pterjan's diary

  Funny download stats on ftp.free.fr

Here is the download count for Mandriva iso images on ftp.free.fr yesterday:

$ GET ftp://ftp.free.fr/stats/mandriva.daily.20080409.txt | grep iso/
/official/iso/2008.1                    6741   2656708887348     2.42      83.92
/official/iso/2008.0                     753    205020960820     0.27       6.48
/devel/iso/2008.1                         35     18410545367     0.01       0.58
/official/iso/2007.1                      22      3233336546     0.01       0.10
/official/iso/2007.0                      26      1270717545     0.01       0.04
/official/iso/move                         6       795533110     0.00       0.03
/devel/iso/contrib                         3          492062     0.00       0.00
/official/iso/2006.0                       4           36204     0.00       0.00

Can someone explain me why some people are still downloading iso from 2006.0, 2007.0, 2007.1, or move ?

  PLF stats

It looks like 2008.0 was much more successful than previous distros. Previously we had a lot of downloads when a new release was out, but on 2008.0 it increased during the life of this distro !

  Taiwan photos uploaded

At last, I finished uploading the photos of the 3 weeks I spent in Taiwan in February! I had taken more than 1000 photos (Meaning I had more than 1024 files in a directory and libgphoto2 did not want to import them), so after a difficult triaging I uploaded a set of 512 photos, and then for people in a hurry, a subset of 100 photos.

  Bash and horizontal-scroll-mode

On my machines (Mandriva cooker, bash 3.2+upstream patches, readline 5.2+upstream patches) bash now displays the long command lines on a single line and handles scrolling.

This means I can't read all the command line without scrolling, and I can't copy it...

After some search on this topic I found a readline option called horizontal-scroll-mode which exactly does this, but is off by default (at least according to the doc).

Our packages changelog does not say anything about it and grep "horiz" in the patches or the config files does not return anything related. The upstream changelog of readline and bash also does not say anything about it...

Worse, I tried "set horizontal-scroll-mode off" in .inputrc and then in /etc/inputrc, without any effect...

Any idea on how to fix this ?

  Tip of the day: tar is now smart

As toady pointed out on IRC, you no longer need to tell tar that it needs to uncompress an archive with gzip or bzip2. So, instead of calling tar xzf on tar.gz archives and tar xjf on tar.bz2 ones, you can now call tar xf on both.

Update: To answer Beranger, this was introduced by tar 1.15 on 2004-12-29, and should be available in all recent distributions (According to Distrowatch: Mandriva since 10.2, Debian since Etch, Ubuntu since 5.10, Fedora since FC4).