Arch has this (albeit from the command line) without the need to keep adding specific archives for individual packages.
If you don't want to use the command line, the very good Manjaro, which is based on Arch, will give you a nice clickable interface.
As far as I'm concerned, the plethora of personal archives that some people have reported with ubuntu-like distributions is a great way to make a great system awful.

@normanlinux - sed sounds fascinating, particularly since I spend so much of my time trying to organize snippets of this and that - but what on earth is it? An abbreviation?

I like to set up a simple web develop system with:

LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)(any system)
mc CLI file manager (any system) or Krusader GUI file manager (KDE system)
openSSH (any system)
Geany editor (any system)
Kate (for some note taking or email prep offline) (KDE system)
Filezilla (any system)
git-gui (any system)
dolphin file manager (KDE system)
Dev Tools in Google Chrome or Chromium (any system which can handle it)
synaptic package manager (all .deb based systems)
octopi (all Arch based systems)

Operating systems used:

Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Arch (KDE), ArchBang, Bunsenlabs, Raspbian (Pi)

tkdiff - graphical version of the diff command - much easier to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tkdiff
pssh - run commands in parallel on lots of Unix/Linux boxes https://www.tecmint.com/execute-comm...rs-using-pssh/
iftop - top command for a network interface to measure bandwidth
collectl - go back to a point in time to see the state of a system .. like use the --top filter to see top output right before a system crash
auditd - audit tracks system calls and who issues them .. for instance, see who deleted a file at a particular point in time
column - nice output format to a command .. ex. mount | column -t
iotop - see whats hogging up the I/O - good for troubleshooting database latency

FSlint for riddance of duplicate files. Easily tidies a mess.

Hi

Josephj thanks for your comments. I will check out. Have just downloaded a program using terminal successfully ! at that.

Charles Harris

I would like to see another menu option in the edit colum of the file manager to Resize pictures. There are some utils out there but hard to find to do the job right. I often need to have a pic resized to 800 x 600 for another forum and it is never easy to find that other util. I use Gnome mostly by the way.

@normanlinux - I love sed for simple things and hate it for complex ones. Where that line should be drawn is based on individual experience and preferences. It is an awesome tool.

Between it and awk, there's very little you can't do with a text file (especially if it's line-oriented). And a lot of things can be done easily and quickly in very few lines of code.

If you don't know how to use sed yet, that's cool. When you need it, you'll learn it. But ...

If you haven't heard of it, then you really need to read a few general books on working from the command line (CLI). IMHO, it's pretty hard to learn this just by trying one small thing out at a time. Books give you a conceptual framework and some of the "why" behind things that examples usually don't provide.

You may like Linux now, but you won't really understand why so many people love it until you get a basic familiarity with the command line and the amazing things you can do by stringing a few commands together in a pipeline.

sed is a "Stream EDitor". To greatly oversimplify, it's basically a non-interactive/batch text editor that reads an input file one line at a time and manipulates that line and then prints it out.

It gets a bit hairy once you go past this basic functionality because it offers many extremely powerful editing options in an extremely terse/cryptic format and is generally totally unhelpful when it fails or just doesn't do what you want it to do.

Simple example:

I have bash function to determine if a string is numeric (defined here simply as all digits). This line does all the work:

The argument (${1}) is fed into sed. sed replaces one digit followed by zero or more digits with nothing (matching as long a string as it can). The result ends up in VAR. (I'm only explaining the sed part here.)

If the resulting string (in VAR) is empty, then the original string contained only digits. (I make sure it isn't empty to start with before this gets called.)

There's a great new sed tutorial here https://github.com/learnbyexample/Co...ter/gnu_sed.md .

There's also one for grep https://github.com/learnbyexample/Co...er/gnu_grep.md

Thanks, Josephj! Earlier I was merely fascinated - now I am daunted as well. Clearly, I am not ready for sed - and, as you say, I "really need to read a few general books on working from the command line (CLI)". Any suggestions?

Thanks, again.

I use shell pipes with simple tools like sort, uniq, grep, wc, comm, find, diff and sed. The one that is suspect most have not used is comm. It is a better diff if what you are doing is lists of file names. One can them use sed to build commands to pipe to shell to mv, cp or rm the files. I, also, prefer tcsh to bash but that is another thing.

The stuff posted by @schwarm is effectively a foreign language to me! Could I be the only one who is so handicapped? Please point me in the direction of some crucial instruction.

Remember: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5530337

We're kinda drifting Off the original thread Topic tho. "OT"

Yes, technology is an infinite learning experience

Thanks @Jjanel for reminding me of that earlier thread - and chiding me ever so gently for drifting off the original topic! I shall desist. In any case, the original problem is resolved, and since "technology is an infinitely learning experience", one's ignorance thereof must also be infinite. So, I am sure, I will be back with something else. Meanwhile, to all the wonderful people here, thank you, thank you very much. This forum seems like one last enclave of gentility in a world that is rapidly going insane!

And yes, @Rickkkk, my login issue seems to have resolved itself - miraculously! Thanks.

No. You're just one of the few brave enough to admit it! And to try to do something about it by learning.

While this forum is exceptionally helpful and friendly, it does tend to attract intermediate to advanced posters, so you will see a lot of material that assumes substantial prior knowledge.

Beginners are welcome here as long as they are willing to be courteous and to put out some effort to learn more as they figure out what they need to learn. The ones I don't like are those who ask obvious school homework questions and want answers with no work.

The books on my shelf are rather old. Now that Linux has been around for some time, there should be good books in a library near you - for free. After you read enough to know if a particular book is good and works for you, you may want to buy it so you can highlight and write in it, etc. - whatever helps you learn. Used books are great too. The basics of the command line haven't changed in quite awhile. They just keep adding new options to programs.

I'll try to resist going off topic now.