[wellylug] Kernel Compile - SUCCESS!

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <1062587451.17143.1122.camel at genesis>, Centurion Computer Technology 
Ltd writes:
>On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 22:58, Enkidu wrote:
>> On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 22:30:31 +1200, you wrote:
>> >[...] compiling the lot as per the sourceforge newbiedoc I found and viola.
>> 
>> Your laptop turns into a largish stringed musical instrument? I hope
>> that's a typo. It annoys me when people spell non-English words wrong,
>> though an honest typo is OK of course. I've seen THAT word spelt
>> "wullah" for the Great Goose's sake!
>
>Well How is it spelt then...........

Voilà (ie, "voila" with a grave accent on the a).  Most of the
pronounciation of it comes from the "oi" which is a "wuh" sort of sound
in French.

IMHO "wullah" isn't too bad a guess from the sound for someone used to
only English spelling/pronounciation and who'd never seen it written
down.  (Obviously it'd be handy if everyone knew how to write
every word from every language, but that's hardly a realistic goal.)

>> I can understand people leaving off accents, since keyboards don't
>> easily supply those characters.....

You what?

There are plenty of keyboards with the accents in convenient places.
I've used both French French keyboards and Belgian French keyboards (and
yes, they're different, fun huh?) and the accents are very convenient.
However the numerals, punctuation, etc, becomes fairly inconvenient.
And if you're programming in C or a similar language, well, I hope you
have a more patient soul than me, because [, ], {, }, etc are all rather
tricky to get at (which is where trigraphs came in -- yeech).

And lest y'all think you're missing out, there's nothing at all stopping
you from telling Linux you have a French keyboard even if your keycaps
don't agree -- you simply need to have a good memory for where the keys
end up (just like touch typing, really).  Oh, and remember that it's
not QWERTY any more -- it's AZERTY.

And FWIW, both vim (which I use) and emacs have compose functions for
building accented characters.  In vim it is ctrl-K followed by the
character followed by the accent (although annoyingly these accents
changed between versions of vim).  For instance the à above is composed
with:

ctrl-K a ! 

I don't use emacs often enough to remember the compose functions there,
but I'm sure it's in the help.

Ewen