1 Introduction

Sometimes it’s not enough to simply “get on the net”; what’s important is to stay on the net. If the network is depressed, it might start ignoring you. You can use GNU Alive to cheer it up. But, first things first. Do you know what this command:

ping -i 149 ipaddr

does? If you answered “yes” and don’t mind typing that command into a shell, then you do not need GNU Alive, as its functionality is roughly equivalent to that command. In this case, go ahead and save yourself some time and disk space and remove this package from your computer!

If you answered “no” instead, perhaps that’s because you know what ping ipaddr does, but are not so sure about -i 149. Well, it turns out that -i n means repeat the ping every n seconds, instead of every second, the default. So now you know, and can blithely proceed to remove GNU Alive from your computer. Go ahead, what are you waiting for?

Still here? Fine. You must be curious, then, about the “roughly equivalent” functionality mentioned above. Surely there must be something to recommend GNU Alive. Was such profligate duplication always so?

• Features
• History