Created by Terry Henderson on February 05, 2013, at 01:44 PM
Suggested post-install procedures:
The first thing I do is check the time and date to make sure it is correct, if not I correct it with command
ntpdate pool.ntp.org
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Created by Terry Henderson on November 28, 2011, at 11:41 AM
...Unity vs Gnome vs Xfce vs Mate (Mate is a new one)...
The Ubuntu community is in a tailspin over Desktop Environments. Here is an article w/comments about the Unity vs Gnome controversy and it discusses alternatives. One alternative in particular is Mate, which is really just a Gnome2 continuation for the last couple of Ubuntu releases. The comments are as interesting as the article so don't skip that part. Aside from the assumption that the whole world uses Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives, the article is fairly interesting / informative and explains that the reason for Unity is to support the explosion of touch screen tablets on the market these days, or at least, that's what it appears to imply..
http://www.thevarguy.com/2011/11/23/could-mate-be-the-savior-of-the-gnome-2-linux-interface/
As for me, I don't have a touch screen tablet and I'm an xfce user [now-days]. I find xfce simple, easy to use and easy to customize.
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Created by Terry Henderson on September 25, 2011, at 10:42 PM
Any Prairie Home Companion fans here?
A neighbor of mine got me re-interested in the show when he told me what a good time he had at one of the "Summer Love" shows at Bass Hall earlier this moth, I realized why I didn't catch the show. Even though it comes on two times each weekend, I seem to be doing other stuff and miss it almost every week. (It plays at 5 pm on Saturday and 10:30 am on Sunday each week, our time.) Anyway, I decided to try and capture it and sure, enough, it's not hard at all. I caught it this Saturday (September 24 at 5 pm) with cron job(s):
01 17 * * sat streamripper http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/play/64.pls -l 7800
04 19 * * sat pkill streamripper
(This particular stream will end on it's own but I've set it to only capture for two hours, (7800 seconds) The kill job may not be necessary but just wanted to make sure it doesn't keep on...)
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Created by Terry Henderson on July 06, 2010, at 09:08 PM
My first 64bit system - very nice - a few bumps on the road but a very nice system in the end.
XCcube
AMD 64 3300+ (cpu family: 15)
Mem: 1G
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Created by Ed Leach? on May 01, 2010, at 09:00 AM
Here is a perl script that lists the largest files in a directory. I don't remember where I got this. Give it the directory you are interested in as an argument.
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Created by Terry Henderson on April 08, 2010, at 01:37 PM
Most desktop users don't use crontab because it seems too hard and they just don't find a task worthy of such a complicated process. It seems complicated at first, but once you've made an entry or two it's easy and seeing a few examples will break the ice. To edit/create crontab jobs, simply issue command
crontab -e
And I think most systems just use the vi editor. (There is an interactive turotial: vimtutor Or here is a really good article from Linux Journal: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6542 )
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Created by Terry Henderson on March 13, 2010, at 09:41 PM
You can do an image of a drive or partition and send it across the net to another system.
dd if=/dev/hda | ssh $user@host 'gzip - > /home/user/image.gz'
or
dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh $user@$host 'gzip - > /pub/image.gz'
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Created by Ed Leach? on March 09, 2010, at 11:18 AM
Prices recently found for a 2 gig Sansa Clip:
Radio Shack - 49.99
Amazon - 34.44 (397 reviews!)
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Created by Ed Leach? on February 25, 2010, at 06:57 PM
Very neat hierarchical list:
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Created by Ed Leach? on February 25, 2010, at 05:54 PM
Chris taught me this some time ago to backup a full disk:
gzip < /dev/sda > mybackup.img.gz
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Created by Terry Henderson on February 23, 2010, at 11:47 PM
"I think Solaris is way far advanced, and I love Linux, but I think Solaris is a more capable operating system," Ellison said. "I think Solaris' home is in the high-end of the data center, and it will be a long time before Linux catches up. I don't think the high end is in trouble at all."
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Created by Terry Henderson on February 17, 2010, at 11:38 AM
I finally decided to do the upgrade on my laptop [from 12.2 - 13.0] and it turned out ok, but I found KDE-4.2.4 a little rough around the edges on this system, not bad but just a few things that were not working as well as it should. For one thing, the window decorations were intermittently distorted at the top. It may have had something to do with the upgrade procedure, I usually just backup /home and restore after a fresh install and I didn't do that this time. At any rate, I heard there were significant improvements in KDE-4.3 and since we can apparently go to 4.3.1 without having to upgrade to -current I thought I'd try it. The end result seems pretty nice, there are a number of improvements and new features, an overall cleaner and neater look and feel, I highly recommend KDE-4.3.1 and the upgrade is fairly easy.
Just do:
lftp -c 'open http://cardinal.lizella.net/~vbatts/kde/kde4-packages/4.3.1/x86/ ; mirror KDE-upgrade'
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Created by Terry Henderson on January 25, 2010, at 06:51 PM
The computer situation at my sister and her husband's place has evolved to the point that they both have their own PCs now and are connected to the internet via wireless router. (User names on these two computers are NOT same.)
The way I have it set up [after the second visit] is pretty good and fairly simple too.
The situation is this;
Candi's PC is in the living room and Tod's is in the office. The dhcp range is
from 192.168.6.100 - 192.168.6.150 and so I set Tod's PC to
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Created by Chris Cox on August 18, 2009, at 10:42 PM
(but were afraid to ask)
At the heart of almost any operating system is a filesystem. That is, a place to keep files containing data. To organize such files, most filesystems support the idea of a folder or directory and those are usually hierarchical, that is, one folder can contain other folders and so on.
Inside of Unix and Linux, files are very important. They not only serve as places for data and programs and such, but also serve as access points for devices and sometimes provide views and access into the deep recesses of the kernel itself!
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Created by Chris Cox on June 20, 2009, at 07:02 PM
According to Microsoft, everything you have heard about Linux is lie.... well, actually what Microsoft says is that you perceive incorrectly. Of course, when Microsoft says "Linux", they are actually referring to a Linux distribution and in particular (because Microsoft would like to isolate things as much as possible), Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 
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Created by Terry Henderson on October 25, 2008, at 09:35 AM
Bootable USB sticks are really catching on:
See:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
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Created by Terry Henderson on August 26, 2008, at 08:28 AM
I tried billix out and works like a charm. It's easy to install and use.
Billix is a bootable linux OS that fits on a 256MB thumb drive, (it runs on DSL Linux).
On my first test run I was happy to see that it had no problems with the wireless NIC on my laptop and connected to the internet just fine.
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Created by Terry Henderson on June 27, 2008, at 09:17 AM
I recently upgraded a couple PCs from 7.10 to 8.04 "Hardy Heron". Even though the new release came out over two months ago, I ran the upgrades Wed Jun 18. I usually hold back on distribution upgrades so that the patches can catch up - not a real big fan of bugs - maybe this time I didn't wait long enough.
So, I just ran across a small piece of bleeding edge brokenness, even after a pretty extensive pile of critical patches [to "Hardy Heron"].
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Created by Terry Henderson on June 24, 2008, at 10:55 AM
...[for Ubuntu]
To see what kernel you're running now:
uname -a
(This will tell us which one NOT to remove.)
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Created by Terry Henderson on June 30, 2007, at 11:31 AM
Never would have guessed; udev would switch the NICs when I wasn't lookin'.
[To keep a long story long]:
I resurrected 2 computers for a friend / neighbor.
One had an Intel Celeron with a dead MB. So I dug up an old used replacement [Soyo SY-K7VTA] mainboard with an Athlon 1G and it was a pretty decent system [memory = 768M DDR RAM]. (Strictly a low budget operation.)
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