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you are missing a third component to understand everything clearly: kerneld

IMHO, I believe systemd is spying on kerneld but I ain't too sure ;-(

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Kerneld/...

If any OS was designed from the start to be multi-user administered remotely, it was Linux considering its Unix legacy. Here's a primer. The short answer: bash shell. The long answer: bash + GNU utilities

What? OpenRC? Why run a mean a lean init system written C ? The heresy !

When you could show the world how geeky you are by running a horrible pile of hacked-together shell-scripts as the gods themselves (= Old versions of UNIX) intended ?
With said shell script running inside bash, a shell interpreter whose BUG manpage section not only opens with... :

It's too big and too slow.

...but also a shell interpreter that features full blown networking support out of the box ?

Turn your geek card, you non-Sysvinit / non-Bash script heretic !

You need to look into multicast streaming, here's a starting point.

About 5 years ago I built a little relay box to control household outlets (inspired by http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coff... ). So I can control my lights/stereo amplifier/etc. with a dinky web interface or via SMS (through Google Voice emails). Security is dubious (to say the least!), and yet somehow, I haven't been the victim of an attack, "friends" aside ;)

Also, the HDMI CEC on the Raspberry Pi allows me to control basic features of my A/V system remotely (my TV and receiver are not internet-enabled). Really handy given that I don't have line-of-sight access to my receiver. Much better than v1.0, which was to use a mirror...

I know how you feel, I had a similar experience at first. I think Linux is actually more difficult for advanced windows users than for novices - advanced users are used to feeling like they know all the answers and being able to just get things done, so it's more daunting coming to an unfamiliar environment.

If you want deep knowledge and you're technical and patient, you might want to check out Linux From Scratch, which is a book that goes through building your own Linux system from the ground up. It's probably more involved than what you're looking for at the moment - it's probably something better suited to someone with at least a few years Linux experience under their belt, but it does give you a really good understanding of a lot of stuff.

There are a lot of guides out there. Search engines are your friend. Search for [distro] [problem], e.g "ubuntu install software". also searching or "howto" is helpful, e.g "ubuntu apache howto".

One site I have used is the linux documentation project. They have a bunch of guides. In particular, Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Sounds like one which would be good for you. I have referred back to their advanced bash scripting guide many, many, many times over the years.

On the command line, man is your friend: type "man [command]" to get the documentation for most commands, e.g "man ls". There is also "man -k [searchterm]" if you don't know what command you want. It's dry reading but usually pretty detailed.

But I think perhaps what you really want is IRC. Pick a distro and jump on to the freenode IRC server and look for a relevant and active channel, e.g #ubuntu. Ask questions. You'll find someone (or a group of someones) who will be happy to answer questions. An advantage of IRC is speed - you get a response more quickly than on a forum.

In terms of installing software, it's not like windows - It's much, much better. most distros have a pretty user-friendly GUI for it these days. It'll offer you tens of thousands of apps with search and screenshots and ratings and all kinds of bells and whistles. And if you use the command-line you'll soon get the hang of apt or yum (depending on which distro you choose).

Go with a distro aimed at newbies. They are all very configurable and it's unlikely you'll need to switch for a technical reason, the community is the biggest difference IMHO - the distros aimed at newbies have better documentation and more helpful communities. I don't want to tell you what to choose (it's all about it being your choice after all), but IMHO you should choose ubuntu or one of its variants/derivatives.

It's not easy at first, but as your knowledge builds up it gets easier and easier. You will hit a point where you feel comfortable and then you will start learning a lot of things really quickly and then suddenly you'll feel really comfortable and you'll never want to go back. Don't give in to the initial frustration - stick with it, it's worth it.

I know how you feel, I had a similar experience at first. I think Linux is actually more difficult for advanced windows users than for novices - advanced users are used to feeling like they know all the answers and being able to just get things done, so it's more daunting coming to an unfamiliar environment.

If you want deep knowledge and you're technical and patient, you might want to check out Linux From Scratch, which is a book that goes through building your own Linux system from the ground up. It's probably more involved than what you're looking for at the moment - it's probably something better suited to someone with at least a few years Linux experience under their belt, but it does give you a really good understanding of a lot of stuff.

There are a lot of guides out there. Search engines are your friend. Search for [distro] [problem], e.g "ubuntu install software". also searching or "howto" is helpful, e.g "ubuntu apache howto".

One site I have used is the linux documentation project. They have a bunch of guides. In particular, Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Sounds like one which would be good for you. I have referred back to their advanced bash scripting guide many, many, many times over the years.

On the command line, man is your friend: type "man [command]" to get the documentation for most commands, e.g "man ls". There is also "man -k [searchterm]" if you don't know what command you want. It's dry reading but usually pretty detailed.

But I think perhaps what you really want is IRC. Pick a distro and jump on to the freenode IRC server and look for a relevant and active channel, e.g #ubuntu. Ask questions. You'll find someone (or a group of someones) who will be happy to answer questions. An advantage of IRC is speed - you get a response more quickly than on a forum.

In terms of installing software, it's not like windows - It's much, much better. most distros have a pretty user-friendly GUI for it these days. It'll offer you tens of thousands of apps with search and screenshots and ratings and all kinds of bells and whistles. And if you use the command-line you'll soon get the hang of apt or yum (depending on which distro you choose).

Go with a distro aimed at newbies. They are all very configurable and it's unlikely you'll need to switch for a technical reason, the community is the biggest difference IMHO - the distros aimed at newbies have better documentation and more helpful communities. I don't want to tell you what to choose (it's all about it being your choice after all), but IMHO you should choose ubuntu or one of its variants/derivatives.

It's not easy at first, but as your knowledge builds up it gets easier and easier. You will hit a point where you feel comfortable and then you will start learning a lot of things really quickly and then suddenly you'll feel really comfortable and you'll never want to go back. Don't give in to the initial frustration - stick with it, it's worth it.

Sarah seems rather talented, considering she (apparently) wrote and maintained the USB 3.0 code for Linux. And Matthew seems okay, having been awarded the 2013 FSF Free Software Award.

But the news here: A PNW Millennial and a Feminist do not agree with someone who is the architect of a giant, massively adopted project, and who has no time nor inclination to mentor people. It's going to be great in the next 5-10 years as the coddled Millennials meet the kind of international attitude where being overly polite is rude because it wastes time (German specifically, confirmed).

The Sarah Sharp thread shows her as a typical Social Justice Warrior who flies off the handle incomprehensibly. If she is a typical woman who saves everything up until it boils over (sorry for generalizing based on every woman I've ever met, minus two who do not fit the stereotype, but bear with me) then she may have a point that we just don't see in print. But we don't see it in print.

As for Matthew, This shows the reasoning behind Linus not adopting BSD style securelevels. Not that he refuses to listen - he clearly understands the limitations, and explained how he would accept an implementation of securelevels. In 1998.

And is it just a coincidence that he decided to fork after Sarah quit, and references that in his blog post? It doesn't matter, he's arguing a 17 year old point, and Linus has already said how he would accept the code.

For example, I would personally never be interested in using the BSD kind
of securelevels: by design the BSD securelevels would prevent me from
doing exactly the kinds of things I need to do (ie install a new kernel
and reboot, which is a very obvious security risk).
In short, to me the BSD securelevels are completely useless. Why should I
support them, when there is something that is a _superset_ of the BSD
behaviour, that I could actually find useful (ie I might well want to
limit some people from doing specific things).
Read my email again - I specifically said that if you want the bsd
behaviour you can get it with the per-process-bitmap approach. I don't
want to (I _cannot_) work in that kind of fascist setup, but it certainly
works well enough.

More:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/...

Matthew characterized is this way:

... having to deal with interminable arguments over the naming of an interface because Linus has an undying hatred of BSD securelevel, or having my name forever associated with the deepthroating of Microsoft because Linus couldn't be bothered asking questions about the reasoning behind a design before trashing it.

Is that anything like the same thing?

Sarah Sharp - Portland State University
BS, Computer Engineering
2002 â" 2007
Pacific Northwest Millennial

Matthew Garrett
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...
".. I'm very aware of how different my life might have been if Hanna hadn't gone to the trouble of ensuring that I knew not to be a dick. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In October 2014, Garrett stated on his blog that he would no longer contribute Linux kernel changes relating to Intel hardware, in response to Intel pulling their ads from Gamasutra over the Gamergate controversy."

Linus Benedict Torvalds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish American
He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel

At an online chat with Finlandâ(TM)s Aalto University, Linus explained:

"Iâ(TM)d like to be a nice person and curse les

I have one functional hand and I have edited my keymap in linux console to have sticky keys in console. In Xfce it's easier, just toggle a switch in the accessibility settings.

Doesn't the Linux kernel group hold a very similar stance in that you cannot use the kernels internal APIs without breaching copyright and thus falling under the GPL as a derivative work?

Not really. TL;DR: Linus doesn't say so, and he holds the trademark, so he gets to decide what makes "Linux(tm)".

The word is "dumb."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remo...
http://gizmodo.com/5887808/eve...

This may be a shock to some folks: the serial console is alive and well!

I'm just going to leave this here.

Honestly, it's really kinda sad to read some of these comments - especially the over the top "reverse discrimination" ones. What's up with all of this anger and aggression over something this insignificant? Jeeze, put things in perspective. Women have to deal with a ton of discriminatory and sexist bullshit all the time - where's the anger and outrage then? I'm not advocating for affirmative action, but the question has to be asked: Why the disproportionate rage? When you answer that, maybe you will also find out why women aren't prevalent in tech.

I'm talking data de-duplication searching tools,

Son, are you kidding me?

multi-monitor window managers,

What?

downloading / p2p tools,

Excuse me?

media players,

You fail it

media encoders

Wrong

etc.

Are you even trying?


In unrelated news, slashdot doesn't let me post this reply as-is, because it consists of too short lines, on average. Wtf. Fooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

1. Create a linux image (you can use Clonezilla, g4u or Ghost) that requires labusers authenticate to either LDAP, AD or something so you have their actual user details for logging and auditing. Alternatively you could boot it from the network or from CD. Another alternative is to use deep freeze.
2. Ensure that the system is checked for integrity on startup and the latest image is downloaded and applied if it doesn't match the correct version. cron a reboot that forces this if you're worried about users doing stuff and not rebooting.
3. Ensure that logs are written to a syslog log server or that you get the authlogs somewhere (who logged in where, on what ip address and when etc...).
4. Give users as much access as you need to (yes, even root). If they do anything wrong you have audit logs and because of the imaging unwanted software and programs will be removed.

TLDP - The Linux Documentation Project. It has links to the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide which can introduce you to the BASH shell and its limitations. Another good read is the Power On to BASH Prompt which, though from last decade, isn't quite out of date.
 
oblig: csh considered harmful

TLDP - The Linux Documentation Project. It has links to the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide which can introduce you to the BASH shell and its limitations. Another good read is the Power On to BASH Prompt which, though from last decade, isn't quite out of date.
 
oblig: csh considered harmful

Read TLDP's Coffee HOWTO ( http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coff... ), messed around with some simple hardware. Now I use Google Voice to control my lights via SMS -- a hack in the traditional sense, I suppose.

You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use /dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the /dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from /dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null . See:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.

Aside from the hardware devices in /dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the /proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

If you ever did need to program for the kernel itself, you do so via a module:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/...

My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.

You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use /dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the /dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from /dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null . See:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.

Aside from the hardware devices in /dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the /proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

If you ever did need to program for the kernel itself, you do so via a module:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/...

My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.

You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use /dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the /dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from /dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null . See:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.

Aside from the hardware devices in /dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the /proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

If you ever did need to program for the kernel itself, you do so via a module:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/...

My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.

All the novels of Jacqueline Suzanne (one of the giants).

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

And THIS.

Serial lines don't fall into any category labeled "Smart Network"

Once the attacker can get at your serial lines, they are pretty much inside your plant. Serial runs aren't that long..

The problem come when someone tries to send this across a cheap unencrypted modem connection or some such.
If they put them on TCP/IP and send it through an encrypted link the problem is largely solved.

In the United States, the analog "plain old telephone" network was designed to handle 300 to 3400Hz voice traffic, which in practice allowed for 9600bps communication at 2400 baud even if the telephone switches were using 1970s (or older?) technology and the wire from the switch to the end user was who-knows-how-old. By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.

Disclaimer: The above is from unreferenced text available at Wikipedia (Modem, as of 22:53, 26 November 2013). Caveat reader.

You should have looked further down the article. While the mathematical basis for 33.6kbps modems was developed in the 1980s, actual 33.6kbps modems weren't seen until the mid-1990s. Most of the release dates are referencing this, but having lived through the time, those dates match reality.

Besides Linux Kernel Newbies, there's also The Linux Documentation Project, which has en emphasis on users and system administrators but might be useful for new developers.

There are also many good books for developers:
Robert Love - Linux Kernel Development: a very good introduction, doesn't require much previous experience or knowledge about the Kernel;
Bovet and Cesati - Understanding the Linux Kernel: more thorough and advanced than the previous one;
Corbet, Rubini and Kroah-Hartman - Linux Device Drivers (this one is available for free under a Creative Commons license).

Among coutless other resources you can easily find online for all sorts of different projects and subsystems, including mailing lists.

--

The reason there is no single centralised place, or hub, for developers is because Linux is not really developed as a single big project. Many features and subsystems have their own websites, frameworks, development tools, mailing lists etc. I am not even sure how you would define "basic kernel code". A good place to start is writing device drivers, looking at a lot of kernel code, and fiddling with it.

It's sad even how few people claiming to be "C" programmers really understand how much work there is to memory management in a modern system beyond libc's "malloc" and "free". Go write (or even just find and read/understand) a useful, efficient, multithreaded embedded/mobile memory management library. Then take it down a level and go understand Linux kernel memory management.

And I saw you posted that C programmers don't really need to use libraries, anyway. So I assume you are just calling mmap and brk syscalls directly in your code? Sounds simple enough...

Does it hurt to be as ignorant as you are, or does the ignorance come with some sort of pain-reducing features of its own?

What is PR.

Some news articles that would probably not exist without PR professionals:
http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/trends/how-linux-foundation-runs-its-virtual-of/240156624
http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-to-support-linux-kvm-virtualization-on-power-systems/
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Linux-Mint-15-A-better-Ubuntu-for-the-desktop-1873682.html

I just randomly picked Linux as a search item in Google News. It could have been anything. Almost everything you read in a publication was "sold" to that publication by a PR professional. Did you think journalists actually spent time researching and finding out stuff on their own? Honestly, if it wasn't sold by a PR agency, you probably never heard about it.

Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.

Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.

By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO, but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.

Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.

Fuck it, karma to burn anyway.

You could try doing a little basic research before posting your question.

Here's a toaster that meets more of your requirements, though it runs NetBSD rather than Linux:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1018836/toaster-pc-runs-bsd-makes-toast

Let us know if that doesn't meet your requirements for some reason, there may be some NetBSD packages that can do what you need.

Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.

Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.

By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO, but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.

Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.

Fuck it, karma to burn anyway.

There is no cheat sheet on a subject so vast. I recommend starting here and read, read, read : http://www.tldp.org./

sit back

• get yourself a good book about linux: mine was this, but it can also be this one
• Keep away from any computer,
• read it through. Enjoy!!!
• Once you're done with it, go for debian, spend a few days installing
• spend some weeks making all your hardware be seen
• learn , learn, learn
• you're done!!!

I honestly think this is the best way. I've seen many go for "ubuntu" but you don't pass a certain level in which you can do nothing outside ubuntu, and you can barely get by within it.

sit back

• get yourself a good book about linux: mine was this, but it can also be this one
• Keep away from any computer,
• read it through. Enjoy!!!
• Once you're done with it, go for debian, spend a few days installing
• spend some weeks making all your hardware be seen
• learn , learn, learn
• you're done!!!

I honestly think this is the best way. I've seen many go for "ubuntu" but you don't pass a certain level in which you can do nothing outside ubuntu, and you can barely get by within it.

Even if the submitter kinda implies he or she wants to learn by doing (or, "the hard way"), I can't get a feeling out of my chest that all this learning by doing would be much more effective with at least some reading homework before and/or during the doing. For that, I recommend at least skimming through this: http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/index.html

Yeah, there's some stuff the submitter probably already knows or isn't all that interested about for now... and that's why it's a good idea to skim through first.

With dd you can create an exact image. Unfortunately you need to figure out if your hard drive can be read in a modern system. Xenix aka OpenServer was far more popular than Unixware in the x86 arena so I wonder what kind of architecture it is?

Here are the steps 1. Create a Linux system 2. Hook up the hard drive to it and mount it (Can Linux read Unixware formatted volumes?) and then run dd off the old hard drive and output it as a binary to the new hard drive. 3. Find a Virtualization solution that is compatilbe to load the image in

I doubt VMWare supports Unixware but it might. This is going to be a challenge and I know you may hate me for saying it but keep the server. Unless there is a new version of the software that is Linux compatible why fix what isn't broken? Keep in mind old SCO is Tarantula and owns Unixware. New SCO aka SCO Group does not own Unixware but is a just a licensing troll.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO-9.html Quote from page: The support for BFS is included in the Linux kernel since version 2.3.25. If you are using an earlier kernel, check if BFS homepage contains a patch which adds support for this filesystem. The homepage also contains bugfixes/enhancement which are not yet merged into the official kernel.

Do's and don't's of encouraging women in Linux:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x168.html

Ada initiative, supporting women in open technology and culture:
http://adainitiative.org/

Ada initiative (temporary) donation page:
http://adainitiative.org/donation-server-down/

Actually a linux server on it's own you can calibrate the system clock to be incredibly accurate. you can calculate the drift of the cmos clock and adjust to get pretty darn accurate.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock-2.html

For example, at my previous company, inside the local intranet I could type 'bugzilla' in the URL bar and it would resolve to the bugzilla of our company. It's really convenient. And now this sort of system will be impossible because it might conflict with the .wiki domain name space.

Seems like someone has never heard of default domains and doesn't understand how domain name lookups work from the client side.

Good idea. But you can only tunnel traffic originating from programs supporting the SOCKS protocol, right ?

Wrong. Since you own both ends, it's trivial to set up ppp over ssh to make it a real and routable link. Here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/ppp-ssh/

Bullshit.

9600 didn't show up until the mid 1980s. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-29.html

If you're gonna lie, at least do some research first so that those of us from that era might believe you for a sec.

Bzzzzzt thankyouforplaying...
AT&T supplied 9600 baud data lines for the ARPANET way back in the late 60s. And yes... They used modems!!!
Almost all of the endpoints for the ARPANET were universities. That would make someone that claiming to use a 9600 baud terminal in the late 70s easily accurate and using a technology that was at least a decade old.

So I suspect two things: (1) You weren't there. (2) You are an anonymous idiot who can't Google.

Local multi-user is an aspect that has somehow been neglected in PC gaming. I think you are right, it should be possible.

On a more general note (and getting a bit off topic), using a generic PC as multi-user device should be possible too, as far as hardware is concerned. Take a modern PC with decent speed, plenty of USB ports and an ATI Eyefinity card that can handle 4-6 displays. Hook up all you need for 4-6 users and you have a relatively cheap way of equipping an office. But so far, there seems to be not much development in that direction. All I found is this link from 2004:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/XFree-Local-multi-user-HOWTO/

Of course, it also means that the police wouldn't be able to listen in either without setting up a fake cell phone tower to be a MitM

I don't get it. Somehow, you seem to have missed that one of the main points of a key exchange is to protect you from a MITM attack? See: Certificates, how do they work? You even said: "to establish a completely private connection on something that you are broadcasting, and do not know who might be listening in?"...

Well, if they could do a MITM, wouldn't they be listening in?

(cough)

So really, who says programmers can't design enjoyably readable books?!

Seems that Slashdot is bogging down your site. Alternate site: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/

I'll go download Mendel Cooper's bash programming guide I've used countless times, just in case.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

I assume this is an epic troll, but am going to give an honest answer anyway, because there are some legitimate questions buried in there.

I work with a aggregate.org a university research group which has a decent claim to having built the very first Linux PC Cluster, set some records with them (KLAT2 and KASY0 were both ours), and still operates a number of Linux clusters, including some containing GPUs, so I feel like I have some idea of the lay of cluster technology. It is *way* overdue for an update (and one is in progress, we swear!), but we also maintain TLDP's widely circulated Parallel Processing HOWTO, which was the goto resource for this kind of question for some time.

In a cluster of any size, you do _not_ want to be handling nodes individually. There are several popular provisioning and administration systems for avoiding doing so, because every organization with a large number of machines needs such a tool. The clusters I deal with are mostly provisioned with Perceus with a few ROCKS holdovers, and I'm aware of a number of other solutions (xCat is the most popular that I've never tinkered with). Perceus can pass out pretty much any correctly-configured Linux image to the machines, although It is specifically tailored to work with Caos NSA (Redhat-like), or GravityOS (a Debian derivative) payloads. Infiscale, the company that supports Perceus, releases the basic tools and some sample modifiable OS images for free, and makes their money off support and custom images, so it is pretty flexible option in terms of required financial and/or personnel commitment. The various provisioning and administration tools are generally designed to interact with various monitoring tools (ex. Warewulf or Ganglia) and job management systems (see next paragraph).
Accounting and billing users is largely about your job management system. Our clusters aren't billed this way, so I can't claim to have be closely familiar with the tools, but most of the established job management systems like Slurm, and GridEngine (to name two of many) have accounting systems built in.
The "standard" images or image-building tools provided with the provisioning systems generally provide for a few nicely integrated combinations of tools, which make it remarkably easy to throw a functioning cluster stack together.

As for GPUs... be aware that the claimed performance for GPUs, especially in clusters, is virtually unattainable. You have to write code in their nasty domain-specific languages (CUDA or OpenCL for Nvidia, just OpenCL for AMD) and there isn't really any concept of IPC baked in to the tools to allow for distributed operations. Furthermore, GPUs are also generally extroridnarly memory and memory bandwidth starved (remember, the speed comes from there being hundreds of processing elements on the card, all sharing the same memory and interface), so simply keeping them fed with data is challenging. GPGPU is also an unstable area in both relevant senses: the GPGPU software itself has a nasty tendency to hang the host when something goes wrong (which is extra fun in clusters without BMCs), and the platforms are changing at an alarming clip. AMD is somewhat worse in the "moving target" regard - they recently deprecated all 4000 series cards from being supported by GPGPU tools, and have abandoned their CTM, CAL, and Brook+ environments before settling on OpenCL, and only OpenCL. Nvidia still supports both their C

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/ is helpful -- I printed and older version of it 2-up and duplexed it, then comb-bound it. It's been very handy.

It's almost as if there should be a public documentation project or something.

Yes, but the standard has been in flux for a while, and may still be in flux. Example: Initially, the private address space for 6 started with fec0:: but the current standard is now fc00:: .

I've been trying to learn IPv6 with my home network and it's been a struggle. XPs IPv6 support is a joke (even at SP3). It's so incomplete, my advice is don't bother trying.

Ubuntu 10.10 is much better, but even a release that recent doesn't ship with an IPv6 compatible DHCP server (need 11.04 to get it). At least IPv6 DNS is supported, and while the forward zones are a breeze to write, and you can even combine them with IPv4 zones in the same zone file, the reverse IPv6 zones kicked my butt. Eventually I got them working, but I truly think it was more luck than skill.

I can say there needs to be a lot better tutorials than the ones I've found out there for 6 to really take off. So far, the two best I've found are Ubuntu's IPv6 and the Linux IPv6 HOWTO.

"you gain constructors and destructors whose execution are enforced by the compiler.

You pretty much answered your own question without knowing it. Overhead enforced by the compiler is a BadThing(tm) when trying to create an efficient OS. With OS development you are doing lots of data structure related access, and you don't want indirection except when absolutely necessary, for example.
Here is Linus explaining the issue quite well (from a Linux Gazette article):

Linus: C++ would have allowed us to use certain compiler features that I would have liked, and it was in fact used for a very short time period just before releasing Linux-1.0. It turned out to not be very useful, and I don't think we'll ever end up trying that again, for a few reasons.

One reason is that C++ simply is a lot more complicated, and the compiler often does things behind the back of the programmer that aren't at all obvious when looking at the code locally. Yes, you can avoid features like virtual classes and avoid these things, but the point is that C++ simply allows a lot that C doesn't allow, and that can make finding the problems later harder.

Another reason was related to the above, namely compiler speed and stability. Because C++ is a more complex language, it also has a propensity for a lot more compiler bugs and compiles are usually slower. This can be considered a compiler implementation issue, but the basic complexity of C++ certainly is something that can be objectively considered to be harmful for kernel development.

So, you never heard of the certificate programs run by Redhat and Novel and never visited http://tldp.org/ or used http://google.com/linux?