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While the "coffee" machine in the summary may be long gone, it is not without descendants!

BEHOLD: THE FUTURE!

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html

Now your computer can actually MAKE coffee!

Not exactly a "noob's" guide, and it hasn't been updated in awhile, but: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

Not a bad noob reference. Its funny in a quaint way how it squeals about root LVM... that hasn't been a serious problem since like the Clinton administration. I know I've got vanilla out of the box Debian boxes from like half a decade ago with root LVM, just not an issue.

It does suck in the "Why" section, in that all it does is list "What" it can do.

Assuming the prerequisite of understanding what Xen/KVM/VMware does, think about how it wedges a layer in between the OS and the CPU so you can pool, combine, snapshot, transfer, share, shrink, expand, what the OS sees as "its" CPU. LVM does the same thing, except living between the partition table and the physical hardware. The analogy is LVM is to disks, like KVM/Xen/Vmware is to CPUs. I kind of enjoy this paragraph, I think its the best description of LVM I've ever read, and not just because I wrote it...

Not exactly a "noob's" guide, and it hasn't been updated in awhile, but: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

Think of LVM as a layer of abstraction between physical devices (your disks and/or arrays) and the logical devices that you can then put a filesystem on. LVM lets you break your physical disks into bite-sized pieces called extents (say, 32MB each, but it's configurable), and then you can add/remove extents to a logical disk device. If you have a filesystem that supports it, you can then grow/shrink the filesystem to use the space you've allocated.

There are also other benefits (snapshots, etc.).

Diff the content of two tar.gz files:
diff <(tar tvfz foo.tar.gz | sort) <(tar tvfz bar.tar.gz | sort)

Wow! I learned something new and useful on /. today! I had never seen the <() syntax, but I can appreciate how useful it can be, especially for tools like diff that tend to take files. For those wanting to learn more, this is called Process Substitution.

Thanks for this great tip!

Here are some of my "tricks" I use regularly.

Diff the content of two tar.gz files:
diff <(tar tvfz foo.tar.gz | sort) <(tar tvfz bar.tar.gz | sort)

The <(some command) trick works with all commands that takes a filename as parameter and is a good alternative to using temporary files.

Fork off five subcommands that sleeps for 0-15 seconds and wait until all of them are finished:
while test $(( foo++ )) -lt 5; do
( sleep $(( $RANDOM & 0xF )); echo "Hello from $foo" ) &
done
echo "Waiting..."
wait
echo "All done."

Set a variable to a default value if it's not already set:
% echo $X

% echo ${X:-42}
42
% echo $X
42
% X=50
% echo ${X:-42}
50

If using temporary files, use mktemp and the files will always be deleted when the script exits:
TMPFILE=$(mktemp)

Run other cleanup code on exit, even if the script was interrupted:
trap "psql -c 'drop table my_temp_table'" EXIT

Append ALL stdout and stderr output from the rest of the script to a file:
exec 2>&1 >>/var/log/myscript.log

That's just the top of my head. I can REALLY recommend reading the free Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (more formats) from cover to cover! Every time I skim it I find something new that I missed before.

Here are some of my "tricks" I use regularly.

Diff the content of two tar.gz files:
diff <(tar tvfz foo.tar.gz | sort) <(tar tvfz bar.tar.gz | sort)

The <(some command) trick works with all commands that takes a filename as parameter and is a good alternative to using temporary files.

Fork off five subcommands that sleeps for 0-15 seconds and wait until all of them are finished:
while test $(( foo++ )) -lt 5; do
( sleep $(( $RANDOM & 0xF )); echo "Hello from $foo" ) &
done
echo "Waiting..."
wait
echo "All done."

Set a variable to a default value if it's not already set:
% echo $X

% echo ${X:-42}
42
% echo $X
42
% X=50
% echo ${X:-42}
50

If using temporary files, use mktemp and the files will always be deleted when the script exits:
TMPFILE=$(mktemp)

Run other cleanup code on exit, even if the script was interrupted:
trap "psql -c 'drop table my_temp_table'" EXIT

Append ALL stdout and stderr output from the rest of the script to a file:
exec 2>&1 >>/var/log/myscript.log

That's just the top of my head. I can REALLY recommend reading the free Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (more formats) from cover to cover! Every time I skim it I find something new that I missed before.

The only bash scripting guide you will ever need:

http://tldp.org/guides.html

free as in beer.

I'm not really sure what the point of this item is, but I'll be more than happy to blather on about console stuff I like :P

Midnight Commander: (mc) - Mostly I write scripts to make things easier for other people. But there isn't always a good GUI to allow the user to see what scrips are available. So I'll get all my scripts together in a directory and open the directory in midnight commander. Then they can see a sorted list of all the available commands. Gnome panel buttons work OK for this as well, but there's usually limited space for those, and they're kind of finicky in Nautilus views.

GNU Screen : is like VNC for terminal sessions. Lets multiple human operators see what's going on in one session (as well as let them fight over keyboard control :P ). You can also set it up to launch an entire multi-terminal environment, for complex scripts with lots of log monitors, controls, fields, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal with mouse support so much, so you have to teach your users the keyboard commands.

Judicious use of colors are always welcome in my scripts: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html
As long as they're not overdone, they really help delineate different kinds of information.
For a bit more control, you can also use tput http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x405.html to let you overwrite fields so you're not just breaking out status strings of newlines.

gdialog / kdialog / xdialog are somewhat interesting ways to throw in a touch of GUI dialogs for common actions (radio buttons, file selectors, etc.) that get passed back to the script. But pretty boring.

That said, I've been pretty impressed with python tkinter for making simple GUIs a snap to toss together. It's another matter stringing together subProcess() arguments to get commands and scripts to exec, but whatever.

I'm not really sure what the point of this item is, but I'll be more than happy to blather on about console stuff I like :P

Midnight Commander: (mc) - Mostly I write scripts to make things easier for other people. But there isn't always a good GUI to allow the user to see what scrips are available. So I'll get all my scripts together in a directory and open the directory in midnight commander. Then they can see a sorted list of all the available commands. Gnome panel buttons work OK for this as well, but there's usually limited space for those, and they're kind of finicky in Nautilus views.

GNU Screen : is like VNC for terminal sessions. Lets multiple human operators see what's going on in one session (as well as let them fight over keyboard control :P ). You can also set it up to launch an entire multi-terminal environment, for complex scripts with lots of log monitors, controls, fields, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal with mouse support so much, so you have to teach your users the keyboard commands.

Judicious use of colors are always welcome in my scripts: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html
As long as they're not overdone, they really help delineate different kinds of information.
For a bit more control, you can also use tput http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x405.html to let you overwrite fields so you're not just breaking out status strings of newlines.

gdialog / kdialog / xdialog are somewhat interesting ways to throw in a touch of GUI dialogs for common actions (radio buttons, file selectors, etc.) that get passed back to the script. But pretty boring.

That said, I've been pretty impressed with python tkinter for making simple GUIs a snap to toss together. It's another matter stringing together subProcess() arguments to get commands and scripts to exec, but whatever.

An appliance such as a coffee maker isn't designed to be hacked into.

Don't be such a naysayer.

So, each can clearly show unique content in text mode, but does any tool exist that can bring some order to it?

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-14.html mentions a tool called con2fb. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like it does what you want.

Maybe we need for say docs.linux.org to redirect to The Linux Documentation Project or something and for wiki.linux.org to point to somewhere

Maybe we need for say docs.linux.org to redirect to The Linux Documentation Project or something and for wiki.linux.org to point to somewhere

I learned something new today too, apparently I was wrong about ls being equal to "list". Neat. Now, regarding ls being only two characters from the middle of the word, afaik that is purely historical, and comes from the early terminals where memory was a super-huge concern. That's why many of the basic commands dating from the early days of UNIX are so short - to conserve on typing and memory. As jimicus states later downthread, at this point changing it to something more sensible would cause more harm than good.

But in the end you're right, it's all what you've learned. To someone who has never used computers, they might expect "show files" to be a command, or something similar.

For anyone else following along, I found a handy DOS->bash chart here. For those reading wanting some bash-love, I highly recommend The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

Is there a good bash-> DOS reference? I have a difficult time locating and killing hanging processes when the three-finger-salute fails to bring up the task manager. Then there's the finding which process has the open file handle when trying to eject a USB drive. Its all so simple in Linux.

I learned something new today too, apparently I was wrong about ls being equal to "list". Neat. Now, regarding ls being only two characters from the middle of the word, afaik that is purely historical, and comes from the early terminals where memory was a super-huge concern. That's why many of the basic commands dating from the early days of UNIX are so short - to conserve on typing and memory. As jimicus states later downthread, at this point changing it to something more sensible would cause more harm than good.

But in the end you're right, it's all what you've learned. To someone who has never used computers, they might expect "show files" to be a command, or something similar.

For anyone else following along, I found a handy DOS->bash chart here. For those reading wanting some bash-love, I highly recommend The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

I seem to recall this topic being covered on TLDP (that is The Linux Documentation Project)

CD-Writing HOWTO

I think the problem is that newbies expect everything to be easy, and they expect someone else to do it for them. In the case of the CD-Writing HOWTO, it has been done for them. That, among many other topics, have been covered, documented and posted for the benefit of all.

My boss is a prime example. He wants to be in control of everything, but he doesn't want to read the manuals. He'd rather that I write a couple of commands down on a post-it note so he doesn't have to learn anything. He'd rather be told what to do and doesn't really care to know the why or how of the topic.

Documentation isn't the problem, lazy (or stupid) users are the problem.

Back when I first started using Linux, I found Linux Installation and Getting Started (a.k.a. LIGS) a really helpful reference. It's probably very much dated now (I last looked at it in 1998) but there's lots of useful information in it, probably much more than the average Ubuntu user will ever have considered necessary.

But now that I've got a bit of experience under my belt, I mostly hit Google and the manpages for answers to specific issues. Oh, and apropos is a useful command to remember for a search of the manpages. Most distributions include the command by default, but you sometimes have to build the database yourself, which is pretty straightforward.

Wireless Howto

Wireless Howto
Roberto Arcomano berto@fatamorgana.com
v1.6 - July 31, 2002

I don't think so.

What you describe is pretty much how the linux kernel handles system calls. See this: How system calls work on linux/i86

For an example of what a single instruction CPU might look like, take a look at this: Building the Turing complete coffee machine: an adequate assembly langauge

What you describe is pretty much how the linux kernel handles system calls. See this: How system calls work on linux/i86

For an example of what a single instruction CPU might look like, take a look at this: Building the Turing complete coffee machine: an adequate assembly langauge

$( ) and back-ticks does the same thing

That's mostly, but not exactly true. The Bash Guide for Beginners explains the minute difference in section 3.4.5 (link).

Operating systems for gourmets: Linux make coffee, and now Windows make sandwichs (not sure what makes OS/X, but it Cocoa flavored)

'I researched this subject thoroughly and found that it's almost completely undocumented'.

Did the thorough research include a Google search for 'ldd security'?

My thorough (3 minute research) turned up this tidbit from TLDP:

Beware: do not run ldd on a program you don't trust. As is clearly stated in the ldd(1) manual, ldd works by (in certain cases) by setting a special environment variable (for ELF objects, LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS) and then executing the program. It may be possible for an untrusted program to force the ldd user to run arbitrary code (instead of simply showing the ldd information). So, for safety's sake, don't use ldd on programs you don't trust to execute.

It's news to me that Linux requires admin privileges to install software.

"Once you've finished choosing, click the Apply button at the bottom of the window. Another window will pop up, showing all of the packages you've selected and asking if you'd like to apply the changes. To install the packages, click Apply. You'll then be asked to type in your super-user/administrator password. Once you've entered it, another window will appear informing you of the installation progress. Once this has finished, click Close. Your new programs are installed, ready to use!"

"Most software packages come with one or more preformatted man pages. As root".

Installing Software
"The process of installing software is very simple. Start YaST by selecting it from the menu under System, or by using the run command dialog (press Alt+F2) and typing yast. You will be required to enter your root password. Start the Software Management-module by selecting it from the Software tab in the YaST Control Center."

That's just a quick look but all three say an admin, root, or superuser password is needed.

Falcon

Using the whole disk as a PV (as opposed to a partition spanning the whole disk) is not recommended because of the management issues it can create. Any other OS that looks at the disk will not recognize the LVM metadata and display the disk as being free, so it is likely it will be overwritten. LVM itself will work fine with whole disk PVs.

In future on dedicated machines I probably won't use that method, but then again, LVM has issues anyway. I set up my first volume without using RAID, as the disks were of differing sizes. I added a new disk some time later which very quickly began to exhibit problems. Because the disk wouldn't read properly, I couldn't retrieve any data from it and couldn't therefore remove the PV because it had data on. The only way was to shut down, then remove the disk, then remove the volume then use the metadata to rebuild the volume. I lost a few files but the main worry was whether I would get any files back at all. To this day, I have files visible on the volume that correspond to lost data. I cannot find anyway to delete these files as they only exist in the metadata not on the actual disk. I'm not confident that creating a replacement volume (on the same drives) would allow me to inherit an accurate filesystem from the old volume.

So my only option at present is to buy progressively bigger drives, run them in for a few weeks, then after adding them to the volume, use the free extents to move data off of the older drives. This procedure is fraught with risk. Any tips ?

I use ext2online to resize my LVM based ext3 filesystem. To clarify, when I have added a new disk to the LVM group, I use ext2online to extend the filesystem to cover the new disk. Also, I have never used lvresize. It's the same procedure as either lvreduce or lvextend. Here is my mini howto for adding a new disk to an LVM volume.

adding a brand new disk to the lvm volume

install the disk
start system
open terminal as root :

check what disks (physical volumes)already exist as part of LV :
pvscan

run fdisk on the new drive :

fdisk /dev/sdc # if this new disk is the 3rd sata or scsi disk in the system
                # modify accordingly and use the same label throughout this # howto! (sdd, sde, sdf etc)

create a new partition using the whole disk
n
p
1
when thats done enter the next command
t
partition will be 1
hex code 8e

write the partition table with
w

this exits fdisk

then create a new physical volume on that disk
pvcreate /dev/sdc

then add the physical volume to the volume group

vgextend my_movies_group /dev/sdc

run pvscan again to check its in there

then run vgdisplay and take a note of the allocated PE for the logical volume
and for the free PE
then add them together ! (this figure should already be showing in vgdisplay as Total PE )

then run
lvextend -l22222 /dev/my_movies_group/my_media /dev/sdc
    # where 22222 is the total you just calculated

you can run vgdisplay -v again to check its been added ok

lastly, run this, to resize the filesystem to cover the new drive

ext2online /dev/my_movies_group/my_media

That should be it !

Bullshit. The real problem is C version Y not being backward compatible to C version X, leading to this idiocy of piling more and more complexity on top of a totally rotten mechanism.

Right, which is of course why Linux doesn't have any way to version .so files... er... or does it. Wonder what "totally rotten mechanism" (do you mean dynamic/shared libraries there? or can you meaningfully explain how /usr/lib is any different from C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32?) that is supposed to pile upon...

A serial console needs for your kernel to come up,

That's horrendously idiotic.

You don't configure the kernel for a serial console, you CONFIGURE THE BOOT LOADER for it:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/configure-boot-loader.html

It also needs a second computer to connect the serial line to.

Yes, and managing the system over the network needs a second computer to make the connection as well... What's your point?

With serial-port management, you can have a single PC connecting to an unlimited number of headless machines. On the low-end, a few USB-Serial adapters can give even a low-end PC dozens of serial ports these days. A bit higher-end are console servers (which you telnet/ssh into), or serial port muxes (which give a machine dozens, if not hundreds of REAL serial ports to use).

I have been doing something similar for half a decade now

How very sad that in all those years you couldn't spend a couple minutes searching the web, or asking anyone who knows ANYTHING about the subject. Either one of which would have quickly resolved your problem. This is beginner stuff.

I must suggest you refrain from giving advice to anyone, ever again, since you apparently speak authoritatively on subjects you know next to NOTHING about...

Define the serial port and configure GRUB to use the serial port, as shown in Figure 4-6. Figure 4-6. GRUB configuration for serial console

serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal serial

--unit is the number of the serial port, counting from zero, unit 0 being COM1. Note that the values of --parity are spelt out in full: no, even and odd. The common abbreviations n, e and o are not accepted. If there is mysteriously no output on the serial port then suspect a syntax error in the serial or terminal commands. If you also want to use and attached monitor and keyboard as well as the serial port to control the GRUB boot loader then use the alternative configuration in Figure 4-7.

Kernel:

The Linux kernel is configured to select the console by passing it the console parameter. The console parameter can be given repeatedly, but the parameter can only be given once for each console technology. So console=tty0 console=lp0 console=ttyS0 is acceptable but console=ttyS0 console=ttyS1 will not work. When multiple consoles are listed output is sent to all consoles and input is taken from the last listed console. The last console is the one Linux uses as the /dev/console device. The syntax of the console parameter is given in Figure 5-1. Figure 5-1. Kernel console syntax, in EBNF

console=ttyS<serial_port>[,<mode>]
console=tty<virtual_terminal>
console=lp<parallel_port>
console=ttyUSB[<usb_port>[,<mode>]

Quite a bit more info at tdlp.org..

"Unlike minicomputer systems, the IBM PC was not designed to use a serial console. This has two consequences. Firstly, Power On Self-Test messages and Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) messages are sent to the screen and received from the keyboard. This makes it difficult to use the serial port to reconfigure the BIOS and impossible to see Power On Self-Test errors."

If that box and another both have serial connections, then use the serial console: Get a null-modem cable. Connect that to another box. Make sure the you add console=ttyS0,19200n8 or some variation to the append line in your grub entries. On the client side use cu aka tip, minicom or PuTTY to make the serial connection, making sure that bps, parity and stop bits match.

If that box and another both have serial connections, then use the serial console: Get a null-modem cable. Connect that to another box. Make sure the you add console=ttyS0,19200n8 or some variation to the append line in your grub entries. On the client side use cu aka tip, minicom or PuTTY to make the serial connection, making sure that bps, parity and stop bits match.

The question about bios settings is a good one though, and I don't know.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22Is+Linux+UNIX%3F%22&btnG=Google+Search

Many of those search results tend to state that LINUX is a UNIX...

PLUS, over time, I have heard tell that Linux is indeed a UNIX (heck, it is a UNIX imo, that's where I started in this madness & lunacy: It surely IS a UNIX to myself @ least).

Well, amending that - Except that I personally think LINUX is a BETTER UNIX than most "classic UNIX's" are, & so is MacOS X (but, I respect Linux more)).

Question is though, is it OFFICIALLY (for whoever controls that, & honestly though? "So much for that" anyhow) a UNIX? I have honestly always wondered that myself, but, I am more of a "Win32 fanboy", admittedly (@ least since 1992 I have been).

APK

P.S.=> Apparently, the ONLY reason that Linux has not been (& this might not be true anymore/currently either & my source MAY be "stale"... I say that, because for SOME REASON, I recall that Linux was actually classified as a form of UNIX) officially classified as a form of UNIX, is because of some license fee that hasn't been paid to the Open Group, per this source for that much:

http://tldp.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/general.html#is-linux-unix

PERTINENT QUOTE:

"Q: Is Linux Unix?

A: Officially an operating system is not allowed to be called a Unix until it passes the Open Group's certification tests, and supports the necessary API's. Nobody has yet stepped forward to pay the large fees that certification involves, so we're not allowed to call it Unix. Certification really doesn't mean very much anyway. Very few of the commercial operating systems have passed the Open Group tests.

A: Unofficially, Linux is very similar to the operating systems which are known as Unix, and for many purposes they are equivalent. Linux the kernel is an operating system kernel that behaves and performs similarly to the famous Unix operating system from AT&T Bell Labs. Linux is often called a "Unix-like" operating system. For more information, see http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix.html."

(Many of the other GOOGLE search query results tend to say much the same, & I feel that way myself, but... there is that "officiality" (is there such a word?))... apk

If you can't tell me how

I believe that someone has already written a HOWTO. Besides, Comcast is looking into IPv6 deployments for consumers (to save you on that tunneling) around 2010 -2012.

But the reality is this. You can connect to the Internet via IPv6 if you choose to want to. That's a big thing in the whole IPv6 debate. It is a question of if you want to or not, as opposed to if you can or not. Most people at the current moment do not want to, but they can if they truly want to. It would be a whole different debate if you totally lacked the ability to connect via IPv6. Soon enough, most people will want to switch to IPv6, companies that are not ready for this transition will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. (see TFA)

On ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install bind9
will give you a working caching nameserver.
This page gives info about maintaining root hints: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO-8.html

On windows XP I've been using Posadis which sort of sucks, except when compared to all the others I tried.

Bash scripting first; go study this, to learn bash. Then maybe some PHP, depending on what you're doing.

Perl is abstract, hideously ugly, has utterly alien syntax unlike anything you will find anywhere else, and will make your ears bleed. Also don't go anywhere near assembler unless you are a mathematical savant. You also likely won't need to bother with C, either; 98% of what you might want to do in C will generally be done far more easily and painlessly in something else. Read this as well. Most of the hot shot Debian scrubs these days don't bother to, and they should.

You will only need Cobol if you're wanting to do this for a living, and even then, it probably isn't a language which anyone should learn as a new skill these days; still, banks and other similarly eldritch, sadomasochistic institutions can sometimes still want it. With Java, who knows? Some people use that for various things, but ask before you assume people will want you to have it. If you can get away with avoiding it, do so.

Also, do not try to learn to code purely for its' own sake; you won't learn anything that way. Find something you want to do; even if it's only something like setting up a cron job at first, and then do that. Learn vim or Emacs, read the RFCs for the net protocols, and listen to some psytrance while doing all of the above. Have a reason for doing it, and enjoy it while you do it, or you'll never get anywhere.

> I am on KDE 4.3 RC2, so things may have been fixed from whatever KDE you were using. Which
> version have you? Can you test with KDE 4.3?

I'm using 4.2.96 (4.3 RC2) as packaged for Kubuntu 9.04.

> > Konqueror: (1) Ctrl-C doesn't copy the selected text; I have to use the context menu.
> > This only seems to affect pages in frames.
>
> I cannot reproduce, and you point to a specific site?

Any site with frames (that I've tested):
http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_frame_cols

> > (2) Websites seem to use the KDE-wide "View Background" colour as the default background:
> > this can lead to black text on a dark/black background. Decoupling the default website
> > background colour and the View Background colour would help.
>
> Again I cannot reproduce. What site, and what is your background colour setting?

Black or blackish. It probably affects any site that doesn't have a background colour of its
own, for example:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html

> > Application launcher (classic, not Kickoff), "Computer" submenu: (1) displays storage media
> > along with Places under "Places", not under "Removable Storage" (which displays the Places
> > instead). (2) Both types of misplaced entry are dead to mouse clicks.
>
> Is this an English installation, or translated? I do not have that issue in neither my English nor
> Hebrew interfaces.

English. The equivalent tab in the Kickoff menu works, by the way.

> > Kate: (1) I don't think the "Open Recent" list is working properly. (2) Sometimes cursor
> > colour = background colour, especially (exclusively?) after (highlighted?) braces and after
> > search or replace operations (which may also highlight text... hm).
>
> I don't have this issue, either! And I use Kate a lot.

Hm again. I've seen complaints about both (1) and (2) before, so it's not just me... black background
again; it's possible the cursor turns black rather than background-coloured.

> > KRunner/Quicksand: In the "Task oriented" interface mode, results are displayed in black no
> > matter the background colour.
>
> Which theme? I cannot reproduce this, either!

Any theme I've tried! The results list box that pops up to the right of the main search box always uses
the "View Background" colour (black, unsurprisingly) with black text (except for the highlighted entry).

"Command oriented" mode has readable text, although I don't understand its autocomplete function.
I type "fetc", it completes "fetchmail" and puts the cursor at the end of it, but I still have to type
"fetchmail" before "Run fetchmail" appears below.

> > Windows List widget: Right-clicking an entry and picking "Move" or "Resize" just teleports the
> > pointer over to the respective window without going into move/resize mode. It works fine via the taskbar.
>
> I cannot find that widget, though I have seen it in the past. Again, I am useless!
>
> > PowerDevil: DPMS settings don't seem to take effect. Can use separate Display control,
> > though. (Haven't tested this on 4.3 RC2 yet.)
>
> I don't use those features, so I don't know. Sorry.
>
> > Kwin cube: With "hovering windows" activated, panels sometimes poke through or overlap windows
> > on rotate.
>
> I don't use those effects.
>
> > kded4: Sometimes this process jumps to about 50% CPU and stays there until I kill it. (May have
> > been fixed with the recent upgrade to 4.3 RC2, bit early to tell.)
>
> This sounds serious, please file a bug!

There's this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi

Some people do meet by finding new interests (casual sports teams, dancing, professional groups, hobby groups), but I've noticed but I notice too that people who are really into those groups can also get a little apprehensive about asking someone from their group on a date? Why? If things go sour, you might be uncomfortable in the group.

If I were you, I would find a new social activity or two to try where you meet the opposite sex, but don't count on it. Try online dating too. Look at it as more of experiment - see if you happen to find people you jive with.

Take initiative and schedule to hang out with lesser-known friends you like and friends of friends. Make an effort to take genuine interest in others. You'll never know who you might meet. Even if you don't meet a girlfriend that way, it will be good for your soul. (I did this myself after a long-term relationship ended... best thing I ever did for myself).

And for God's sake, make sure you can communicate on things other than your one nerdy interest. One shouldn't change the nature of who one is, but if you ever want to meet another human being and hold their interest, you need at least a few subjects to talk about. "All the special items in Fallout and World of Warcraft" isn't likely to cut it.

While you're at it, read http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

I found my current boyfriend on PlentyOfFish, but had to sift through a lot to get there. It's the first time I've dated a non-geek, but it's a welcome change.

My previous problem with meeting geeky men before that was the whole "OMG YOU ARE A GEEK GIRL" thing. General the idea is they were so wound up with me being a geek woman they never considered if we actually got along. Please consider others' advice here, and consider you may want a woman with similar values to your own; she may or may not be a geek.

Seriously, even Windows NT 4 had SMP support in 1997.

I don't know what year Linux first had support for SMP, but the 2.0 kernel supports SMP, apparently even on a 486. Just imagine a Beowulf made of 486 class SMP machines!

Making good use of multiple CPUs requires more than just OS support.

Multiple CPUs has been the standard for servers for at least a decade in x86 gear.

Seriously, even Windows NT 4 had SMP support in 1997.

I don't know what year Linux first had support for SMP, but the 2.0 kernel supports SMP, apparently even on a 486. Just imagine a Beowulf made of 486 class SMP machines!

This seems to offer a pretty good explanation of how the filesystem works:
http://www.freeos.com/articles/3102/
Another guide is here:
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_03_01.html

It's obviously different than Windows, but as those articles describe there are lots of advantages to doing things that way. Modern distributions like Ubuntu have made it possible to easily handle CDs and other removable disks, which can be a bit of a sticking point.

and having a soft spot in my heart for them since I discovered Linux in 1995 I still think linux.org and The LDP are way better then this...

Tip:

Over and over I have heard people say that you just use the usual configure, make, make install sequence to get a program running. Unfortunately, most people using computers today have never used a compiler or written a line of program code. With the advent of graphical user interfaces and applications builders, there are lots of serious programmers who have never done this.

configure; make; make install
[Linux Gazette, November 22, 2003]

Perhaps they need a console font? I think the VGA console needs it in either a raw bitmap or psf format.

For paranoia, I would think they should look to OpenBSD. They are the origins of many secure features in open source software: OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and so on. They just need people who can maintain it for them. After all, *nix style systems are really designed to have administrators maintain the system, while the users use it instead of trying to do the maintenance themselves.

If Linux is the choice, I have concerns about both Red Hat and Debian. They both seem to like using either experimental versions (gcc 2.96), maintainers try to "fix bugs" (OpenSSL weak keys), or use weird or unstable patches. I have been wanting to try Slackware as a base (as far as I can tell they don't dick with core projects), with the ability to install Debian apps using apt-get.

The best I've been able to do is just download Slackware packages from Slacky.eu and Slackware's Alien and manually converted Debian packages, and installing them manually. I think slacky has a few apt-get like utilities, but I don't use them...

Then again, since this is probably for a massive group of people, they should create a Linux distro for the Dalai Lama. Just take packages from Slackware (for the core) and rpms/Debian for the end user apps which aren't in slackware--alien will convert these formats and slackware comes with an rpm2tgz utility, compile a custom kernel (maybe with some security patches which work and you are certain are stable), create any custom packages you may need (such as a Tibetan font) and make your iso image.

Unless you think they will have limited hard drive space or need to only install specific packages, just have it install everything for the basic or default option. Or perhaps it should just be a live CD which stores /home on the hard drive--this would probably be more secure as no one can modify your system software on the disc. Perhaps you could even use Slax as a base. They seem to have an easy drop-in live packaging system. It will be work to get it right, but I think it will be worth it.

They will need to find someone who can do this though, but it will be easy for someone who is a decent programmer and knows the *nix command line. Debian packages are just tarballs inside .ar archives. Slackware packages are just strait tarballs. The mkisofs man page talks about the switches to make a bootable image (look for "El Torito"). There also appear to be tutorials how to make bootable CDs.

Um...

A quick google of "linux howto" would take you to this:

http://tldp.org/

Not quite sure what is so difficult about those. Many of the things I now do as part of a career I learned from that site.

Need to add a new SCSI tape library to a Linux server? Sorry, need to reboot the server!

No, no apologies or downtime required.

BTW, 99.999% is a fiction. In the real world, everything needs a maintenance window. For example, next weekend late at night my ILEC is scheduling 45 minutes of downtime for all their voice customers so they can physically move their 5 9's capable phone switches to a different suite. It's not likely that phone system will still be in production in 9 years so they can make up the difference. Do I, as their customer, care? No.

You can use IPv6 _now_ with 6to4 or Teredo.

It's quite simple, actually. You can start IPv6 on your network in about 1 hour (including stateless autoconfiguration setup).

First, follow this tutorial: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/conf-ipv6-in-ipv4-point-to-point-tunnels.html (I suggest the 'deprecated' method, because it actually works fine :) ).

Then install radvd ( http://www.litech.org/radvd/ ), don't forget to turn on IPv6 routing and you're set!

Being able to SSH directly into every machine on my network is UBER-COOL.

Actually, there are lots of good references and tutorials on the web. The trick is separating the really good ones from mere fluff.

One starting point is The Linux Documentation Project site at http://www.tldp.org/ The guides http://www.tldp.org/guides.html contain fairly decent references and examples on bash scripting, CLI utilities, etc. The howto section has more narrowly task-oriented stuff http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto Note that many of the items have not been updated recently, but they remain valid.

A less comprehensive but more frequently updated collection can be found at http://www.linux.org/docs This has many task-oriented howto guides but lacks extended reference guides. However, it does link to numerous free online books http://www.linux.org/docs/online_books.html