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The Linux Documentation Project ( http://tldp.org/ ). The HOWTOs and FAQs are the most valuable resources. Caveat: some of the information may be outdated, look at the date of the last update. Beginners should always read the accompanying documentation of their distribution first. It is the easiest way to get started. Once you feel familiar with your distro, you can go on gaining deeper insight into the inner workings of Linux by reading the HOWTOs and the kernel documentation (part of the kernel sources). There are a lot of other documents already installed with almost every distro. The man and info pages are the place to go to learn about a specific command. Also look for directories called "doc", like /usr/doc. Another good source for info is the homepage of your distro. For example, if you use openSUSE, check out the SDB (support data base) at http://opensuse.org/SDB. In any case, when installing Linux for the first time, the first thing that you should get working is your internet connection and a web browser. That way you have access to all the online documentation as well as the discussion boards. Google Linux ( http://www.google.com/linux ) is another good place to find specific info. You can find lots of free information if you know where to look.

Yes, it's a good idea.

But don't waste time on bugs that only affect legacy hardware.

It would also be a good idea for some effort to be spent on consolidating, corrrecting, and updating the various lists of "Hardware supported by Linux". There are lots of such lists on the web, for example:

• Hardware Howto
• Linux Hardware Support
• LinuxQuestions HCL

- not to mention the distro-specific compatible hardware lists maintained for Redhat, Mandriva,Suse, and others.

We need one correct, maintained list, not dozens of nearly-correct, usually out-of-date lists. And it seems to me that the list should depend only on the kernel version, not on the distro.

Building your own RPMs isn't all that difficult actually.

Official instructions are here, but you can google for every one in the worlds opinion on how it should be done.

"to do everything but make the coffee."
Yet another poorly researched article from ZiffDorkus

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.htmlOne of the most memorable comments about software ever said is whether this or that piece of code can make coffee. Coffee is a world commodity that is second only to oil. Linux DOES make coffee; and it tastes good as well!

Yes, it's a bit more complicated than just the number of bits in the address-range when calculating disk-mapping capacity.

"A disk has sectors numbered 0, 1, 2, ... This is called LBA addressing.

In ancient times, before the advent of IDE disks, disks had a geometry described by three constants C, H, S: the number of cylinders, the number of heads, the number of sectors per track. The address of a sector was given by three numbers: c, h, s:

No disk manufactured less than ten years ago has a geometry, but this ancient 3D sector addressing is still used by the INT13 BIOS interface (with fantasy numbers C, H, S unrelated to any physical reality).

The old INT13 BIOS interface to disk I/O uses 24 bits to address a sector: 10 bits for the cylinder, 8 bits for the head, and 6 bits for the sector number within the track (counting from 1). This means that this interface cannot address more than 1024*256*63 sectors, which is 8.5 GB (with 512-byte sectors). And if the (fantasy) geometry specified for the disk has fewer than 1024 cylinders, or 256 heads, or 63 sectors per track, then this limit will be less.

The old ATA standard describes how to address a sector on an IDE disk using 28 bits (8 bits for the sector, 4 for the head, 16 for the cylinder). This means that an IDE disk can have at most 2^28 addressable sectors - With 512-byte sectors this is 2^37 bytes, that is, 137.4 GB.

The ATA-6 standard includes a specification how to address past this 2^28 sector boundary. The new standard allows addressing of 2^48 sectors. "

Basically bit-size of the address range, because of this legacy BIOS fantasy translation to CHS, is not linearly related to the addressable capacity of the disk. Note, linux isn't affected by this problem post-boot, as it addresses the disk directly. It does however cause lots of problem if the boot partition is on a drive with two different geometries depending on when you look at it from the BIOS, and when you look at it in the OS.

You mean snapshots like LVM has provided for years? http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_back up.html ?

I hear that complaint from a lot from Windows users. But I don't think it's justified. I think the article's publisher is merely hyping the snob angle as a marketing ploy to drive click-through to his Linux-help blog. Nearly ever so-called Linux snob I've ever met has been an ex-Windows snob. If Linux users were such snobs why is there so much free documentation written by Linux users @ http://www.tldp.org/? Did I also mention the article's blog hypes a Linux help book?

I think its a matter of find the right people. When I started, Ive a friend that knows linux six months earlier. For me, he was a master. IMHO, the best way to begin is having friends that doesnt know the linux either and then all could learn together. Share the experience.

Those arrogant people dont realize that more people using linux is better, no matter how they understand its internals. So, sometimes is good have some help. The worst is the beginning. A mix of frustrating, irritating, stress and a sense of "so, what this crap do?" Even worse, when linux begins, more people knew what was a dos shell, a CLI etc. Today?! People simply dont know whats a CLI or develop a fear of touching it.

How many people you know that read linux-advocacy-howto?
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/text/Advocacy

But, on the other hand, we have to consider that, eventually, we may encounter lazy, arrogant people that dont want to learn anything. People like that go to a list and demand a answer. Dont give any information, log, debug, help... nothing.

For me, "Those arrogant people" > /dev/null 2>&1

Its my opinion.
---

Its easier to criticize than correct.

Yeah...except that "Linux in a Nutshell" ISN'T a manual. Manuals come with products. Going out and buying a book, while sound advice for someone who wants to learn Linux administration, really isn't the implication that comes from RTFM.

If they don't want to buy a book, fine. It's not like there aren't many free guides available. Being cheap is no excuse.

Yeah...except that "Linux in a Nutshell" ISN'T a manual. Manuals come with products. Going out and buying a book, while sound advice for someone who wants to learn Linux administration, really isn't the implication that comes from RTFM.

If they don't want to buy a book, fine. It's not like there aren't many free guides available. Being cheap is no excuse.

Yeah...except that "Linux in a Nutshell" ISN'T a manual. Manuals come with products. Going out and buying a book, while sound advice for someone who wants to learn Linux administration, really isn't the implication that comes from RTFM.

If they don't want to buy a book, fine. It's not like there aren't many free guides available. Being cheap is no excuse.

Thanks!

Oops, slashdot "fixed" my link. It should be tldp.org

the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location.

Wow! If only someone had thought of that before!

Yes, partnering with Redhat to make a distro is going to make things difficult. But if you give it a brief amount of love, it can easily work. Until two years ago, I ran Debian on a machine with very similar specs, although it did have more disk space. The base install of Debian takes up over 500 megabytes. Localization for a langauge other than english may require up to another 200. The "desktop task" on Debian takes up almost 2 gigs. Although this installs both KDE and GNOME, clearly this system isn't designed for a 100 dollar laptop market that doesn't exist. If rather than install you cook up a single image for all these devices, then KDE+GNOME is down to 1.3 Gigabytes. This is still too damn big. I don't know offhand what eats up a lot of debian's base, but its clear the big guys aren't after this non-existant market at the moment.

However, its not impossible, moreover, its been done before. Fuck, theres even a HOWTO on the subject. There's also several distros and projects on the subject, but many of them have died out as the need for them has waned. In short, you cant just put fedora core on your 512M CF card, and if you expected this, you're much further from done than you think.

I think the grandparent poster's real beef is not that the author of the book has published something that's printed on dead trees. Instead, GP's problem is that the book has a restrictive license. There are dead-tree books out there, such as Dive into Python, that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Full text is available online as well.

There are also books at the Linux Documentation Project that are not available on dead trees, unless you print them yourself.

All that said, I don't understand GP's beef either. Ubuntu is not a community based distro. Sure, it benefits Shuttleworth to cultivate this community myth, but Ubuntu's from a for-profit company. Even if Ubuntu truly were community-based, I'd have no problem with people trying to make money off it with restrictively-licensed books.

If we want more free documentation, we'll have to write it. This I am doing now (see sig.)

Ah, I love the smell of MS-fanboi in the morning.

Try installing latest Fedora Core, SUSE, or Ubuntu, and not only will the space they take up greatly exceed that of a proper Windows 2000/XP install
Does Windows come with an Office Suite? CD Burning software? Image editing software? A development IDE? A variety of games? How about vector graphics software? Or a database?

What do you think takes up those 5 CDs in the SuSE install? The kernel?
, but they will be much slower, because while hardware advanced, Linux still uses technology from 20 years ago to talk with the graphics card (X11),
Those who do not understand X11 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. X11 is a high speed, fully network transparent architecture. The Xfree86 people let it languish on the vine, but the Xorg fork has gotten things into gear again, and we're seeing the API move forward at a breakneck pace. Xorg 7.0 is really far more sophisticated than anything else on the market, including WGF/DirectX 10 or whatever MS is calling it, and even my beloved OS X's Aqua/Quartz.

Don't underestimate the extensibility of Xorg, and don't underestimate its performance. It's a lean, mean, high-performance and full featured windowing environment.
still lacks kernel audio mixing
Bzzzt.... dmix runs at the kernel level. Modern linux distributions enable it by default for all users. You can turn it off if you want lower latency audio. AFAIK, you have to call dmix from userspace, but the plugin is running directly "on the metal" of the alsa subsystem.

still lacks in PnP department (removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?)
Huh? Go to media:// (or click on the "Desktop" icon in Gnome, or click on the "Drives" icon in KDE, or go to the file browser). Right-click on the USB stick icon. Press "Eject" in the context menu.

Nay, Windows lacks in the PnP department. What the _hell_ is this concept of drivers, where I have to log in as administrator to install new hardware on my system? On Linux, I just plug it in, and the device node just appears, be it USB stick, WLAN card, ethernet card, or whatever. With a proper desktop environment I get a nice little pop-up asking if I want to configure it.

Oh, and Windows is braindead in the filesystem support department, as well. NTFS, and FAT32 are NOT enough for everyone's needs. Some people use modern journaling filesystems. Some people need to access HFS+ (that's the OS X file system). Some people need to access a wide variety of filesystems (don't forget the commercial UNIXes, which have a substantial marketshare in the server/workstation market). Perhaps someday MS will find the cash to hire a few more developers, and maybe even add a filesystem driver or two. Then again, given the ugly nature of the Windows Driver Model, this might not happen.....

still has abysmal support for various multimedia devices (no, the few tens reverse-engineered audio/video capture/etc drivers don't really count), etc etc
This one is half true. Unless, of course, your a professional, and use firewire. Firewire, of course, works perfectly. I capture whatever I want directly from my HDV camcorder, or from my cable box. Oh, and my ATI and Happenhauge TV tuners work out-of-box, too. Without installing drivers.

But yes, you do have to be careful with what capture cards you purchase on Linux. Stick with good name brand stuff, however, and you'll do okay. Sorry if your crap-o-matic generic capture card doesn't work; shell out the $35 to go get a supported one. Here is a short list to get you started. None of these require drivers; they are integrated into the kernel. You can get other stuff that's not integrated into the kernel, but I wouldn't recommend messing with that.

Sadly, ATI and Nvidia have not released their VIVO (All-in-wonder) drivers for Linux yet. Both have committed to do so, however. All-in-wonder and VIVO (nvidia) support are avaliable, but only for older card

Oracle refused to install on normal Linux. I don't know what the problem was, and apparantly neither did our Solaris guy.

I am sorry, but I am calling bullshit on this. Yes, Oracle can be difficult to install on a Linux installation that is not "supported" because it makes a lot of assumptions about the services that will be available to it. BUT any competant admin can find out what the requirements are without a lot of difficulty. And in many cases there are guides that can be used to install Oracle on non-supported systems.

One such guide is the following:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Oracle-9i-Fe dora-3-Install-HOWTO/

So what's your reasoning that XP can't be used?

As far as Oracle running on Windows XP, the main reason that I wouldn't do that is that Windows XP doesn't provide the services that a server OS would. For example, such an installation would be limited to no more than 10 concurrent users, amoung other things.

Linux should work reasonably well if you don't run X11 although memory will be your biggest problem. Try the 4mb-laptop howto for some ideas. I run debian sarge on my laptop, which I also use as my main machine because I like the keyboard. It's only a p166mmx but it's maxed out to 96mb ram and a new 20gb hdd. My p4 just sits in the corner for watching videos on and large computational tasks through ssh.

Er? Most computers have a slew of power-saving features on each chip. Unfortunately ACPI can be a bit buggy due to lack of information available on the chips themselves.

At the very least, users concerned about power management should make sure that the idle loop uses HLT (if that works, which it should on most modern PCs), and a little poking around like here for old Athlons and you can usually find ways to kick your computer into a much lower-power state.

And I cannot understand why people think Sleep mode is wasteful. Plenty of people leave their computers on all the time. I'd rather have them put them in Sleep when they're not used than leave them on. Sure, I'd rather them turn them off, but I'd like a million dollars, too.

speech recognition
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

image+speech recognition
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/

Desktop voice commands
http://perlbox.sourceforge.net/

Others
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO /software.html
http://www.cavs.msstate.edu/hse/ies/projects/speec h/software/

Do you know about other usable open source speech solutions?

I work in a large telco who's security policy is to restrict everything unless explicitly allowed, and the process to get anything allowed is a 3 month long waste of time.

I also have an ssh tunnel established from my work PC to my home connection, and I run pppd over that to create a VPN between my home network and the network at work. I realise that this is probably completely against company policy, but the "official" VPN solution only lets me hit the Exchange server, and doesn't let me actually do any work. Most of the company's "work" involves forwarding emails, so it's probably fine for them.

Unfortunately tcp over tcp is really quite nasty (http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.h tml) but as nothing else but ssh is allowed out of the firewall at work, I don't have a lot of choice.

A howto that I found quite helpful is at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/ppp-ssh/

Anyway.. on to my anecdote (not required reading):

Part of my job involves working on a distributed monitoring system which is deployed in a star topography around the country. All the remote sites send & receive data from one central site (with one redundant central site) using a variety of protocols, like ssh, xmlrpc, dns, telnet, snmp, syslog, etc.

The network was designed by people who were given a set of instructions like "You will use these 2 vendor's systems" and "You must follow these corporate security policies which were written 10 years ago for phone networks", so it's terrible by today's standards (and for an ISP in general).

There are firewalls between all of my boxes, even though all my boxes are on the management lan, and they only allow a very small set of protocols through - not enough to let my software work. That wasn't the worst part. The worst was that the firewalls are also protecting the billing network so have very low tolerances for intrusion detection and flood protection and such. Basically I can only establish 5 connections per second *across the entire network*. This is clearly not enough for a busy monitoring system. So we decided to build a VPN between all of my boxes using ppp on ssh tunnels.

I now have a separate ppp interface from the central server to each of the remote datacenter servers, all on the 10.0.0.0/16 network. ip forwarding is enabled on the central site, so now remote datacenters can talk to each other (also blocked by the firewalls) and I can use all the connections I need to. I'm running quagga ( http://www.quagga.net/ ) on every remote datacenter and the central servers (along with the redundant one) so I can distribute routes to remote datacenter devices and cope with the death of one of the central servers without major service interruption.

However it really is quite slow. I can only get around 200kb/s over each ppp interface even though the physical links are 100+mbit each. But I really don't need huge bandwidth, just some that isn't firewalled.

This "solution" has been in production for 6 months now, and I'm sure as soon as the corporate security people find out they will shut it down and I'll go back to not being able to do my job.

I'd be looking for technical writing, in the flesh, not "technical writing" as a search term. You'll need some sort of portfolio or writing sample if you make it to an application anyhow.

What?

If you sync the mirror on a RAID-1 and take one mirror out, then you no longer have RAID. Moreover, if you pop in another disk and wait for it to sync you will overload the system.

Might as well use external disks attached via USB2 and copy what you want to them.

EMC has a feature called Business Continuance Volumes (BCV) whereby you have something like Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and snapshots, but with multiple RAID-1 mirrors, AND the mirror can be remote on another EMC box.

Still limited by how fat the pipe is, and not affordable for home use!

Those who have EMCs use robotic tape libraries, and pop out the tapes for offsite storage.

What?

If you sync the mirror on a RAID-1 and take one mirror out, then you no longer have RAID. Moreover, if you pop in another disk and wait for it to sync you will overload the system.

Might as well use external disks attached via USB2 and copy what you want to them.

EMC has a feature called Business Continuance Volumes (BCV) whereby you have something like Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and snapshots, but with multiple RAID-1 mirrors, AND the mirror can be remote on another EMC box.

Still limited by how fat the pipe is, and not affordable for home use!

Those who have EMCs use robotic tape libraries, and pop out the tapes for offsite storage.

I would assume most of the users on here are quite linux savy (if not, ask a friend, they may be able to help, but prepared to supply beer and pizza).

Rather than a dedicated cheap nas device, i decided to go with a DIY linux software raid array. The current linux software raid is pretty reliable. if your doing mission critical data, i recommend hardware raid instead however. To estimate this, try to attempt to guage the cost associated with re-gathering all your data, and spend at least 1/4 that much for your storage.

My solution was 4 200gb ata seagate baracuda drives in sw raid 5. the cost was about:
- 4 drives @ $125 cdn
- case & powersupply @ $100 cdn
- board, cpu, 512mb ram @ $200 cdn
total cost - 900$ cdn

i used the onboard ide controller for a 80gb os disk, and a separate 2channel pci ide controller for the 4 disks, in raid 5, giving about .6tb of storage:
achilles:/storage 559G 474G 86G 85% /storage

i've been using this volume for about 1.5 years now with no problems *knock wood*. I've also rebuilt a sw raid 5 array at work, so i know that part of it works (for the most part).

A few benefits i find using linux rather than a hardware device:
- i can ssh/winscp in and get any of my files, anytime, from anywhere
- i can run apache, mounting my /store/picturelibrary/ directory, and share my pictures with family
- nfs or smb mount the volumes to any other linux/windows machines
- the geek satisfaction of having my own .6tb volume.

my next step from this is to purchase 4-8 SATA drives, a 8channel sata controller, and go with that. One thing to consider, is the location of your system. With this many drives, it can generate substantial heat (and noise), so you probably dont' want it sitting in a warm location in your home, where you have to listen to it droning away (4 cudas make some noise :) ). Mine is in my basement, also has a cdrw on it (for quick doc backups), a 2gb orb drive (for quicker backups) and a shared printer.

hope this helps! a good linux sw raid howto is at:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

One other thing. you can also use the mdadm tools to monitor the volume for any issues, and if/when they arrise, you can have it email you a message. This way you can pick up a spare 200gb drive on your way home from work to replace the failed one :). The linux md device also supports a hot spare, which i recommend you consider if the data is important enough to you.

dwight s.

Whatever you do, you MUST be protected from accidental deletion and corruption. That means you need a backup, which RAID is not. Now assuming you maintain a separate backup, why waste disk space on a separate "hot" backup, which RAID (not 0) provides? If this is home use, you don't care about the downtime required to restore from background in event of a disk failure.

If you're like me, you don't want to buy a bunch of identical disks at once for home use. Instead, you have a range of larger newer disks, and smaller older disks. . This means the disks you want to use are NOT all the same size, as required by RAID (AFAIK). Instead, you can use LVM with linear mapping to combine smaller drives into one larger one, even if the physical drives are mismatched sizes. Create one logical volume for live, and one for backup, and do nightly updates of the backup. You probably don't want/need to compress the backup if the bulk of your files are already compressed media files.

This appears to be the same as linux's cryptoloop (loop-aes, etc), or am I missing something?

Yes, it's similar.

It's nothing really special, until it's implemented so laptop users can easily set up an encrypted root filesystem and be able to boot into it easily.

It's aldready possible.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encrypted-Root-Filesyste m-HOWTO/

• Learning Debian GNU/Linux
  
• Linux Documentation Project: Guides. You may be interested in Introduction to Linux: Hands-On Guide
  
• Simply Linux
  
• RUTE Linux Textbook. This one is an advanced, comprehensive textbook.

• Learning Debian GNU/Linux
  
• Linux Documentation Project: Guides. You may be interested in Introduction to Linux: Hands-On Guide
  
• Simply Linux
  
• RUTE Linux Textbook. This one is an advanced, comprehensive textbook.

Is there a troubleshooting guide in general for linux? A lot of newbies are intimidated by the number of hoops they have to jump through for things like setting up sound etc. I know it can be quite frustrating because I recall back when I first installed Ubuntu in different installations of the same version of Ubuntu, different tricks got my sound to work on my laptop. For that matter, is something like this feasible because of the various distros and the difficulty of hardware support? So far, the best one I've found is the Ubuntu Starter Guide, but it is distro specific...

PS: I've already checked the Linux Documentation Project

If you want "chicks" go to a bar. There are plenty of them willing to spread their legs for the price of a few drinks (though maybe not for you being as you post on Slashdot).

However if you are interested in meeting women that are interested in Linux you are more likely to find them there than by picking a random one off the street. However note that a Linux user group is not a place to chat women up they probably come there because they are interested in Linux (rather than trying to get a date) and to socialise and don't want to be singled out because they are female.

Read this
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HO WTO/

One good reason to use DB2 is that neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL can scale to the same size of database as DB2. Using DB2's "Distributed Partitioning Facility", or DPF, with DB2 Enterprise Server Edition you can partition data over hundreds of machines using a shared-nothing approach. This means you can create a data warehouse of a hundred terabytes that 1) appears to your applications as just a single database 2) retrieves query results blazing fast (this is the "shared nothing" part; each machine knows what data it is responsible for, so a query that comes in to the database is automatically distributed to the responsble machines, which go off and do their work, then return the results to a single co-ordinator that pipes them back to the application -- it's like RAID-0 for databases).

It's certainly possible to create a multi-terabyte database using MySQL or PostgreSQL -- but you're going to be waiting way the hell longer to get a result back from your queries.

Reason 2: You get support from IBM. IBM lives and dies by its enterprise level support -- 24x7 customer service around the world. Sure, you can purchase support from MySQL AB or from some PostgreSQL shop, but it's not going to approach the level of service that you'll get from IBM. In fact, to get a level of support comparable to what IBM offers for DB2 Express at $4874 for the first year and $1218/year for support after the first year, you would need to buy MySQL Network Gold for $2995/year. So after two years, going with DB2 Express will actually cost you less than half of what MySQL support will cost!

Just think of the number of systems that rely on IPv4 right now: networks, routers, cell phones, etc. There really isn't a lot of room left at the current rate of expansion. But let's face, that's how we get: complacent. The current system is working -- why bother with a new one? I believe the Romans got that way toward the end...

I read the article and it was insightful, but I didn't have a lot of background on IPv6, so I searched for some background and found this on the details and this on implementing it in Linux.

From the article: The Internet was not designed like this. It was designed to enable peer-to-peer and VoIP. In the meantime, through NAT, telecomms companies are offering VoIP but they want to bill you for it, but the Internet was not designed with any billing mechanism. When you connect to the Internet you pay anyway, so why should you pay for more services? This is the big debate. The Internet was not designed for telecomms companies, it was designed for everyone to share expensive CPU power. When you share expensive resources you can do anything.

I agree. Paying for sevrices is basically just icing on the cake for telecoms.

Only downside was the ugly fonts but thats very easily fixed after a visit to TLDP Font-HOWTO

Day to day use is great.. never any problems, never any time 'wasted' configuring anything.. everything 'just works' - its almost like windows! ;)

I also have it running on an old toshiba laptop.

Everyone raves about ubuntu (perhaps rightly) but I had no luck with it as it refused to install on my desktop or laptop although maybe the new version would.

Kickstart - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/KickStart-HOWTO.html Welcome to the new world.

Goes to web page . . .

This document has been removed at the request of the author

Wow, was I supposed to see something impressive?

Kickstart - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/KickStart-HOWTO.html

Welcome to the new world.

Yeah, I meant to preview.

When I said "besides the HOWTOs", I meant to be dismissive of them, sorry if that wasn't clear. I was specifically recommending the guides, many of which are current and maintained, and more useful than any of these gimmicky books they're charging money for.

First of all, it's tldp.*org*. Second of all, many, many HOWTOs are absurdly out of date. Sure, there is good stuff there, but, for example, a search for dual-boot first turns up results on how to dual boot Linux with Win95/98/ME, complete with instructions for the complicated partitioning needed to get around LBA boot limitations (presented not as "oh, and this is what you need to do *if* you happen to have a bajillion-year-old machine," but as "oh, and this is what you need to do because it's a limitation of *all* current hardware"). The FreeBSD Handbook, also constantly lauded, has the same issues. Both the Handbook and the HOWTOs are inconsistent and outdated. They're both very helpful when they *are* up-to-date, but it's hard to trust documentation that is that spotty... I'm not just trolling--I realize the difficulty in maintaining docs (heck, I'd rather code, too), but it's something that makes *nix systems less approachable.

...is free on the Net. Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide at the Linux Documentation Project. Print the PDF, save a trip to the bookstore. Doesn't assume (much) prior knowledge, yet omits all the trivial "Here's how to burn a CD in K3B" nonsense.

Quite a lot of commercial linux software ships as statically linked binaries, where the dependencies are linked in. Indeed, if you're shipping closed source software this is strongly adviseable, as it avoids lots of dependency trouble.

You can also ship things as a single self-installing file: it's called a shar archive. E.g. Sun ship their JDK this way: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Nvidia-OpenGL-Configurat ion/instjava.html

Or you can go one better and have APT (or similar systems) where I type:

apt-get install openoffice .. and it downloads it and its dependencies, installs them, asks any necessary configuration questions, and integrates itself into the desktop menu system.

Quite a lot of people ship software as source tarballs because that's the preferred form for modification. Ease of use isn't everything to everyone.

• Novell Linux Desktop
  SuSE Linux 10
  Novell Open Enterprise Server

A simple Google query would've given you what you seek, but what you need is ncpmount. There are numerous HOWTOs and FAQs on this topic. If people have written these HOWTOs, they've surely implemented it at some point.

Yes, that'd work, and when I had to work with an IPX-only server a few years ago that was what I did. You probably don't need to read much further than http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IPX-HOWTO.html (although that dates from 1988 - I suspect that the "caldera.com" links may not be helpful any more).

However - does the server that you're working with really only run IPX? I've encountered quite a few Novell (Groupwise) systems over the last couple of years - some Windows, some Linux, but most Netware. None of them has been IPX-only. Even Novell don't recommend installing IPX with Netware these days, and if it does support TCP/IP why not use that?

I believe there has long been an X11 port for Minix-386 (an enhanced and slightly bigger version of Minix running in protected mode on 386 boxes).

If you want a simpler windowing system you could try MGR.

" [EAP is] an authentication framework which supports multiple authentication methods. EAP typically runs directly over data link layers such as Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) or IEEE 802, without requiring IP. EAP provides its own support for duplicate elimination and retransmission, but is reliant on lower layer ordering guarantees. Fragmentation is not supported within EAP itself; however, individual EAP methods may support this." --- RFC 3748, page 3

Done!

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/

So what are the choices? ext2/ext3 which are slow, reiserfs which sucks ass when it breaks..

Apart from the big (production quality) alternatives like IBM's JFS (which I use myself) and SGI's XFS (and Reiser - "Reiser sucks when it breaks" is so 1999) Linux additionally supports the following filesystems (from http://www.xenotime.net/linux/linux-fs.html, also try http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO.html):


* accessfs: permission filesystem
* AFS FAQ
* AutoFS
* AVFS: A Virtual File System
* AVFS: A Virtual Filesystem
* BeFS for Linux2.4
* BeOS filesystem for Linux
* BFS UnixWare, Linux Implementation of
* CDfs
* CIFS
* Cluster File Systems Home
* Coda File System
* Crypto HOWTO
* convertfs: convert Linux filesystems
* DAFS: Direct Access File System
* Devfs (Device File System) FAQ
* efslook: read/debug EFS filesystems (ported to Linux & x86) {new}
* Enhanced Loopback (for XFS)
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 Filesystem Utilities
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 FS Utilities
* Ext2 Compression Extension
* FSDEXT2: ext2 filesystem for Win95
* ext2fsnt: Linux Ext2 filesystem for Windows NT driver
* ext2 fs resize utilities
* ext2 online growth patch (adilger)
* Explore2fs
* FHS: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
* FHS Test Suite
* Filesystems HOWTO
* FiST: File System Translator
* FreeVXFS
* fsv: 3D File System Visualizer
* Global File System (Sistina)
* GNU ext2resize: ext2 filesystem resizer
* HFS+ filesystem
* HFS+ filesystem #2
* InterMezzo FS
* JFFS (axis.com)
* Journaling Flash File System, v2
* JFS for Linux (IBM)
* journal_fs report (OSDL)
* Kragen's Amazing List of Filesystems
* Large File Support in Linux
* Large File Summit (LFS) stuff
* Large File / File System Support
* Linux EXT2 salvage utility
* Linux Ext2fs Undeletion mini-HOWTO
* Linux FAT-32 support
* Linux filesystem redundancy
* Linux Links: File Systems
* Linux NFS FAQ
* Linux RAID Solutions
* LUFS: Linux Userland File System
* Lustre & Lustre Light filesystems
* NFS project
* NFSv4 for Linux 2.4
* Linux NTFS file system support
* loop-aes cryptoloop device

How is this article news? Expect to see regular articles that link to TLDP and *NIX man pages soon on slashdot.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61228&threshol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=131&mode=thread&cid=5758997
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html

http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/FDU/truetype.html

http://www.niii.ru.nl/~pauldv/fonts.php

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread .php?s=&threadid=257705

Does this help? Basically the 2 issues are hints embedded within a font for optimal viewing, and the second have to do with freetype fonts which modern oses use over ttfonts. The Linux version is not feature complete due to the legal mess. I am sure you can download the patented versions and install it yourself but its a pain.