read through them as I try to learn the command line scripting language. Thanks again for the list of SliTaz files/programs that are written in script. I am looking forward to hopefully being able to finally contribute to the SliTaz project! Frank Anderson, AC0XL PS August 16, 2013 Well I finally made it through the book "The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts. What a FANTASTIC book!!! I can see now the difference between MS Dos and Linux is that MS Dos commands are mostly for wandering around the file system and one can use "batch" to group some command lines together. One can include "QBASIC" programs in the batch file, while Linux uses a shell script which is actually a more or less complete programming language. The book leads one from the beginning by weaving a program a step at a time until by the end of the book one has a complete program all made from the command prompt. What a fantastic journey!!! AC0XL August 23, 2013 Dear Paul, I want to thank you again for the information on Fifth. I had a little trouble seeing the pdf files, but since you used just raw scans for the pages I was able to go through them and increase the contrast and crop out the background noise. My first attempt I did at 600 dpi and my Acrobat Reader came up with the sizes being a little less than 5.5 x 8.5 inches. I processed them again at 300 dpi and the same thing happened even though they were showing up as a little less than 8.5 x 11 inches in the Acrobat Reader Properties. When I selected letter size paper (even though that is what was showing) the size went to the larger size instead of the smaller size. I did notice a couple of errors in the Glossary section and corrected them. Page 17: > (greater than) from: arithmetically LESS than the TOPO element; to arithmetically MORE than the TOP element. The bottom of the page ends with ABORT; On page 18 the next item is ABORT, with a definition of "abort-quote" so I added the QUOTE part to the abort. I tried to leave enough space so the space is evident. I broke your pdf's down in Linux with pdftoppm setting the resolution to 300 dpi and the output to png to generate PNG files. The .png files were brought up in Windows using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE to make the changes, saving the changed files as .tif files. I rebuilt the pdf's under Linux using tiffcp to combine the pages into one .tif file, and then tiff2pdf to generate the final .pdf's. These pdf's are a lot smaller since they are only 300 dpi bitmapped pages. FifthCovers.pdf is 751KB, and FifthTutor.pdf is 639KB. The file names can be changed, but I thought I should make them similar so they won't overwrite the original pdf's. My question is how can one view the object code that is generated? I see that "ENV! sets the local environment to the given module. The search path starts at this module. Unlike F83-Forth, code is also generated in this module." It would be nice to be able to verify the object code generated. I was glad to see that currently supported CPU's are: 8088, 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386 (all flavors return 8088). And Math CPU's currently supported are: 8087, 80287, and 80387 (all flavors return 8087). My idea was to try to add support for Linux (Unix) so either OS would be able to run Fifth natively. Thanks again for all of your help! Sincerely, Frank Anderson, AC0XL PO Box 615 Green River, UT 84525-0615 TracFone: 435-210-0710 e-mail: ac0xl.ham@gmail.com