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I am not sure if this will help you at all. There is a Kiosk HOWTO that might give you some ideas. A lot of it is very old. It however explains how to use only one program, a browser. I am sure you could link function keys to different programs.

Also links to robust keyboards and mice.

If you decide NOT to go for thin clients, see that the hardware is able to reboot from scratch, so when you do a remote instalation (or upgrade) you do not have to go to each and every PC to press a key to get the machine booted.

Why not read about RAID from the people who don't try to sell you stuff? Try the Hard Disks category at The Linux Documentation Project. Relevant, concise and free.

There is NO solution to WP in linux yet

Well, you know, you could just download the Linux version of WordPerfect. :-) Well, ok, it's an old version (v8) and no longer supported, but it works (I've used it in the past). See here for more details.

I'm not sure what they are up to recently, but you might check out The Linux Documentation Project.

The fact that the submitter claims this is the first good guide to making a VPN with SSH would indicate they have not been around very long and haven't yet discovered the Linux HOWTO guides.

SSH/PPP VPNs are the oldest documented method of creating a VPN on linux. Have a look at www.tldp.org, check the VPN guide.

VPNs with SSH/PPP, and it was released in 1999.

linky

XFree-Local-multi-user-HOWTO

nothing but gcc can compile the linux kernel anyway :)

sure you can get sub-minute compile times with 1024 machines at your disposal -- it's an embarrasingly parralel problem. you can even get less than 10-second compile with a 32way pSeries p690. at what cost, though?

Well, there is the GPL tool Recover, which works on ext2 file systems. You could use this, or you could follow these steps manually.

You can get a good toolset and shell on windows by installing Cygwin. Yes, it does have the drawback of being a big download, but at least it's only one download instead of several hunt-and-peck sessions of downloading. Cygwin provides all of the standard unix tools you mentioned: nice shells, grep, awk, sed, tar, and yes even perl and XFree86. The programs mostly behave the way you expect, because they're compiled from the same source code as the linux versions. You will find some bugs in Cygwin but none so bad as to cause data loss or hinder productivity.

Cygwin isn't as good as the command line environment in Linux (cause it's slow, has bugs, and requires third-party download), but it goes a long way towards filling the gap.

Unfortunately I can't recommend any Windows program to fill the role of apt-get....

I is good to know that a research group is capable of reading the XFree Local Multi-User Howto from the Linux Documentation Project.

I is good to know that a research group is capable of reading the XFree Local Multi-User Howto from the Linux Documentation Project.

I have looked at this... the problem is the way Linux handles the keyboard... To Linux, all keyboards are the same. If there was some way to either tell X to ignore all KBs except some, or have the kernel map them (say /dev/input/kb0 /dev/input/kb1) similar to how mice are done, this would not be a problem at all.

Ah, young Jedi, but there is a way...

Ruby, or Backstreet Ruby.

Note that this was in the article, though the link for Backstreet Ruby here is down - probably Slashdotted.

Beauty of open source. Where there's a need, someone has found a way.

OK, fine. Here you go:

Even if you don't enable power management on your x86-laptop, Linux will always issue the HLT instruction to your processor whenever nothing needs to be done [1]. Many Microsoft Windows CPU cooling program use this technique. This results in lowering the power consumption of your CPU. Note that the system doesn't power down when it receives the HLT instruction; it just stops executing instructions until there is an interrupt.

Battery-Powered-HOWTO near the bottom of the last page. It was originally published in 1997. Are you happy now?

I know perfectly well that the HLT instruction does not actually stop supplying power to anything; however, it's still true that when the clock is not running, the current flow is lower and less energy is used. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether or not Windows is actually sane enough to use this instruction like Linux does, instead of sitting in an infinite loop. (Wouldn't surprise me one bit, actually.)

As it turns out, the X Window System (also called X, but never X Windows), which is the foundation for most GUI subsystems found in modern UNIX (unices?), Linux and the BSD's included, was also the result of an academic project, namely the Athena project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Most of my dealings with GNU/Linux have been to set up a NAT router which occasionally also has a webserver (apache) and maybe an IMAP server on it. The hardest part is always setting up the firewall: I have to turn to the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO and/or learn ipchains/iptables every time... ...except for FREESCO: the Slackware-based floppy-sized distro for routing/firewall. Its text-based task-oriented setup utility and its web-based interface for setting up port forwarding is great! I just wished something like webmin had an interface like that instead of simply slapping a GUI on the ipchains/iptables mechanism. (you're just saving me from using a text editor - big fucking deal)

Anywhoo... that's my greatest wish. (I can't always use FREESCO - one of the boxen I am setting up now not only does NAT but also WWW, mail, samba and has a software RAID mirror. So I have to install a GNU/Linux distro then make it into a firewall...or do I??) Maybe I've missed a new and amazingly nice offering, but last time I checked, most "firewall configuration tools" were either yet another textfile format for ipchains/iptables or a GUI for said textfiles. :(

Well, you only need a 32way pSeries p690 to compile the linux kernel in 4.8 seconds. Nothing fancy like beowulf or distcc needed.

> Linux community definitely needs more books like that

No, we don't. We need manuals that we can legally redistribute and modify (including translations and updates). So I recommend Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide for newbies instead.

> If only the book was published under an open licence then I could modify it

There's always the Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide book. It's published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Have fun!

Actually, I just built a 1TB fileserver for my home last month (I do a lot of video editing and need a secure place to store it). I'm using Mandrake Linux 10, but most any flavor will do as long as you have the raidtools installed. Also be sure to install Samba so you can map drives on both Windows and Linux systems.

One great thing about using Linux on the fileserver is that you can use software RAID. As the name implies, this requires no special controller cards (which is nice, since RAID 5 controllers typically run $200+). You also have the option of setting spare drives, which allows the array to begin rebuilding immediately in the event that one drive fails - the spare takes its place. Setup is easy - create a RAID, select what type you want, and then add drives to it and format.

I'm using a RAID 5 setup with 5 x 250GB drives giving me 4 x 250GB = approx. 1TB of storage space. As has been mentioned, using RAID 5 allows you to recover if one drive fails. The odds of more than one drive failing before you have a chance to rebuild the array are essentially the odds of your box being destroyed (tornado, fire, etc.).

Also previously mentioned, never attach more than one drive per IDE bus (assuming you're using IDE like I am). Doing so is irresponsible from a bandwidth standpoint as well as from a reliability standpoint, since a drive crash typically brings down the bus, and all drives on the bus with it (and as we all know by now, losing >1 drive is not survivable). Buy some cheap PCI IDE controllers, keeping in mind to ensure that they're dual channel if you plan on connecting >1 drive per controller.

Take some time and read this - it will tell you everything you need to know.

> Finding docs is worthless if they all suck.

What are you doing about it? Have you sent in bug reports or re-writes?

> Finally a simple diagram of the generic file system printed in Linux Journal (that's right, even Linux for Dummies didn't bother to even show me a diagram of the file system...

Did you try The Linux Documentation Project? I found this diagram within minutes.

> Because Kernighan and Pike writing generically decades ago wrote better Linux documentation than what was available for Linux...

I assume that you're talking about _The Unix Programming Environment_. I agree that their writing on general topics is very clear and quite good. I like the style but some of the information in that book is a bit outdated now. Also, what about specific questions like how do I get my Brand X soundcard to work? or how do I sync with my PDA?

> The only organizations affected by this are those who chose

> to use a service that acts as a single point of failure.

And that "organization" can be as fine-grained as you want it to
be. If your desktop PC is running a *nix, setting it up to act
as its own caching DNS server is a fifteen minute process. If
your desktop PC is not running a *nix, then old 586's can be had
for $20 which can run a *nix and sit on your LAN, functioning as
your local caching DNS server.

This one-page HOWTO tells you exactly what you need to do (in the
cases of RedHat and Debian, down to the baby steps), with the exact
contents of your configuration files:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO-3.html

If you are disallowed from having another dynamic IP by your
draconian IT department, you can give the $20 *nix box a static
10.x.x.x and add it to your desktop's routing table and sidestep
the entire issue.

You now have no excuse. Go make your internet more robust.

-- TTK

Users need to be educated, there is no alternative. If thay have to change ip address then it is not going to be easy anyway. either build stupid proof s/w of live with bit difficult to follow documentation. You can not makes it easied than peoples did at The Linux Documentation Project

Perhaps you meant FHS?

/usr used to stand for "user" in earlier Unix implementations - all "home" directories were under /usr, i.e /usr/joebloggs. A more detailed discussion can be found here.

What about _Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide_ by Machtelt Garrels? It doesn't have an insulting title and it's available for free from The Linux Documentation Project in different versions.

Perhaps a Linux newbie could ask for a printed copy and review for Slashdot.

What about _Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide_ by Machtelt Garrels? It doesn't have an insulting title and it's available for free from The Linux Documentation Project in different versions.

Perhaps a Linux newbie could ask for a printed copy and review for Slashdot.

> Please show me where Google can find (not provide, merely find) a tutorial as good as you will find in this or
> any introductary book

http://tldp.org

Next!

I understand the need for lack of hard drive noise. A network boot system would solve this problem as well. I've been playing with it at home just for fun, and it works well, and yields a surprisingly responsive system. There's an old-but-good article at tldp.org.

Widespread adoption of X.org Server could also lead to the full integration of auxilliary X.org projects, such as Xinerama, into X11 as standard features.

X.org Server is the MIT/X license's flagship product (in an inverse sort of way), so I think it's also a good possibility that the systematic proliferation of X.org's server may magnify the popularity of its license among OSS developers in general (it's an interesting license!).

• Loop-back encryption is kinda clunky. dm-crypt looks to be a cleaner way to do encrypted devices. And pam_mount can mount encrypted home directories on login.
• As for doing encryption in the filsystem, several people are at working at it.
• Your notion that OpenSSH only creates a tunnel while the "console" is open, is little more than FUD. Oh no! The console!. That's the whole point. SSH is largely interactive by its very nature.
• It's quite easy to setup OpenSSL in inetd mode for SSL'd services.
• Encrypted executables? Are you joking? WTF would that achieve? If someone has physical access to your machine, you're screwed anyway. And if someone has broken into your machine remotely then your executables are probably the last thing to worry about. On Unix/Linux systems you need root access to write to system executables. If an intruder has root access, they can do anything and don't need to modify your executable to screw around. This is a straw-man argument.
• Linux is very good as a VPN router. Not only do we have IPsec/IPV6 from the KAME project, there's also the (abandoned) FreeS/WAN project and the spin-off Openswan. But don't forget OpenVPN (available for quite a few platforms, not just Unix/Linux). If you're really desperate, you can always combine SSH and PPP to make a VPN.
• Tokens? You have heard of Kerberos haven't you?
  BTW, here's a good LDAPv3+SASL+KerberosV HowTo

My god you are a troll. Oh, and as others have pointed out, encryption does not instantly make something secure.

In fairness, the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide here is a great resource for people wanting a good reference to bash scripting and shell scripting in general.

[1] The two books I originally used were "The Design of the Unix Operating System" by Bach, and "OS Design and Implementation" by Tanenbaum. [...] The Bach book has a few nice algorithms in it, and I'd suggest reading them too: many of the actual ideas on how something could be implemented came from that.

Although I could not find information on the main sites either, I found the following documentation very useful as I was really impressed with Fedora Core 2 and got everything I needed to work by following these tips!

A Fedora How To for Multimedia

An RPM repository that fedora.redhat.com and fedora.us could not release!

Let me see if I can find this funny rant with a buncha practical howtos on playing sounds and dvds and whatnot....

OK, here it is, how to get the damn things to work!

I don't have any experience with DSL -- but i.t wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way.

1. download it somehow (from a web browser, or maybe from wget http://some/url)
2. open up a console window
3. cd to your download directory
4. ls -l to list the files in that directory
5. tar zxvf [name of file you downloaded]
6. ./configure - it's at this point you can say ./configure --help to list build options; the configure script gives the gcc compiler flags for you (written to a file called "Makefile", used in the next step)
7. make
8. become root (su)
9. make install
10. leave root shell (exit)
11. 
    
    
    summed up here, the from a google search of configure "make install"

Point yum (/etc/yum.conf) at my isp's yum repository, also add references to Dag Wieer's repository and rpm.livna.org.

sudo yum check-update

then

sudo yum update

Then install java and flash player.

Eric S. Raymond has authored a nice guide entitled: Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO

i saw this while browsing the tldp.org lists. how bout this link for the Linux Documentation Project. Would the law make Linux documentation illegal?

I'm not asking the subject question to poke fun at you or flame. From your description and discerning how you plan to setup Linux on the desktop it sounds like you're missing one of the benefits of Unix because you're looking at it as a Windows admin. But I could be completely wrong.
You can set up desktop as basically a terminal using X. I know, what a waste of a desktop right? But, that's how Unix is built. You can setup a server (or multiple servers of necessary) to act as your main server and each desktop is really logging into the server using XDMCP. Or look at the Linux Terminal Server ProjectYou lock out logging into the local machine and poof! All user files are forced onto the server so there's no pesky phone calls like "Well I saved the file onto c:\pron\pron\pron\pron2\pron2 but the hard disk just went bad! YOU need to get it back for my board meeting in five minutes!" I realize this is a lot of overhead, but you can gain alot of control this way like upgrading OO.org for everyone without having to update every single desktop.

Perhaps XDMCP is too insecure for you or you have so many users that XDMCP would be too difficult. That doesn't mean you can't set it up like I've described. It just gets complicated, which means its beyond my meager expertise, but I've seen it set up that way at school.

Well, duh, he expects you to read his mind. After all, he expects free software developers to be able to just know how sound cards work despite NDAs and all the sounds of silence you get from the manufacturer.

Let's take a guess. Intel chipset that works with Windoze 95... is it a 386? I know that I can't run XP on a real 386, 486 or even a 586. That cinches it.

Really, it's hard to take this guy seriously. He claims to have done a web search but did not come across any of the sound card support pages in the time it took him to load 9 Linux distros and four versions of windoze? He must have been working on it for a week but did not find:

• List of supported cards
• The Lindows page

It's hard to believe.

These utilities are explained better in the man pages themselves or the various system administration guides and howtos at the linux documentaion project.

Oh yeah, and he is missing one of the best tools for this type of thing: namely 'sar', the system activity reporter, which is enabled by default on all redhat distros. (I have an xpostit note dedicated to all the flags to sar for various things)

As for the graphing/monitoring questions people are asking in other posts; look for tools like nagios and mrtg and sysmon and mon or just search freshmeat.net. It's quite a common task which has been done many ways. My personal monitoring/graphs are perl scripts I wrote to fetch stats via ssh which I plug into mrtg.

Seems to me they are trying to duplicate the linux documentation project.

That is part of the problem - newbies don't know what programs they're supposed to be using.

Do a minimum install then get mp3's licq and a firewall working without having to track down a dependency and I will be impressed

• On Fedora, installing licq is as simple as: yum install licq
• As for mp3 support, the Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO will tell you what to add to your yum configuration file. Then it's as simple as: yum install xmms-mp3
• A firewall is installed by default.

Not a whole lot keeps two X servers from running locally. I saw this howto at tldp.org a few months ago, and was very interested. It requires a kernel patch or two, but it seems very nice.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree-Local-multi-user-HOWTO /

Here is a list of some things that I feel are worth considering:

1. Patch your system! As soon as a patch comes out, get it applied and reboot if you have to! Also, stay up to date on security issues by subscribing to mailing lists that are related to the software your using. One good general purpose site is cert.org. Keep in mind that while mailing lists are great ways of being notified, they arent fool proof. If your subscription expires and you dont know about it, you wont be exactly up to date in the community now will you?

2. Use grsecurity. This is a kernel patch that is briefly lagged behind official Linux kernel versions. It has many great features for protecting against stack attacks/buffer overflows. ie: Those latest greatest scripts your local script kiddie just downloaded wont likely do anything against you since special addresses are randomised. It can also hide files on your computer such as intergrity checkers so nobody except you know they exist. Plus it can stop insert code into a running kernel by making kernel memory readonly (which btw, would have prevented at least one of the attacks they mentioned).

3. Install a filesystem intergrity checker. Aide, integrit and tripwire all come to mind and essentially all do the same thing but with different config file syntax. Besides, how can you tell if a file is changed if you dont actually check? Also, dont forget to hide the existence of this program using something like grsec's gradm filesystem ACL util and be careful of automating checks in the crontab!

4. Read a good linux securing article. One such article I have read is called Securing & Optimizing Linux: The Ultimate Solution. It will teach you how to lock a system down a fair bit and how to remove unused/unneeded services from your computer.

5. Watch those logs! Log files provide a wealth of information, but administrators rarely check them (well, not all). If you dont know what a log entry means, research it, or else you may be looking at an attack and not even realise it. Now I know some of you are thinking I am nuts considering just how many logs even a small system generates, but there are tools to help you. One way is to use a program called swatch (a perl script). It can parse existing and old archived log files using a perl regex syntax and trigger actions based on found text. Start by configuring the system to ignore any log entries that are known to be friendly and show you everything. Then slowly eliminate each friendly entry one at a time. What will be left is a list of purely evil enteries :). Next configure swatch to alert you upon recieving such messages! Of course you can always use perl or even grep -v to parse logs, but for repeated use I think a specialised tool would save you some trouble in the long run.

Now I know I could go on forever with suggestions, but I think that these few things should give anyone a kick in the right direction. I hope this has been helpful.

www.tldp.org

I implemented BIND on our home network. I personally didn't think it was all that tricky, though figuring out how to get DHCP to dynamically update the DNS took a little bit. Now, whenever we turn on a machine on the network (laptop, desktop, whatever) the hostname is automagically registered in DNS. It's a caching server, so generally it speeds up DNS queries quite a bit. The ISPs servers sucked for quite some time, so setting up our own DNS server we bypassed all that.

Best way to implement is to get an old box, stick a basic install of slackware on it, download/compile the latest release of BIND, and get yourself the O'Reilly book "DNS and Bind" for how to configure it. For basic setup, the DNS-Howto is good enough, but for advanced stuff (Dynamic DNS) you'll want the O'Reilly book for sure.

As far as maintenance goes, all I've ever had to do was minor tweaking at the beginning, occasional security updates (though I don't worry too much about this since it's only available to the internal trusted network, not the outside world), and deleting a couple of the servers I was using as forwarders when they got crappily slow and started bogging things down.

take a look at simplified docbook. Here are some good DocBook editors

A great way to write program documentation is the usage of DocBook XML (which is in fact sort of a style guide for documentation). This is explained in detail in the LDP Author Guide (by The Linux Documentation Project), which contains even more information about documentation styles. BTW: IMHO the "success" of Microsoft operating systems is based heavily on their extensive Style Guide.

A great way to write program documentation is the usage of DocBook XML, which is explained in detail in the LDP Author Guide (by The Linux Documentation Project), besides many other tips and tricks to write documentations.