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Try here.

I think he's referring to MS Active Directory and their Kerberos support, not the .NET Passport boondoggle.

Apparently it's well-known at Microsoft that Linux doesn't support Kerberos.

Lilliput 7" touchscreens are only $279 at www.mp3car.com. Prefect for and undercabinet mounting. Combine that with a mini-itx board and you have a great kiosk or mp3 car player.

Other links of interest:

Linux Touch Screen HOWTO
EPIA HOWTO
Gentoo EPIA HOWTO
Nehemiah Hardware Entropy Generator
VIA PadLock support for Linux

Haha, that was funny. And true. A friend of mine who used mandrake for a few days went on to install gentoo, for rumour had it that if you can install it, you'll learn a lot about the system.

Spent hours and hours installing it, (which doesn't make too much sense - why not have a functioning system in 5 minutes and then rebuild everything?), installation documentation in his lap, and after a while he managed to install it. Took another day to get alsa working (couldn't help him, I myself was confused by it). Anyway, in a few days, he had a working system with X (and without working kpdf, for he missed a use-flag apparently). And I spent the next few weeks explaining the most trivial things I could learned reading the Introduction to Linux guide on my two-hour trip home on a train. Apparently, my friend didn't buy into the "I'm now a geek cause I installed gentoo" myth, and was very very frustrated. Finally, I dug up the excellent Machtelt Garrels guide (still the best in linuxland for newbies I think) and I lent it to him.

(Then later he switched back to Win2000, and just upgraded to XP recently).

PPP tunnelled over SSH is simple, quick to set up, and works without a hitch. I've used it to connect 20+ locations, and it's just as good as having a dedicated frame link between the sites.

IPSEC (using openeswan or similar) work well, but are in my experience more complicated and harder to maintain than using the PPPoverSSH method.

Both of these are free.

• http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/VPN-HOWTO/
• http://www.openswan.org/

Theres always http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/ which has clients and servers for windows, or you could always tunnel pppd over ssh, http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/VPN-HOWTO/ for details

I really think that we (slashdotters) should launch a project aiming at redesigning Tahoma, Georgia, Verdana, Mono, Comic, Courier New, Impact, Arial, Arial Black, Lucida and Trebuchet. It wouldn't be exactly the same fonts, but their properties (size, spacing, kerning) and looks would be equivalents to those they clone, so that interchanging them with MS's ones wouldn't break any documents / web pages.

*gasp*

Didn't you read the HOWTO!?!? That would be wrong! That would be creating a "ripoff"! We're all supposed to create brand new fonts from all original ideas by copying Guttenberg's interchangeable typefaces, not by copying some font that costs $100 for plain text, and then another $100 for bold, and italics. Bold-italics for $150. That's a savings of 25% over buying a bold and italic individually! WOW! What a deal! But what ever we should do, we shouldn't buy cheap fonts. That's wrong. ("Southern Software, Inc [...] but don't buy any of their fonts!")

The Microsoft Core Fonts [...]
Some people say these fonts are free only for who have a Microsoft Windows license.

The closest thing that I know of that you described is FreeBSD's included documentation, which includes a handbook, FAQ, articles, howtos, and manpages.

I started out with ZipSlack (a mini-version of Slackware that can be installed on a DOS partition alongside Windows) about nine months ago to get used to *nix before removing my Windows partition. ZipSlack didn't come with too much documentation other than manpages, but I found many resources on the Internet such as Linux Questions and the The Linux Documentation Project. Slackware also had some nice tutorials on their website, too, and I checked out Unix books from the library. Within months, I mastered some of the basics of Unix, and I was ready to get rid of Windows. Only things holding me back were a dial-up connection and a Winmodem.

Then, in September, I bit the bullet and deleted my Windows partition to install FreeBSD. My professor gave me a FreeBSD disk with some ports, too, so I decided to install that rather than downloading a Linux distribution (I have dialup, so that would take a long time). FreeBSD has a very good handbook that comes installed with the system. The handbook teaches a new user how to do things with FreeBSD, such as adding users, configuring a network, recompiling a kernel, etc. FreeBSD not only comes with the handbook, but it also comes with FAQs, howtos, and articles. FreeBSD's manpages are actually very readable. FreeBSD's mailing lists are also very helpful, too.

One of the advantages of free, open-source *nix is that there are tons of free resources on the Internet. I found so many tutorials on the Internet, from learning basic commands such as ls to learning Perl, that I cannot read them all. The Linux and FreeBSD communities are also very nice and very helpful. They want more people to move to their platforms, so they're willing to help those who are new to it.

Still, I wish there was a guide for Unix newbies (especially Windows-using non-geeks) that expressed the strengths of Unix over Windows, and show some of the non-geek types that Unix isn't that bad; yes, there is the command line, but you don't need to know every command (or even everything about a specific command), and that there are plenty of programs available that make Unix much more accessible (such as GNOME/KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox, and other great applications).

(1) SMB:
The support is there fore most distros to use an AD server for authentication, (users, not groups, and the users must exist in the password file). On fedora, which I recommend as an alternate to RHEL (RedHat is the easiest to configure in this area imho), the command to look at is authconfig. Enter your domain, your primary and secondary servers, and your AD auth setup is done.

(2) VPN:
consider using PopTop as a pptp vpn server for linux. There is documentation available but there are also other ways of doing it

(3) Research:

Do some research. The Linux Documentation Project is a good source. But google is your friend as well.

(1) SMB:
The support is there fore most distros to use an AD server for authentication, (users, not groups, and the users must exist in the password file). On fedora, which I recommend as an alternate to RHEL (RedHat is the easiest to configure in this area imho), the command to look at is authconfig. Enter your domain, your primary and secondary servers, and your AD auth setup is done.

(2) VPN:
consider using PopTop as a pptp vpn server for linux. There is documentation available but there are also other ways of doing it

(3) Research:

Do some research. The Linux Documentation Project is a good source. But google is your friend as well.

It it good to see js is used for more than popping up annoying ads on my screen. Now also The Linux Documentation Project offers a JavaScript driven HOWTO Generator where you just fill in the blanks, click on a button and out comes LinuxDoc SGML-code, ready for publishing.

Well, some of us aren't Free freaks or anything like that, we just like to use free (as in beer) software that is stable and not laden with spyware/nagware/etc. For someone who is planning on not using Windows (even for gaming), reading the Hardware HOWTO at tldp.org, checking various discussion forums and other resources, and then buying a nVidia card based on the number of questions/problems/complaints from other users would be the smart thing to do.

I can't wait to update my JavaStation to a .NETstation ...

yeah.

"It doesn't seem to want to deal with text files (there is no import feature for the Palm Desktop notepad or memo pad, for example)."

You mean 'in Windows'. In the Linux and UNIX world, there are dozens of choices in how you want to talk to your Palm.

For "text files", nothing beats Plucker when carrying text, ebooks, manuals, HTML pages, HOWTO documents, and other items. The LDP even carries all of their HOWTO documents in Plucker format. Its the only format that is freely available, openly documented, and very extensible.

Just look at how beautiful Plucker is with the PHP documentation as one example...

"Also there seems to be no way to copy arbitrary files to the Palm - all files must be "owned" by an application. With a 256MB SD card I expected to use it to copy files between work and home."

You must mean '...in Windows' again. In the non-Windows side, including OSX, we have pilot-link which talks natively to your Palm and can do all kinds of things that the Windows tools cannot (including operating at 40% faster in some cases).

Commercial companies such as MarkSpace are using pilot-link (the core library of pilot-link anyway) in their commercial product, MissingSync which runs on OSX.

For desktop replacements, PIMs, and other tools, there are dozens of alternatives. Here are several, in no particular order (with Coralized links to protect the bandwidth of the various projects):

• Kpilot
• PilotManager
• J-Pilot
• Evolution (an Outlook clone)
• Multisync

There are many others, but these are the top contenders. They all also rely on the libraries and language bindings provided by pilot-link to communicate with your Palm device.

"Has anyone else noticed these or other shortcomings and have figured out ways around them?"

Yes, stop using Windows. Stop using the featureless proprietary tools provided by these vendors who only listen to their profit margins, not to their userbase.

Seriously

Can you create multiple partitions on a key and then use grub to boot from the different partitions? The HOWTO implies that it can be done, but I don't have any of these devices to verify it.

You are generating collateral spam. The sender address (From: and/or Sender: headers, "MAIL FROM:" envelope) are always forged in the case of spam -- "bouncing" a message is just adding to the problem.

Much better to reject at SMTP time, using a 4xx/5xx SMTP response. For details, see the
Spam Filtering for Mail Exchangers HOWTO.

Here you go.

0) Software http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
1) Hardware HOWTO with example http://www.ram.org/computing/linux/dpt_raid.html
2) http://www.finnie.org/terabyte/
3) Plder http://www.nobell.org/~gjm/linux/ide-raid/ but useful info on controller companies.

If you need to write more that about 10-20 lines of bash to make mp3s and oggs out of your flac files, you're doing something wrong.

It is most satisfying to convert 20 albums from flac to ogg and mp3 while you sleep. The old SETI@home score goes down a bit, though :-)

for question like this. Its why i love slashdot!
Check out Some notes on how to build a Linux cluster and Linux Cluster HOWTO. Good luck!

Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead and then use mplayer or xine or totem to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer to build a custom app pretty quickly that sent 3 separate video streams to 3 different monitors and kept everything synchronized with a single point of control.

A couple of generic 160 gig drives from pricewatch ($70 each), combined with a few cheap enclosures from pricewatch ($20 each) and a safe deposit box across town ($30/year) ensures that even in the event of my home being completely wiped from the map, my data will survive. I'm running a 4 disk 160gb doftware raid-5 which has no troubles as of yet. Two disks are year old Maxtor disks and 2 of them are brand new generic pricewatch disks. I've had no problems or trouble with any of them. Before I could afford more disks, the 2 maxtors were running mirrored in software with no trouble for about a year. After I filled them up, I decided to triple my capacity and go with the raid-5. It's been wonderful. I set it up using the guide at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.ht ml. I don't have any "hot" spares, but I have perfectly suitable replacement disks available to drop in once a primary drive fails. AND I have an offiste backup.

Nothing like doing a little cursory research at the more prominent documentation sites for topics on this matter.

In summary:
How stable is the current RAID 5 support in Linux? Quite. It's really the only way to go, and performs about as well as hardware raid.

How hard is it to rebuild an array? It's not. At all.
How well does the hot spare work? Seamlessly. Be sure to use LVM, as it makes things all the more seamless.
Will it rebuild using the spare automatically if it detects a drive has failed? Yes.

I manage a lot of servers remotely. I started out using the hardware RAID support on my server's mobos. But there were issues with that.

First, it was hard getting Linux driver support (I think drivers were available, but it was a matter of downloading them. And I don't beleive they worked on the 2.6 kernel's I used).

Then the RAID setup required BIOS settings. When you only have remote access to a server (and no KVM-o-IP) that means you need to work through a tech at the DC. Not, umm, ideal.

And finally, there was the issue of 'what if I need to move these disks to a different server'. One that doesn't have the same raid controller. Well, it wouldn't work.

Anyway, I ended up using software raid. I've used it now on a few dozen servers. And I'm really happy with it. Performance seems fine, albeit I'm not using it in really IO critical environments like a dedicated database server. In in 99% of cases I'd now use software raid in preference to hardware raid.

What follows are a few tips I'd like to pass along that may be a help with getting a software raid setup...

If you get the chance setup RAID on / and /boot via your OS installer (on a new system). Doing it afterwards is a real pain.

Build RAID support and RAID1,and RAID5 into the kernel (not as modules). You'll need that if you boot from a raid1 boot partition. Note: if you are using RAID5 you'll need RAID1 built in (since I beleive in the event of a failed disk the raid personaility swaps from RAID5 to RAID1).

With a 2.6 kernel build I've been getting "no raid1 module" errors at the make install phase when building with a RAID-ed / or /boot. The 'fix' is to compile the RAID support you need into the kernel (not as modules) then run: /sbin/mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.6.8.1.img 2.6.8.1 --omit-raid-modules (substituting your kernel image name/version).

Every now and then I've had the kernel spit a drive out a raid array. I've found that sometimes the kernel may be being overly cautious. You can often raidhotremove then raidhotadd it back again. And you may never see a problem again. If you do, it probably really is time to replace the disk.

Rebuilding a RAID array goes smoothly. It happens in the background when the Linux machine is in multi user mode. The md code rebuild guarantees a minimum rebuild rate. From memory it takes about an hour or two to do a 200GB RAID1 array.

You can see the RAID rebuild status in /proc/mdstat. I run a very simple script to check the RAID status each day and send out an email if it is broken.

If you are using a RAID-ed /boot, grab the latest lilo since IIRC it has better RAID support than what is in the distros I use.

Hard drive-wise I've been happy with Seagate Barracudas. I've had to replace a few failed Western Digital drives. (Just my recommendation from experience, it could just have been good/bad luck on my part).

One neat trick with Software raid is that your drives don't have to be the same size. You do RAID on partitions. And your raid array sizes itself according to the smallest common denominator in the array.

Tip: always create a bit of spare space on any device you are RAID-ing. e.g. a 4GB swap partition. Then if you have a drive fail and it needs to be replaced, and your replacement varies in size slightly you'll still be able to use it. Not all 40/120/200GB drives are created with equal sizes :).

In summary: Software RAID=good. Decent performance. I've had no real kernel bugs with it. No need for BIOS access. Easy to move drives between servers. Easy to monitor failures. Non-intrusive/minimal downtime when recovering a failed devi

This LVM HOWTO might help you somewhat, not sure if it's RAID, but it's related!

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Firewall-Piercing/

There's even a tool for automating the process.

Bah! Back in my day we used ARCNET, Twinax, PLIP, or if we were really lucky, SLIP, and WE LIKED IT!!!

There is already The Linux Documentation Project - TLDP, offering many high quality Linux HOWTOs, FAQs and guides in different languages.

not only is it just a bash script, but one that could only be written by a mac user. they need to take a look at the ABS guide and learn a thing or two.

Another thing that kills me is that Linux users are becoming more and more like Mac users every day. They expect everything to be done for them from 1 little click of a button.

GO LEARN SOMETHING PEOPLE
thank you, come again

Every gender bias related paper I've read is about why women are the inherent underdog, not about the nature of gender bias and programming. Gender bias and programming are inherently equal opportunity victimizations and aggressions perpetrated by society, by natural situations, and by self.

The only equal-opportunity social anti-bias resource I've seen yet is VHEMT. ;-)

• "HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux"
• "Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?"

As for why Linus is always reluctant to accept new code in the kernel? simple: Firstly, if he accepted all (good or less good) ideas into the kernel, the damn thing would make coffee already, and I don't blame him to want to narrow the kernel's focus.

Actually, (and somewhat disturbingly) Linux already DOES make coffee.

2. I've noticed that linux/unix software that is or was sold (before becoming open-source or free) generally is easier to install and configure probably because the company wished to keep support costs low. Additionally, 1st-time users don't care about the underlying OS and software, they just want to get their work done. For instance, I haven't run-across a GUI interface for setting up LDAP yet(Its just an example of many apps are typically setup manually or via scripting). It just seems like a GUI desktop version of www.tldp.org combined with applicable man-pages is in-order. ... something like a Unix Expert System. For those of us who enjoy 'tinkering' and customizing manually is great, however, what initiatives would help that 'lowest common denomiator' or newbie.

...Perhaps an automatic tarball package expander/installer that parses the respective configuration file for application/library dependencies, similar to Debian's apt-get packager, (only for tarballs) and installs/verifies them as well? ...providing reasonable automated assistance in the process as needed?

3a. According to your research in the original post, OS Research was pretty much dead before Windows. I would then take Windows to be a paradigm shift in the OS world. Do you see any other paradigms on the horizon that can/will change OSs? For instance, neural-learning algorithms that make users more productive, recommending breaks and/or alerting them to tasks and alternative methods, providing file/application links based on the user's current tasks similar to a 'virtual assistant/secretary'(analogous to the Linux Expert System)?

3b. How about integrating speech recognition (Similar to IBM's implementation on OS/2), and/or hand-writing recognition into the kernel for broadened appeal and useage of the OS and its applications?

4. How much more 'critical mass' (in terms of # of PCs running Linux) does the open source community need to entice mainstream manufacturers into providing better driver support for new products?

The wireless "backbone" could be running OLSR - as described here.

Bush has embraced "corporate national socialism", and abandoned the working class

The way things are going, I'd like to abandon the working class as well. Is there a HOWTO on Linuxdoc.org for how to do it?

Silly IT departments.

If you "upgrade" a piece of software, then discover it requires a complete manual system restart to remain stable, the prudent thing to do in any other circumstance would be a rollback.

Unfortunately, since this is an IT department, it must run Windows; after all, where could you ever find support for Linux?

as a distro, take a pick from one of the (easy) favourites: RH, suse, mandrake and learn the basics. don't use X, there is a console alternative for almost everything. when you got the console in your fingers it is time for your exam!

Try to replace a typical Windows Server of your Company.

You can learn more with simple tasks: implement a little samba configuration, a
simple apache+php site with some users auth (htaccess), a print server, etc...

You can "build" your linux skills really fitting your needs, try to look at
The Linux Documentation Project...

The distro is not really important. Form the Windows world I can suggest a modern distro, based on
RPM or DEB (like RedHat, Mandrake, Debian...).

If you work for Company (so Oracle DB, Qlogic Hardware, etc...), probably you can choose RedHat (or Tao Linux http://taolinux.org/...)

Install one distribution (I'd prefer Fedora Core 1), then http://www.tldp.org/, then http://www.linuxquestions.org/. Free, but takes time.

The best place for questions:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/

More reading:
http://www.tldp.org/

------
You've seen the posts, now see the website!
http://hiddenuniverse.blogspot.com/

In your work lab get 2-3 computers. Set up a linux box as a DHCP and DNS server, then maybe add apache, samba, etc. These are the things that you'll likely be using linux for in the enterprise, right? You can play with firewalling and IPSec if that is your thing too.

After the initial install, go here to learn the rest:
The Linux Documentation Project

The basic sysadmin guide there will give you the basics, and the specific howto's are great for setting up DHCP, DNS, etc.

Another good guide:
IBM Linux Newbie Guide

Set up that small net, play, learn, then go to your class and learn a lot more.

Have fun!

and have a look here:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lfs/html/

Everyone who's contributed documentation to the Linux Documentation Project.

Here are two that I've used in the past.

1. Linux Documentation Project
2. IBM Developer Works

I know that Novell has a "DeveloperNet" program, and IBM also has an Alpha works program. Though, Alpha works isn't devoted to only Linux technologies. Red Hat, also has a developer program and SuSE does as well.

You can do exactly what you describe with this, this and this.

No, you have a story, that's not evidence. Besides, most of what you say here is wrong either because you are uninformed or deliberately spreading misinformation.

Many of my friends now use Linux as their desktop operating system. I also use Linux as my desktop OS when I'm not playing games. Walmart has started selling Linux equipped PCs which are selling fairly well. The fact is that for the average PC user, Linux will work just fine. There will be a learning curve, but that would be true of any new technology.

Given that so many others have been running Bind and Apache for many years without substantial problems, I'd have to say that you probably misconfigured your system.

The "weekend volunteers" that you refer to are some of the finest programmers in the world or the code that they have written is comparable with that written by the best. If they weren't, the code they wrote would not get past the peer reviews and into these popular open source projects. The people who write code for Open Source projects are often the same people who write for the large software development companies. The difference is that they write Open Source code out of love for the work and the project, and the respect of their peers.

While MS might have a "full development team" working on some projects, I doubt they have a full team working on any mature product that isn't undergoing constant new development. What resources they have are devoted to adding marketable features that will bring in additional sales, not necessarily reworking the code in pursuit of engineering excellence.

Again you have demonstrated that you are badly misinformed about Linux. The 2.6 Kernel does in fact have SMP support. There are at least 3 journeling file systems that I can think of off the top of my head, ext3, jfs, and rieserfs.

As for being based on "old technology", Linux has caught up and passed MS. Linux now often incorporates new standards and technologies before the large software companies can even get them on the planning schedule. Linux developers have already put in place buffer overflow protection stipulated by new security standards that Microsoft has endorsed but has been unable to implement to-date. Microsoft hasn't even been able to finish and release it's new security patch, SP2 on-time, leaving millions of PC users vulnerable to viruses, trojans, and other malware. It is truely hard to appreciate just what it means to have thousands of people working on a single project and contributing their enthusiasm and expertise.

There are many places where you can get help on configuring Linux machines. It appears, based on your posting, that you went about it by yourself without much knowledge of Linux. Had you looked for help, I believe you would have had far different results. I suggest you check out The Linux Documentation Project, my own site which is aimed at new Linux users moving over from Windows, and A How To Get Linux HOWTO that I have been working on. Perhaps you'll find that your experience changes when you work with the community rather than on your own.

Fortunately, LVM supports the concept of 'snapshots': Forking a logical volume so that you can use it normally in your production environment, and have a second copy that wont change until you release it (or you run out of space on the snapshot logical volume). commands are: lvcreate -L[size] -s -n [name] [block/device/path]. A URL for LVM snapshots is http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.h tml. I use Reiser4 and LVM2 on a testbox/workbox and it's been doing great.

Easy there chief, Methinks you need to read this How-To: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ index.html

Up until last week, my Athlon XP machine sounded like a vacuum cleaner.

Me too.

I got I2C sensor support compiled into my kernel and watched as my CPU temp varied from 65 to 80 degrees Celsius (as I taxed my processor).

Yup, me too.

Modern CPUs have a HLT instruction, which basically tells the CPU to have a rest and cool down when it doesn't need to do anything (idling, waiting for data from a hard drive, whatever).

The trouble is, Athlon XPs take no notice of this instruction as long as the CPU is paying attention to the PCI bus (or something, can't quite remember the details). So you need to set Athlons up specially if you want them to run as cool as they should.

There's a tool called Athcool which does this for you. For more information, read the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO.

Since fixing this issue, I went from 72 degrees idling / 85 degrees max, down to 48 degrees idling / 80 degrees max.

For those interested in encouraging women to become involved in Linux (and computer science), there is an interesting HOWTO.

As for me, I don't think I've ever had these problems. Maybe I'm wrong, but I treat everyone equally, to the best of my ability (I can't help it; I'm an egalitarian). The one thing I do is take the keyboard away, but I do that to men and women alike, and that's mostly a problem of my own impatience. I'm not a good teacher, but I'm a good fixer, so people ask me for help a lot. Since I don't want to spend all my time fumbling with telling someone how to do something, I show them how. It's something I need to work on, but then I wouldn't have any time to get other work done, and my job description is not "teacher".

So go read this document. Don't laugh at it; it's one of the few things in life that should be taken seriously. And don't be cynical about it (ie "this speaks VOLUMES about why there are not more women involved in IT"); try to learn from it and stop being a pompous know it all for a change.

For those interested in encouraging women to become involved in Linux (and computer science), there is an interesting HOWTO.