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General Trouble Shooting
Sometimes computer problems can feel like James Joyce's dying woman- you know something is wrong, but you have no idea where or how to start looking for it. This article offers help for that. Some of this is general enough to be operating system non-specific, but Unix/Linux is going to get most of the attention.
Another one bites the dust I spent most of yesterday on the phone helping another consultant port a SCO Unix Filepro system over to Linux. Actually, we had started this more than a monthback but ran into a Filepro snag: she had done all her menus using a product called Softa, apparently no longer in business, so although we did an initial transfer then, she had to re-write some menus before we could bring it live.
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Numeric Unix Error Messages It's an unfortunate fact that many programmers are lazy about error messages. Very often, all you get is a cryptic "Error 5", and you may be lucky to get that: sometimes all you get is an error return that you have to examine yourself with "echo $?". You can't even depend on that being the actual Unix error, but even if it is, what does it mean?
Another one bites the dust I spent most of yesterday on the phone helping another consultant port a SCO Unix Filepro system over to Linux. Actually, we had started this more than a monthback but ran into a Filepro snag: she had done all her menus using a product called Softa, apparently no longer in business, so although we did an initial transfer then, she had to re-write some menus before we could bring it live.
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Numeric Unix Error Messages It's an unfortunate fact that many programmers are lazy about error messages. Very often, all you get is a cryptic "Error 5", and you may be lucky to get that: sometimes all you get is an error return that you have to examine yourself with "echo $?". You can't even depend on that being the actual Unix error, but even if it is, what does it mean?
