Re: Trouble with cron
* Johannes Wiedersich (johannes@physik.blm.tu-muenchen.de) wrote:
>
> As said by michael in another reply, the alternatives are overriden by
> EDITOR or VISUAL.
Yes, that would make sense, but I had unset these in trying to get vi
to work with crontab. I guess I had assumed that vi would be the
standard editor and thought that commenting out the variables in my
.bashrc and then sourcing that would bring up vi or vim. But, emacs
still came up. In looking back it would seem that nano should have.
It reminds me of gdm. I don't usually use that kind of thing but
since it was default in Debian I thought what the heck. So, I
switched to fluxbox to see what happened and it starts up conky. I
like conky, and do use it, but I didn't tell it to do that. However,
the desktop was black and so I thought I would set a wallpaper, and to
do that I created a .Xsession file and added fbsetbg to that and
restarted the X server, but nothing. I copied it to .Xclients and did
it again. Nothing. I copied it to .xsession and then .xclients.
Nope. I checked that they were all executable. No good. So, I added
a script to /etc/X11/Xsession.d to set a wallpaper, and still no good.
So, I made the gdm script in /etc/init.d unexecutable and created a
.xinitrc to run with startx.
Admittedly, I am no expert with gdm, or any login manager. But, I do
recall using it once in Gentoo and I just created the .Xsession file
and that did everything, including the window manager. Now, nothing.
And the same with EDITOR. I have to export it explicitly or I get
emacs everytime. Could Debian just be so good it knows what I want
without having to tell it? So far I have conky and emacs, both
unrequested. Man, you people are good!
> nano is just another editor - not as powerful as emacs, but sufficient
> for me editing my crontab etc.
Isn't it also called pico? I recall using that once way back when and
it was okay as I recall. But Jed has always been my low resource quick
and dirty editor. At least for when emacs is cumbersome.
> Just install different packages, the corresponding entries should
> 'automagically' appear, when you run the corresponding
> update-alternatives. See 'man update-alternatives'.
>
> There is also a short summary on
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-alternatives
> which is always good to have.
I may try this out and see what it does. Perhaps if I change it to vi
or something and then unset my editor again it will kick it into
action. Be interesting to see.
> You could install debian's reference to
> /usr/share/doc/Debian/reference/
> by running
> aptitude install debian-reference-en
This sounds like a great suggestion and I will definitely do it. I
like plenty of documentation at my fingertips.
Continued thanks for all the tips and information.
Patrick
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