@terdon Dpes the Money question look better? If you have any further comments or suggestions, let me know. Thanks.

@Tim Yup! I'm in quite a big number of rooms for I starred them based on my skills/interests ... Starts are of the latter category ;)

@FaheemMitha In emacs a query-search-regex (C-M-%) with [ ]\{2,\} and one space will convert all repeated spaces to one. There are plenty of ways to manage whitespace in emacs.

@Isaac Thank you for the suggestion, but the problem actually is/was whitespace in a web form.

But I suspect the problem is entirely due to my own stupidity. Clearly I need to use something like Atomic Chrome.

@FaheemMitha Looks fine!

@terdon Thank you.

@StephenKitt I have no Windows machine to test your comment with, but if that's correct, maybe you could add a short answer?

I installed a Debian OS on my laptop and on the first reboot It takes me to the grub command line?

@Kusalananda right, I will

does it not have a graphical user interface? then that curly symbol was wildly misleading

@AdamL That's usually an indication of an error. What are you seeing, exactly?

If it is too time consuming to type it out, you could post a photo.

To be clear, you are seeing a command line, not a menu?

@StephenKitt Ok, so they don't want to.

Shrug

yeah

it is possible to configure git correctly for this kind of situation but I get the impression we’d be beating a dead horse

@StephenKitt About Regexes. I have not used regexxer. I'll take a look at it. On first impression it feels like a graphical grep. But that seems to be too basic, I like to think that I have learnt a bit more than the most basic of regexes.

For a very basic site to send newbies to is regexone.com. That's what most people need to know. For more complex constructs reference I like rexegg.com and the site to promote a proprietary program regular-expressions.info but which is freely accessible and has quite good information.

To test regex, from the most basic regextester.com , the better regexr.com and the best web page to test regex: regex101.com That covers 99.9% of my needs and uses.

In general, grep testing and regex101 are more than enough for my general needs.

@Isaac yes, it doesn’t provide step-by-step execution or any particular help debugging

I've never understood why people always recommend dos2unix. I don't think I've ever used that. Why install an entire util to just run tr -d '\r'.

Does it do anything else particularly useful? Is it that it edits the file in place or something? Like perl -i -pe 's/\r//g'?

@terdon yes, it edits in place IIRC, I think it also checks that the file is not a binary, and it can convert encodings

so you can do dos2unix * and not destroy everything

(raise your hand if you ever FTPed a file with the wrong ASCII/BINARY setting!)

@StephenKitt And removes the un-needed BOM. :-)

aargh the BOM

@StephenKitt ah, yeah, that makes sense I guess

@FaheemMitha it's literally just the grub command line, and a message saying that tab will enumerate command completions, I remember selecting grub at one of the installation points, I mean I don't mind I can learn all about grub this way instead of Debian

@terdon to be fair I have a skewed sense of what’s safe because I’ve typically worked in VCS-backed directories for a very long time, and I have 15-minute backups

so even pulling a terdon wouldn’t be a disaster

im guessing I had two other options for boot loader, and I clicked on grub because it was on the previous OS I had on the comp

@terdon ive never even heard of dos2unix before, I installed Cygwin64 on my windows machine this week I haven't explored it enough to say whether its useful for me or not

@terdon Sometimes, carriage returns should possibly be left in place, but not when immediately followed by a newline. I'm thinking "it's more complicated to handle all special cases than what I want to know about".

but so far its really good

@terdon sed -i $'s/\r$//' might be safer.

@AdamL This isn't normal behavior. No error message?

@FaheemMitha the first reboot failed, it did that thing where the screen goes all "matrixy" line by line until the screen fills up, and freezes there, so I switched it off and restarted, and I am given the grub command line

@AdamL Laptop or desktop?

"matrixy" suggests the movie. But there lines descend vertically, which I really hope didn't happen to your computer.

laptop HP sleekbook. Originally a windows 8 OS, and I replaced that with Ubuntu LTS 18.04, but I got annoyed that amazon was on the right hand task bar of the desktop, among other things

no like it prints characters over the top of each other, ive made maple do it plenty of times hold on one sec ill flick up an image of what I mean

A link to the meaning and use of favorite question, please :-)

@FaheemMitha

That's what maple does if I make copies of all files and change their extension to txt and ask it to read them

@AdamL Are those supposed to be letters? I don't see any letters.

Anyway, right now you're just seeing a Grub command line? Can you post an image of that? Might as well.

yeah that's what I mean it writes over the top of itself

well ok ill have to ask to borrow a phone from someone I got car jacked last week and they also demanded I give them my new Samsung s10, so yeah im not being a dick I literally don't have a phone atm

@AdamL That's horrible. Where were you carjacked?

a few suburbs away from where I live

@AdamL City?

Belmont

@AdamL There are a surprising number of Belmonts. Which country is this?

its really not that big a deal hey you get accustomed to having to parley with the chuds. (they were people, but they got splashed by radioactive waste, which obviously a metaphor for meth and booze)

I'm guessing it's the US.

no Australia\

@AdamL Oh.

@AdamL Radioactive waste mostly belongs in comic books.

I recently the word "chav" from the TV show misfits. It's a Britishism.

Sorry to hear that happens to you. I though Australia was safer than that. I hope you reported it.

Anyway, a photo is not critical.

Are you trying to dual boot the laptop? Or are you wiping the disk clean before installation?

@FaheemMitha no relax everything was insured.

@AdamL Glad to hear it. Even so, you could have got hurt.

You can't insure your life.

Well, there is Life Insurance, but you know what I mean.

It must be handy to be a cat. They have nine lives, or so I hear.

Oh dear. I see India is moving rapidly up the list in worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india

This really isn't the kind of race you want to win.

@AdamL Did it show anything before that, at all?

@Kusalananda really? why?

I mean, in the process of booting.

Well there is some truth to the 9 lives thing, it came about because their tissue is much more rapidly regenerative than other types of mammal

Also

@FaheemMitha Don't look at the numbers though, look at the rate of change. That's what will make the difference.

yes I selected I wanted to wipe the disk, it said that the Debian installation was complete, and I can remove the usb and reboot, at which point it went funny and froze as I described before, badly, then when I switched it off and back on again I get that screen

@terdon (Daily infection increase) / (Total number of people who have been infected, including those recovered) ? Or something else?

@AdamL What's the laptop model? And Debian version/release?

@terdon It just deletes carriage returns at the end of lines (replace sed with perl if that's better).

Also, roughly how new is the laptop? Laptops are generally iffier than desktops, but these days Linux can generally cope, because it's more mainstream than it used to it, and a lot of people use it on laptops. Sometimes you need a newer kernel.

If you booted off a DVD/CD, provide the link you downloaded it from.

@Kusalananda Ah, OK, I thought you meant sed was safer than perl for some reason.

This definitely looks wrong (for the Indian data):

@terdon Ah, no. The substitution.

I suspect that the data provided simply doesn't include that information.

@FaheemMitha Ideally, the rate of change in daily infections but we don't have that. Here, these two are very useful:

nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19

(dunno if that has India yet)

And:

@terdon Ah, University College.

aatishb.com/covidtrends

This last one plots the rate of change. So that when a country manages to get out of the exponential growth period, it is immediately obvious. It's very nicely explained (including relevant caveats) in this video:

@FaheemMitha ok cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/…

thanks heaps for your help btw

@terdon Oh, that really doesn't look good. Now I'm even more worried.

yeah...

It's very early still for the Indian data, but it certainly looks like you're still very much on the exponential growth phase.

It looks India is following basically the same curve as everyone else.

@terdon Agreed. I'd crawl under my bed and hide there. But it's rather dusty.

That covidtrends graph is the most informative representation of the data I've seen so far.

Nice job on whoever did the work, anyway.

Very clever.

The video's worth watching too, it points out a few features of plotting that way that might not be immediately obvious.

Actually, maybe not that dusty. But still rather cramped.

@terdon Ok, I'll watch it.

@terdon The govt is currently pulling out all the stops. I'm never seen such a level of activity here.

Particularly the state govts.

South Korea certainly seems to have exited rather dramatically.

@FaheemMitha yeah. They're the ones who implemented immediate, wide-spread testing and where large parts of the population started wearing masks which may well have helped prevent asymptomatic carriers from infecting others.

Should I turn this into an answer instead of a comment? It's a bit rant-y, admittedly. unix.stackexchange.com/questions/577678/…

It is, a bit. But the question seems completely opinion based anyway.

It does. Should probably close it.

One good thing to come of it is the level of international communication and cooperation, like I'm happy that the average Australian is actually considering what the situation is like beyond Australia, it usually rarely occurs

@terdon Of course, it's not clear what those Indian numbers mean, in terms of how fast the infection is spreading. Since India has been ramping up testing. At tbe beginning of the lockdown, they had hardly done any testing. Now apparently they are testing at 38% capacity, or something, and are presumably speeding up further. Or should if they have any sense.

Though now I think the data is bad enough that basically everyone is on board.

Anyway, so it could simply mean that the testing is picking up more of a large mass of already infected people.

But it's unclear how much that mass is increasing.

India should have substantial test capacity if properly utilized. Though unfortunately, much of it is private.

And even more unfortunately, the Indian govt isn't making the test free. Which I think is a huge mistake. Though I suppose that may change when things get worse.

@AdamL Sounds like the United States.

@AdamL That looks like vanilla stable Buster/Debian 10. You didn't mention your laptop model or when that model came out.

If it's newish, it's worth trying testing or unstable images.

Sometimes there is a bit of a time lag before support for new hardware arrives in the kernel. And the Debian kernels are usually out of date, anyway.

An alternative is to look for a stable image with a newer kernel. Those are certainly out there.

Those American numbers are horrific. Coming up to a quarter of a million.

NC does not seem to have been too badly hit, but then, I would not expect it to be.

@FaheemMitha yep, that's the perennial problem.

and it’s possible to game the numbers: stop testing all cases, stop counting all deaths

we’ll only know for sure once everything’s over and we can compare year-on-year death rates

(which will also give some indication of how many people dying from COVID-19 would have died from other causes, in all likelihood; e.g. people who would have died from the flu)

basically, governments are trying to pilot countries in a situation where (a) changes take a least two weeks to be visible and (b) indicators are being made up as we go

@FaheemMitha it's a HP Pavillion Sleekbook Model 14-b022AU

@AdamL And how new is the model?

can I get that info from the grub command line? seems like the sort of thing I can

@AdamL that’s a 2012 model, AFAICT, so Debian 10 should work fine

@AdamL No. When was your laptop model released?

@StephenKitt If that is the case, then yes, it should. Also HP generally has good Linux support. At least for printers.

But I would have thought for laptops too.

I would have to say Stephen might be right, one of the several numbers on the back starts with 2012

@FaheemMitha that depends, but for this model they even provide a Linux-specific user guide (see the manuals)

The virus statistics shows the health system quality in each country

for poor people and for homeless

@StephenKitt Looks like it might be for a preinstalled machine. It's a bit light on actual *nix stuff. It mentions Ubuntu in a couple of places.

I guess wealthy people who travelled a lot brought the virus back

i used that universal boot usb program and a usb stick, the laptop doesn't have a cdrom unfortunately otherwise I would try the other iso. I'll just attempt the install again and photograph each step its really not cool expecting you guys to do this level of guess work

Specifically, the Ubuntu software center.

lol

I don't want to talk about this subject good night ppls

@AdamL While I applaud your desire to use Debian, you could try the most recent Ubuntu version. Sometimes Ubuntu provides a smoother install experience.

then other wealthy people can afford to avoid contact with the virus

I think they tend to tweak their hardware support a bit more.

@Tim Yes, that's the way the world works.

then poor people don't know much about the virus or can't afford to avoid contact with the virus

@AdamL Once you've got a working version, it's easier to figure out what's not working with other distributions. Assuming you want to.

Anyway, Ubuntu would be a reasonable next thing to try.

Unless Stephen chooses to use his superpowers to help you solve it.

Countries with the worse situations have the most problematic healthcare systems

@AdamL Are you sure GRUB was installed correctly?

If it, you're not going to have a very successful booting experience, no matter what else you've done. Did you do a vanilla install, or did you use UEFI or something?

Sorry, I should have written "If not..."

There is only one pantry that is open near me. All the others are closed. A lot of food insecured people will still go.

The earliest infected places were the most upscale, and now the fast spread places are the slums

@StephenKitt Genuine question: why should governments want to make up indicators? And what would be the point in making changes take a least two weeks to be visible?

(Of course I'm seeing the whole issue from the perspective of a European country -- one, Italy, that has probably made several mistakes, but that is apparently not cheating much).

@fra-san governments aren’t making up indicators; but people are trying to make sense of the numbers, as shown in the graph above, which means we’re tracking an evolving situation with new indicators

and the two-week delay is caused by the length of time it takes from exposure to symptoms

if you make a change in policy now, you won’t see its effects for another two weeks; you might see some results before then, but you won’t be able to isolate the variation to be reasonably convinced that your change had an effect

epidemics are usually measured after-the-fact

@fra-san Made up, as in invented, not as in lying.

@FaheemMitha sorry I took a break to watch X-files and it was a chem trail episode, like a really dumb, sweaty, chem trail plot. Anyway ill get back to you with those details I just don't think as quickly as you lot do in comp sci

@FaheemMitha I used Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.9.0.exe with the iso I previously linked to make the boot disk. I will look through the grub command line options to see if there is a means of verifying the install of it was successful or not

@StephenKitt as a bench mark for global statistics, is it worth noting that over 70,000 women die giving birth every year on average?

after fact indeed, there is a huge danger in attempting to model expectation from data being collected in real time

but given it's asymptomatic nature as you mentioned, a delay between infection and time of presenting symptoms, the isolation measures are warranted. Of course it may seem like over kill if they are effective, people have no means of seeing what would have been the case if they were not taken

oh I’m not arguing against isolation, I think it’s amazing (in a good way) that we’ve accepted collectively that we can pull the hand-brake on the economy to save human lives

I’m just saying that it’s too early to draw conclusions

@StephenKitt Oh, sorry. I (mis)read it as "the values (of indicators) are made up", and not as "new indicators are being invented".

@FaheemMitha Yeah, right.

@AdamL Ok, but we're not in comp sci.

@AdamL The GRUB installation is part of the installation process.

It will (usually) ask you if you want to install it.

Though it's possible a very automated install might not ask. Though I still think it should.

I had a can of green beans.

I got it from a pantry