I noticed _DEVICE$ now includes [DISCONNECTED] when a controller is disconnected but find no mention of this in the Wiki. When will the Wiki be updated with the new controller features offered by v3.7.0?

This is my first program contribution, it worked so well I thought I'd pass it on.



Here is the backstory about why I wrote this program.



I had a problem. My Windows computer started BSODing during initial boot/startup. Since it was an actual BSOD with frowny face, this means it's a Windows problem, not a hardware one. After several attempts to use any of the recovery methods which would leave my files intact, I came to the conclusion that I am in a pickle. Then, I find the recovery partition no longer works.  Now, I came to the condclusion that I was, quite frankly, screwed. So, I used the time-tested method of attacking a problem: I threw money at it.



I went on Amazon and purchased a refurbished machine. The new (to me) machine is actually better than the one I had. A "Dell OptiPlex 7020 Desktop Computer,Intel Quad Core i7 4790 3.6Ghz, 32GB Ram New 2TB SSD." After I received it, I discovered that while it has 4 cores (as I had expected) it has 8 threads (which i did not.) So the computer is actually better than what I thought I was buying.  With that I purchased something I really needed: a 4 TB ruggedized external hard drive, so I can back up my computers without worrying about someone dropping it. I already have a 6 TB external, but I don't feel good about it being moved around.



The price was terrific: with Windows 10 Professional, it was $265.00. Add the external drive and sales tax, $401. So I set up the new computer, and have it build a Windows recovery SSD on an SD card. Plug the reader into the old computer, reset the BIOS to allow boot from an external drive, and I try again. Nothing works. So, from my new computer, I download a Linux distribution,Xubuntu. Repeat the process and it boots fine, file manager can see the internal drive, and it can even see the 6TB external, but not the 4TB ruggedized (even though the new machine does). So I copied my most recent files from my working directory to the 6 TB.




The Problem


I do have a backup of my huge collection of downloaded open-source software on the 6TB but it's old., from last year. It does not have local changes I made from writing programs. On Windows, I just have Free File Sync scan the work directory and mirror to backup. So that is out. I had, however, downloaded the Linux version of QB64PE, but attempt to install it fails because the Wifi adapter apparently is not recognized; it can't download required packages.

Well, I could just copy the new archive to replace the backup. About 1.3 million files, 100,000+ directories, 411 GB, and will take about 500 hours, So, that's not an answer. So how can I solve this problem? So, it hits me: run an 'ls' directory scan with recursive subdirectory search, piped to a file, then take that file over to my new computer and write a filtering program to run there. I had ls exclude owner and group, and list one  file per line. Output from ls looks like this:



Output:

• The current directory is shown followed by a colon.
  
• The first letter of a file entry is  'd' for a directory. Ignore these; we get specific directories from the prior item.
  
• Size summary starts with "total ".
  
• There is a blank line before a new directory.
  
• Items from 2023 have a colon in the time field, older files have a year in the field.
  
• Entries are separated by one space, with the file name last.
  

Never noticed it before but my menu selection screens have a memory leak! It keeps adding about 8MB/s of system memory. It is a pretty forward loop and the MOUSE calls are not the source (they were all commented out when I was trying to locate the source of the leak). I am really at a loss here....

This is a program that fabricates desktop environment color sets for KDE Plasma. :O

It creates a definition which changes the colors for the window title bar and stuff contained inside the window such as buttons and text fields. It also affects the "main" panel that contains the desktop menu, digital clock, notifications etc.

The random scheme could be improved. Especially for the window title bar. Generally dark has to contrast with light. It seems far too often it creates bright pink as foreground color, but the important thing is that it could be seen. The color settings for the tooltip are not touched. The original definition was from "Oxygen Cold".

This program creates only "dark" modes. To get light ones might have to tone down what two of the functions do. Swap "lightcolor$" and "darkcolor$" assignments on RHS for starters. But something has to be done also about "twincolor$" so it returns dark colors, ie. the value is related to "darkcolor$".

The color definitions are dropped right into the area the System Settings/Appearance/Colors expects them so they could be viewed straight away. Otherwise it's clunky to load one definition at a time from disk only to see what it is. After all, they are harmless text files. (Um, for some people being unable to see anything on the screen clearly, because foreground and background colors are almost the same, counts as "causing harm" but anyway. Windows doesn't allow it, but also doesn't allow too many other combinations which could be sensible but could tire the eyes faster.)

The output example of this program will not change the position nor behavior of widgets or other screen elements, or any aspect of its appearance than the colors. This doesn't affect applications such as Kate and Konsole which have distinct settings, even if they were written by KDE. (Kate/KWrite does have a plethora of color settings and a program like this one could be created for it.) It might cause some "Plasmoids" and other widgets to look weird, and it might not work well with certain visual effects the young people love so well. It won't affect a bunch of other applications that keep their own settings such as Geany.

Silly Love Songs:

Inspired by Charlie's BAM version I started from scratch for QB64 version with added full colorization mode.
Use b key to toggle color modes or esc to quit, any other key shows another random tile tessellated screen:

This is a silly program that could almost be used as screensaver. It needs music LOL, so it's better.

I derrived the idea from a book on programming games in GW-BASIC by David L. Heiserman (had to look it up), but it's not the book being sold on Amazon that readily comes up in the searches. I think it was called "101 Games In BASIC" or alike. The programs weren't all games; some of them did silly things on the screen. My favorite from them was the "Hacker's Aid". I made my own version with fancy text-graphics and with beeping from "SOUND". It even emulated dial-tone telephone and ringing LOL.

Honorable mention was the "Surrogate Cusser" which could have gotten boring quickly. Fiddlesticks!

I don't remember very well but there might have been a version of that book for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, or for the Model III which was incapable of sound. Instead of sound it had a subroutine that "blinked" a short message on the screen. That was its favorite trick.

This program has the "robot" moving in a different way from the old program it was derrived from. It has a quirk not found in the old program.

Hi,

if code is running inside a SUB, can I somehow get the SUB name?
This would be great to have for debugging or logging.

I'm looking for a reliable way to determine if a drive letter is in use but I'm running into some difficulties.

Take the following small clip as an example:

A$ = "F:\"
If _DirExists(A$) Then
    Print A$; " Exists"
Else
    Print A$; "Does not exist"
End If

Normally, this works fine and indicates if the drive letter contained in A$ exists. But now consider these two exceptions:

1) Suppose I have a thumbdrive attached to the system that has been wiped clean. By wiped clean, I mean you open DISKPART, select the thumbdrive, and perform a "CLEAN" on that drive. In this instance, there will be no partitions on the drive, but in File Explorer, the drive still shows up with a drive letter. However, the clip above will indicate that this drive letter does NOT exist. As a result, if I try to assign that drive letter to another drive, it will fail because it is already in use.

2) The same thing happens if I connect a drive that has BitLocker encryption but has not yet been unlocked. The QB64PE code will indicate that the drive letter does not exist even though it is already in use.

Any suggestions on a better way to determine if a drive letter is in use?

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue...508#fedora

This but sucks so very hard.

It looks like IBM and Red Hat want as less people as possible programming, especially if the user is stuck using one operating system which belongs to Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise Linux family. They are not leaving behind the GNU Compiler Collection because they want to save disk space on the ISO!

They didn't dare touch Git (yet). :/

Kudos to Slackware, soon to celebrate its 30th anniversary for never, ever taking off many of the "devel" libraries and other tools needed to build PPA's and stuff like that. Because that was a requirement on Unix. Long live the slack!

I was going to post this on the QB64PE v3.7 release announcement thread but created a separate topic here because I would like other people to react to these news about one of the most popular distros around. React only to the review about Fedora 38 if you want. Correct me if this insinuation about "gcc" is not right LOL.