Re: some bees nest stirring, was just how much can you do with?

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On 03/04/2013 01:38 PM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
...You are avoiding the dos ports question councilor.
I personally have never in all my years of  computing needed to do
anything like the below.
I have  two hands and two ears, and believe each task deserves my full
attention.
Besides I can do them so fast in dos anyway that by the time I needed to
do this It is over.
Multitasking strikes me as a windows thing because windows  works so badly.
I can listen to a cd while working in dos now if I want to use the
computer for that, but why?  It is what  my real stereo is for lol.
...but again this is totally only and uniquely me.
I would never wish to suggest that anyone else on the planet computes
like me.
such is the  beauty of PC as in *personal* computer.
Now speak to the ports of Linux things professor!

I won't speak to the DOS ports point, but multitasking predates Windows by quite a bit. It's been available on Unix probably since the beginning.

I could not go back to DOS myself and put up with a single tasking system. I want to be able to leave my place in an editor or an email message while I look something up. I want to be able to start a download and go onto something else while I'm waiting for the download to finish. I want to be able to kick off a make or a compile that will take a while and go back to checking my email. I want to kick off the conversion of a batch of .wmv files to .mp3 files, and I don't want to have to sit around and wait for that to finish.

Windows is not multi-tasking because it does things so poorly. It's multi-tasking because people want to run multiple tasks at the same time just like you can in Unix and other operating systems.

On Mon, 4 Mar 2013, Tim Chase wrote:

On March  4, 2013, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Still if elinks and mplayer exist ported for DOS, why go through
the extreme mayhem of finding someone local enough to learn speakup
and ora and so forth to teach me in the first place?

Well, to be able to use Linux which excels at multi-tasking.  So
even on the console (without a GUI or Orca), you can run yasr/speakup
to read the screen, but then use either GNU "screen" or "tmux" to run
multiple virtual terminals within that one yasr/speakup session.  Thus
you can be browsing with lynx in one process (or more), reading email
in another, playing music in another, have your audio-mixer up all the
time in another (allowing you to adjust the audio on the fly while
other stuff is running), managing files in yet another, etc.  I
remember using DOS and having various TSR
(terminate-and-stay-resident) programs to fake multi-tasking but they
never worked very well for me.

The virtual terminals are cheaply created, usually with the
tmux/screen prefix key followed by "c" (for "create").  You can then
switch between the virtual terminals by using the tmux/screen prefix
key followed either by "n" (next) or "p" (previous) or by directly
jumping to the numbered window with the corresponding number key.  In
both tmux and screen, the key mappings are also configurable.

An added benefit of using tmux/screen is that the sessions can be
detached and then reconnected-to, even from another computer.  So you
might be downstairs working on the Linux box, then go upstairs to
your workhorse machine and telnet/ssh into your Linux box and
instruct it to reattach to the session and you can pick up right
where you left off.  All without losing any of your work or running
programs.

-tim





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Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail

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