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Do us a favor and get yourself a sense of humor, pal.

I ran across those HOWTO pages. They are not good documentation, they are just are a reasonably categorized collection of quick HOW-TOs aimed at command-line monkeys: "type this in if you want to do x".

That site doesn't document in detail how every option of every LVM tool works. Yeah, there are some conceptual basics on how VGs relate to PVs and LVs (which is obvious to anybody who reads the MAN pages or understands sotarge virtualization on any platform), but the exhaustive details of LMV2 simply aren't documented there, or anywhere else I could find.

I decided your linked HOWTO page was not a good documentation resource to use when I kept running across pages like this. There are no explanations as to what any of those commands mean, nor why they might need to be different in some use cases. The majority of that HOWTO is similarly constructed.

Where is the comprehensive reference that documents every option of LVM2? Why is there only one nearly incomprehensible page about disaster recovery of an LVM system, which should be the most important topic? I didn't find any true documentation back in 2005, and I still haven't run across it. Compare that to Sun's documentation for ZFS, and you'll see why I think LVM documentation sucks.

I know C, and even wrote a simple C compiler as an undergrad back in the early 1990s. But I don't code C regularly anymore, and I am certainly not going to try to decipher C source as documentation. I don't have time, and neither do most other IT folks. Professionals do not consider source code documentation. My developers write design and architecture documentation for all of their code, which is then passed on to technical writers so it becomes actual documentation for end users and system administrators. It seems in most open source projects, coders write the documentation themselves, which leads to documentation being perpetually incomplete. Writing documentation is not what coders are good at, nor is it what they enjoy doing.

Such a thing already exists, it's called The Linux Documentation Project.

No, I explicitly mentioned "Apache Tomcat, Sendmail, ntpd or even X configuration". ALl of which have perfect analogues included with Windows Server editions (IIS/ASP.net, SMTPsvc, w32time, and the Windows GDI).

Except of course this is a dishonest "comparison" as Sendmail is rarely used these days, having been superceeded by Exim, Postfix, Courier and the like -- but you picked it specifically because of its complex "config" file -- which is in actuallity a state-machine program and exceedingly well documented, Tomcat is nowhwere near the "equivalent" for ASP.net, PHP is. And so on.

I mentioned Postgres as a positive example in the open source world. It has documentation nearly as good as that which comes with MS SQL Server (which I believe is Microsoft's best individual product).

Which is laughable, because having worked with both, I find the documentation of Postgres orders of magnitude better than that of MS SQL, not to mention all the wacky, undocumented, buggy mis-features in MS SQL versions I run into over the years, for the "privilege" of reporting of which I had my credit card abused by Microsoft.

Yes, 30-year-old GNU utilites are well documented in man pages. But man pages don't cut it for a lot of other,more complex software. Tyring to figure out LVM2 the first time I used it from the man pages was very painful, and the man pages were the best documentation available at that time.

I stand by my initial assertion: you are just incompetent. LVM2 is extensively documented, every distro includes copious examples on how to use it and on top of that there are reams of "How Tos" on the web. Like this one, which was available since the LVM days, never you mind LVM2.

• I googled "diskless htpc". This looks promising. It doesn't have details, though.
• Boot from a linux install on a USB thumb drive.
• Boot from a "Persistent Live USB" (or google for things like "casper" and "casper-rw")
• Netboot (PXE boot), and set up an NFS root or SMB root (not sure if SMB root has been done before)
• Netboot or boot from USB, and run from a ramdrive root. Then even if network goes down, system still has basic functionality (net being down is more of an issue on a home network and an always-on HTPC)

You're right, there really IS no need. The kernel, as it currently exists, is easily adaptable to server distros, home-oriented distros, and anything else you could think of. Hell, i've even seen coffee machines run off linux using the standard kernel.

"I did not know I had any kind of SELinux in place, because I had never installed it, and certainly never checked for it. Now I know it comes by default with Ubuntu." - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Saturday August 11, @02:56PM (#20197089)

Didn't you state this:

----

"Alright, correction: I do, in fact, have selinux installed. Apparently it comes out of the box on Ubuntu, along with ACLs and all the rest. It's still not something I look forward to learning about, for a single-user system" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Friday August 10, @12:52AM (#20178969)

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=264303&cid=201 78969

----

AND LATER, THIS:

----

"When did I say that? No, I don't have it compiled or installed. And since I don't normally run programs I don't trust, I see no reason to compile it and learn its intricacies (and very possibly cripple the rest of my system) just to satisfy your curiosity" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Thursday August 09, @10:34PM (#20178127)

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=264303&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20178127

----

?

That's not contradicting yourself? That's not 'changing horses in midstream'??

Hmmmm... sure looks like it is to myself @ least, lol!

"And that is correct -- I do not want to learn its complexities." - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Saturday August 11, @02:56PM (#20197089)

Then, you will continue to be less secure than you possibly CAN be... by NOT using "layered security" & then falling into the trap you already have, depending on chmod, only... chroot/chmod/chown are NOT ENOUGH!

SeLinux usage also would give you more ontop of THAT!

SeLinux gives you more than IPChains &/or IPTables work for control of "things internet" too (AND THERE ARE DIFF.'s between those as well, mind you, per proof below, despite what you stated earlier as well) because SeLINUX kernel hook addons to LINUX give you SOCKETS LEVEL CONTROL also, for layered security ontop of IPTables &/or IPChains usage, just like it gives you layered security over chmod/chroot/chown usage @ the filesystems userrights level!

Here, take a read:

FOR YOUR REFERENCE, THINGS THAT ARE DIFFERENT IN IPCHAINS vs. IPTABLES in LINUX:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO/iptables -vs-ipchains-vs-ipfwadm.html

(That way, you will be better informed on THAT ACCOUNT, as well)

Pretty funny me the "Windows Person here", has to show YOU, the "LINUX person" those differences, & what SELinux GIVES YOU, that overcame all of your objections (ontop of my having to point out to use chroot/chmod/chown as the tools & details to use for layered MAC/ACL type filesystem security control as well).

"There's no contradiction there. You're just trying to find contradictions to "trap" me and make me look bad, rather than address the actual issues I've brought up." - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Saturday August 11, @02:56PM (#20197089)

I BEG TO DIFFER (quite the contradiction IS present, & in your OWN words no less)... YOU TRAPPED YOURSELF!

By the way? I addressed EACH OF YOUR OBJECTIONS POINTS, here (point by point, quoting them):

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=264303&thresho ld=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20185057

"There's no point in bringing them up again if you're just going to pretend not to understand, or evade them again. For example, the race

That's what you get for trying to install a 2007 distro on a pre-1998 hardware.

As anticlimactic as it might sound, you just won't be able to find a GUI OSS that works quite as well as windows 98 on these older machines.

It'll take some reading and combining from multiple sources. I've been doing it for a few years, combined with a handful of upgrades, plus setting it up as an iSCSI backend- all of that lent to the pool of greyness in my head.

I recommend Gentoo to do this with. Other distro's dont include the latest mdadmtools required to manage and migrate RAID5 md devices. Ubuntu is catching up, I believe.

Here are some places to start:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Sof tware_RAID
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2- quickinstall.xml
http://linas.org/linux/Software-RAID/Software-RAID .html
http://linas.org/linux/raid.html
http://evms.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

My apparent "anger"? Yes, anyone who disagrees with you is an angry mis-informed blockhead. I'm more amused than angry at your vehemence on re-naming Linus' operating system. And I'm familiar with my facts. The FSF operating system was called "Hurd" (later "GNU/Hurd" when Stallman became more explicit about the separation of "OS" and kernel after Linux got popular)... and it was a dismal failure.

As for whether people should call the Linux operating system "GNU/Linux", I guess this sums it up pretty well. But the long and short of it is that Linux is not an FSF project. FSF has no control over it, and certainly wouldn't have encouraged it to go into all the places that Linus encourages it to go (TiVo, etc). FSF contributed a bunch of command-line tools, compilers, daemons, etc. Good for them! Hurrah, that's what FOSS is all about. They don't get to name someone else's product, though.

And to imply that Richard Stallman "politely asks" people to call it GNU/Linux is inaccurate. He rants and raves about it, and basically calls anyone who refers it by the name Linus gave it (ie. "Linux") bad people.

" Don't botter replying with a repetition of your arguments, I likely won't reply back."

Heh, yeah... LALALALALALA I can't hear you or anyone else who disagrees with me, either.

Linux in the form of a laundry detergent?

This is great news! It should be included in HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux. Linux usage will soar at last! Now we need a Linux beer to cover the male non-geek audience and world domination will be assured!

Either one will do fine. If you want to learn the underlying system, it doesn't really matter what GUI you are running on top of it. For usefull materials, if you haven't found it yet, see The Linux Documentation Project http://www.tldp.org/

Personally, I do prefer KDE because it's standard tools let me work faster than the Gnome equivalents and have better inter-component integration.

The bad news: It may be difficult to jump onboard a specific project (particularly one as complex as Linux or Firefox) solely as a technical writer. Documentation ranges from extremely technical (as in code comments) to quite understandable (as in FAQs on websites). In my experience, the more technical documentation is left for the developers and the more understandable documentation is left for the admins.

The good news: If you're creative, you'll find a fulfilling way to help. If you're only interested in supporting a particular project, you could find its official discussion channel and work your way up to being a channel operator. If you're interested in the movement as a whole, you could contribute to a more generic (non-project-specific) documentation site. Many such sites even have author's guides where you can RTFM about WTFM (Writing The Firkin' Manual).

Good luck!

The bad news: It may be difficult to jump onboard a specific project (particularly one as complex as Linux or Firefox) solely as a technical writer. Documentation ranges from extremely technical (as in code comments) to quite understandable (as in FAQs on websites). In my experience, the more technical documentation is left for the developers and the more understandable documentation is left for the admins.

The good news: If you're creative, you'll find a fulfilling way to help. If you're only interested in supporting a particular project, you could find its official discussion channel and work your way up to being a channel operator. If you're interested in the movement as a whole, you could contribute to a more generic (non-project-specific) documentation site. Many such sites even have author's guides where you can RTFM about WTFM (Writing The Firkin' Manual).

Good luck!

Err...actually...you can RTFM on how to write documentation. I should know - I wrote one:

LDP Author Guide

On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one

Only the /boot partition is outside LVM control ---

I use LVM on my media server, as it allows me to keep a consistent addressing format (in automatically generated playlists) as the disks get filled up. I currently have 4 disks arranged as 1 LVM volume with a total capacity of 1.3TiB.
Another plus point being that as the disks age and available disk capacities rise, I can migrate the data within the LVM group onto the newest drives and then replace the older ones. I have 1x 200GB, 1x 250GB, 2x 500GB currently installed.

[root@kids ~]# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb VG my_movies_group lvm2 [232.88 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sda VG my_movies_group lvm2 [186.31 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdc VG my_movies_group lvm2 [465.76 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdd VG my_movies_group lvm2 [465.76 GB / 0 free]
Total: 4 [1.32 TB] / in use: 4 [1.32 TB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree-Local-multi-user-HOWTO /index.html

The HOWTO is a bit dated, but it is probably relevant enough to get you on the right track.

Linux Documentation Project ~ Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition ~ Linux Newbie Administration Guide ~ LinuxCommand.org ~ Linux From Scratch ~ FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages for Red Hat 9

If you are on a linux system:
$man man

If you are on the web:
http://tldp.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

http://tldp.org/

this is the linux doc proj the one place i found indispensable while learning slackware back in the day

lately http://www.debuntu.com/ is a god send as well

and of course , unlike windows software, most linux software readme files are actually filled with useful information

othjer than that either a quick google on a specific question or jump onto irc will usually get you some help

Here is what I got, take it for what it is worth.

See 'man Linux Filesystem Hierarchy'. In case for some reason that doesn't work on your system, here is a link -> http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/htm l/

One example - which I run into at work all the time: parsing large HTML (or XML, same thing really) files. Web browsers are multithreaded in the sense that they use threads for connections to the server to get different files; it's still (as far as I know) single-threaded per file as far as parsing is concerned.

OK, fair enough. But in a lot of (almost all?) workloads, it's not really the time required to process a single file that's the problem, so much as the time required to process a whole bunch at once.

Compiling is similar--sure, gcc isn't multithreaded, but you can keep a lot of cores busy by running make on a kernel tree....

... one thread to maintain the gameworld state, another for AI, another for physics, another to push polygons to the GPU... But since these are different tasks, rather than one task that's being computed in parallel, it's very unlikely that the threads are going to be using the CPU cores (or multiple CPUs) equally

Is that really a problem? As long as you've broken things up small enough so that there isn't, say, one huge task that needs well more than half the CPU time, then just start up all those threads and let the operating system figure out how to balance them between CPUs.... Sure, they'll never be exactly balanced, but that doesn't mean you can't get a lot of benefit.

> I actually have a keyboard problem.

Yes, I've read that.

> The top of one of they keys (the "fn" key which I
> never use because I'm in Ubuntu all the time) came off.

Maybe just lie that you are using Windows and that is it.

Och and copy then wipe entire partition with Ubuntu - it should not be a problem but you need to have a spare drive in USB enclosure or better a file server or something. You should have backups of your data anyway. :)

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html

I guess you just want to have your laptop repaired and also wish to inform us that HP support sucks since they can't even diagnose if the problem is software or hardware related. Well yes - HP sucks. Nothing new. Next time get a ThinkPad they don't break in the first place. ;)

Hot geeky girls, on the other hand, are much more elusive. A geek in a small town could easily go his whole life without meeting a HGG. As a student at a large public university, I've met 0 hot, seriously-geeky girls and a few hot, sorta-geeky girls.

That's because they are hiding from you. Quite apart from the fact that they are geeks in the first place which tends to lead to a reclusive lifestyle, especially in college (they're studying!), anyone who knows they will basically cease to exist as a person and become an instant target for horndoggery the minute you find out something about them is likely to hide these things to a certain extent. The fact geeks tend to be shy does not help. Rinse and repeat this a few times and it's a wonder that someone hasn't created a secret bunker only accessable through obscure mathematical codes where women can evade such depredations. Then again maybe they did.

I was looking for, and have once again found, the HOWTO that talks about the problems women have with the men who hound them from the fields they might have trod, and how to prevent yourself from being one of those guys. If you really want to "score" a "geek chick," the first step, I would think, is to stop treating them the way men usually do (especially maladjusted ones). Some people also enjoy ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks, but you aren't old enough to read that until you've finished the other and done penance to linuxchix.org for your many failings :D.

Not to say truecrypt sucks (it doesn't) but this isn't a new idea (It made it into tldp almost 5 years ago!) Check out the howto and set it up yourself. Shouldn't take more than an hour (well, it didn't for me, anyways). It's quite efficient; That being said, I *can* feel the performance difference on my RAID setup, it's still worth it.

From wikipedia: "A Linux system which includes system utilities and libraries from the GNU Project is sometimes referred to as GNU/Linux." I thought it's 100% correct name. We could now start flamewar about calling it Gnu/Linux, but it would be pointless.

Here is one:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

Your script is broken in many ways. In fact if your goal was to provide the worst bash script example possible then you've done well.

You're gonna need a pretty big napkin to write down that number

Sun proposed the JavaStation.

The only problem was that just after Sun was introducing this hardware, the target markets started using the advanced JAVA multimedia API's to implement basic applications - medical students were using the image
library to view MRI scans by loading in hundreds of 2D images. And other companies needed to play video files
for staff training purposes (including DVD's).

It more or less remains the same now. By the time all the necessary hardware (video card, sound card, CPU) is
put together with an OS, device drivers, windowing system, video/audio codecs, a hard disk drive for caching applications and data, it's all but a desktop computer. And using a hard disk drive to cache applications and data off the network is worse than just stamping on a standard installation downloaded from a server, as old versions can become munged up with new versions.

http://www.wireshark.org/
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TransparentProxy.html

'nuff said.

When my kid figures out how to properly encrypt his traffic, then I figure he's mature enough to take proper precautions when dealing with strangers (and you folks on the 'net are stranger than most).

Still, I find it deeply troubling how I find that I'm understanding right-wing leanings more and more after being a parent. But then again, I'm almost over 30, so I guess I'm allowed to "mature" into a lying conniving misleading figure of authority anyway :P

They call it Sun Ray.

and 10 years ago they were called javastations. sun trots it's thin clients out once or twice a decade, shakes it's fist at MS and then goes back to selling OMFG expensive servers :-)

Microsoft's domination on the desktop is based on marketing and not on any kind of technological merit

the corporate desktop itself is pretty much based on marketing and not any kind of technological merit. coincidentally, that is pretty much why MS will own it for the forseeable future.

innovative ideas like this just don't stand a chance, and it's really a pity.

couldn't agree more. your basic corporate MIS type is two or more parts "Management" and two or fewer parts "Information Systems". thin clients/open source/linux/[insert cool technology here] could appease the "Information Systems" requirement given the right implementation, but that pesky "Management" part is a whole other story.

It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar

It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Looks like that Oxley-Manton amendment was eventually defeated. I'd never heard of it, although, similar laws pertaining to key escrow do exist in England (and I'd guess other countries). So whatever Seagate is selling -- and whatever Apple is selling -- could be compromised so that they don't get shut out of those markets.

Yeah, I'll use something I can be fairly confident isn't backdoored, thank you very much.

Define 'Linux'.

I'm running Gentoo and would strongly assert that the task is on the far 'minor pain' end of the spectrum. I did it using losetup, basic steps:

1. dump/restore everything to another HDD.
2. chroot/boot new HDD.
3. dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=8192
4. wait
5. losetup -e aes256 /dev/loop0 /dev/hda
6. mke2fs /dev/loop0
7. mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/tmp
8. restore onto /mnt/tmp


Niggly details in papers here http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encrypted-Root-Filesystem-HO WTO/ and here http://www.remote-exploit.org/index.php/Encrypted_ EFS.

Granted, you speak of customers, but for those with middling to good Linux skills this shouldn't be too hard.

(Comments in brackets are generally not directed at this post's author, but rather members of the usual /. peanut gallery who are likely to flame me for deviating from standard groupthink)

2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them?

For word processor documents, you'd need to figure out whether said file formats are binary, or primarily textual. If they're binary, there probably isn't a whole lot you can do...if however they're primarily text with proprietary markup, opening them in a hex editor or possibly even plain Notepad will allow you to get the text out of them. From there you can simply paste it into whatever other application you want. For graphics you should be fine, as there aren't a lot of completely unreadable proprietary Windows graphics formats about that I know of. (Unless we're talking about vectors, of course)

1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.

You need to figure out specifically what it is that you want/need to do before you can solve this problem one way or the other. Form a list of your usual tasks, and then do some research to find out how Linux handles those specific tasks. That in turn will tell you how difficult adapting is likely to be.

3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.

Two websites can help here. The Wine website, which is about a Windows emulator for Linux that can run a large number of Windows programs, with varying degrees of success, (it has a database of known apps) and Freshmeat, which is more or less an OSS equivalent of Download.com, and can thus help you find Linux native applications that do the same or similar things to those you use on Windows.

Also, in terms of "small applications," you might want to consider learning some shell scripting. You may well find that not only can you write shell scripts which duplicate the functionality of your small Windows apps, but that even more, they can potentially do so without you needing to be in front of the keyboard.

4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.

Red Hat is to be avoided, as is anything rpm based. Mr Shuttleworth's heart might be in the right place, but Ubuntu also seems to have some fairly serious problems as well, from what I've been hearing lately.

I'm going to get flamed for this, but it's good advice, so I don't car

That convenience of one platform means less management expense. So far, companies are going with lower costs over susceptibility.

Alternatives to Windows are free. As in beer. As in licensing costs: $0. License management costs: $0. Time spent calling to re-license the operating system because you installed a sound card: $0. License audit exposure: $0. As in infinity% cheaper than Windows. As in incremental cost per unit = 0. The cost of alternative supporting application and utility software is $0. Alternative database application software is $0. Alternative firewall softare is $0. Alternative antivirus software (if and as applicable) is $0. Word processing software - $0. Systems/network management tools - wait for it - $0. Documentation,comprehensive howto resources, and technical support - all $0.

Turning away from solutions such as Linux because of cost is like being on fire and turning away from a bucket of water because the water might be too hot. Arguing against alternatives to Windows on the basis of cost is the very height of idiocy and is ultimately disingenuous. The real issue when considering alternatives is the fear of change and organizational inertia. How much of either can your company afford?

the fact that cramming ten virtual machines into a single system is not a good idea when the minimal install is 1.2GB

Um, considering that in VM situations, most of that 1.2G can be in a shared read-only partition (or an LVM2 RW snapshot), and that modern hard drives are quite large, I respectfully disagree.

See the LVM HOWTO which SPECIFICALLY mentions XEN as an applcaion of RW snapshots.

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

The Linux Documentation Project is a really great site with loads of HOWTO's and guides. Really worth checking out if you have a relatively big task to do (eg. setting up a mailserver or such).

If you want help with smaller tasks I would recommend finding a nice channel on freenode (IRC).

Disclaimer: In addition to being opinionated, I've used Xen and VMware in an attempt to deploy an ISP hosting environment.

Actually, the guest OS can very much benefit from being cooperatively virtualized.

A lot of realtime code is run along side the kernel under a rudimentary hypervisor (Google for nanokernels, Adeos and RTLinux do this sort of thing). In this very important case, it is usually quite a pain to require the OS to have to implement the infrastructure to support emulated devices when it could be using a hypercall infrastructure like Xen. The real potential isn't the gigabyte-sized general-purpose OS guests, it's the 40 kilobyte realtime handlers.

If you're running VMware to run some Windows terminals under a beefy Linux box, that's great. It's an important use case.

However, in addition to this, Xen caters to situations with tiny realtime handlers running along side the a larger interface OS. Little dedicated systems controlling things like Avionics, X-ray equipment, or tracking systems. Xen is an architecture for revolutionary new systems. VMware is a crutch to prop up existing systems, and VMI is designed to efficiently implement that crutch. I don't want to take away people's crutches, I just don't want to impede the revolution.

In my case, specifically, the combination of Xen, a SAN, and CLVM has been consistently less trouble, less management, and higher performance than anything we achieved with VMware. Considering my development partner is a VMware dealer, you can bet that we exhausted their possibilities before diving into Xen. The Xen architecture has simply been better for my purposes.

If you desire to have any real understanding of the issues, take a look at the VMI spec and then the Xen Hypercall docs. Note the proliferation of x86 instructions and constructs in the former and the clean implementation of abstract interfaces in the latter.

VMware is designed to do literal translation of instructions that are pretty much architecture specific. This is because that is how they virtualize--by instruction trapping and translation. The VMI is effectively defined in terms of fencing off x86 specific instructions, memory management, and certain IO. The idea is that everything "dangerous" is trapped and emulated.

The Xen hypercall interface, on the other hand, is much clearer and targeted at actually developing towards it somewhere above a machine code level. Rather than just providing mitigation for basic instructions and processor architecture, Xen provides an hypercall layer and abstractions of pagetable maps / IO that are not nearly as architecture specific. In Xen, a single priviledged domain is allowed to do the dangerous stuff (think kernel-space / user-space split) and an efficient, set of interfaces is used to selectively provide those services to the subdomains.

Of course XenSource and VMware can't agree. VMware doesn't want to have to use abstractions when their selling point is sandboxing binaries. XenSource doesn't want to compromise a good architecture for hardware partitioning just so that a commerical vendor (with sharing issues) can implement a simple meat grinder to churn native code into sandboxed code backed by their clever emulated hardware devices.

Silly Historical Note: If you have enough history under your belt, the VMI might remind you of the architecture behind the Windows NT compatability layer to run NT code on the DEC Alpha processor. The Xen Hypercall system will likely remind you of the architecture of the kernel-space / user-space split among Unixes. If you recognize these, I'm sure you remember which one was a solid, successful product and which one was a buggy source of enterprise-level headaches.

You could consult here:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/nic.html

Or here:
http://linux-atm.sourceforge.net/

But I guess networking professionals can't really Goggle for "linux ATM".

"Women severely underestimate their abilities in many areas, but especially with respect to computers. One study about this topic is Undergraduate Women in Computer Science: Experience, Motivation, and Culture: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/papers/sigcse97 /sigcse97.html

For example, while 53% of the male computer science freshman rated themselves as highly prepared for their CS courses, 0% of the female CS freshman rated themselves similarly. But at the end of the year, 6 out the 7 female students interviewed had either an A or B average. Objective ratings (such as grade point averages or quality and speed of programming) don't agree with most women's self-estimation. I personally encountered this phenomenon: Despite plenty of objective evidence to the contrary, including grades, time spent on assignments, and high placement in a programming contest, I still didn't consider myself to be at the top of my class in college. Looking back objectively, it seems clear to me that I was performing as well or better than many of the far more confident men in my class." (HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux

I might well try that. I've only heard good things about Ubuntu, not that Fedora 5 is particually bad either.

Incidently, this link was very usefull getting multimedia support in FC5 - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Fedora-Multi media-Installation-HOWTO/

Cheers,

Sam

1. Get this book: Invaluable. Read it, from start to finish. It's that good.
2. Get this other book: also very good.
3. Check out your local Linux/BSD/UNIX user group: google is your friend for this. For instance, NYCBUG is very good if you live in New York City. Also Linux International has got a lot of conference-related announcements.
4. Pick a Linux distribution, any Linux distribution really, and try to find forums and User's group in your area. Then, do the same for another distro. And another. Lather, rinse, repeat.
5. For complete newbies, Linux Questions and The Linux Documentation Project are invaluable places to start. For more advanced advice, check out Unix Guru universe, or the O'Reilly web site.
6. Finally, do check the local university and/or community college to see if they offer some sort of training
   

Sounds like you need LVM (Logical Volume Management) on Linux.

Stop the database server process, make an LVM snapshot and restart the database process. Run the backup on the snapshot at your leisure.

What documentation issue?

There are boatloads of documentation available. Ever hear of The Linux Documentation Project? Plus, most distributions offer lots of very good documentation. Why there was a Slashdot story just two days ago about the excellent Ubuntu documentation. There are no fewer than 600 books available about Red Hat distros available for sale on Amazon. Not to mention that Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself includes lots of lots of documentation and most of it is available on the Web gratis. Plus the hundreds of open source apps that include very good documentation with their package. Have you actually read the documentation and free books available on the Samba website? It's darned good!

Any perceived documentation issue is Laura DiDiot's head.

its likely just a link local address (it begins with fe80 right?).

first assuming the linux box has a public IPV4 ip and your isp isn't providing native IPV6 connectivity you wan't to setup 6to4 on the linux box.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configuring -ipv6to4-tunnels.html

then you'll need to use other parts of that howto to assign a /64 to the lan and set up routing within the /48 that 6to4 gives you.

I think http://www.tldp.org/ is a good choice to.