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You may find an almost complete list of Open Source and of commercial Linux applications for different medical purposes in the Linux-Medicine-HOWTO.

You may find much more tips and tricks how to use a computer with ecological awareness in the Linux-Ecology-HOWTO, which is also available at the The Linux Documentation Project - TLDP and in Japanese.

Being one of authors, I will plug a good resource. Call the Linux Medicine How to. If you see any problems with the how-to, let me know and I will fix it.

It can be read at Linux Medicine How-to

Comments are appreciated

It sucks using Linux with a keyboard missing a CHR$(47) key.

I would say that that's not really true. There aren't a hell of a lot of OSes where it's as easy to work around a big hole in your keyboard as Linux.

It takes a couple lines of text (none of which involves using the slash key, so you don't even have to cut and paste initially) to remap, say, your right-hand control key to slash/question mark.

(I especially like the Willow Rosenberg quote).

But if a designer settles on Docbook--and does it right--then they might as well still attach good CSS for the HTML output.

No disagreement there. The LDP (which I've been working with for something like 8 years) has done a pretty good job with Docbook so far. I don't write HTML, but the CSS examples elsewhere shows it has real potential.

CSS can and should be used to enhance screen output, braille output, screen-reader output, print output.

But CSS only helps if you're using HTML as an intermediary step. Docbook already has something similar to CSS (called just "stylesheets") and the LDP has their own version of stylesheets already, depending on the output method. So in a way, we're already using CSS, just under a different name and skipping the HTML step.

TLDP needs your comments to improve.

But the thing is that with Linux, you can always back out to Windows, which in this day and age, is just a fine choice. So if I'm gonna install Linux, then be presented with 13 web browsers, 3 desktops, and 5 office suites, I'm much more likely to throw up my hands and say "fuck it" and re-install windows, then to try to deciper everything in Linux.

I think you had the wrong approach when learning Linux. I just recently switched almost exclusively from Windows to Fedora Core 1, and it isn't that bad! You simply can't expect to learn how to do things the "UNIX" way in a day or two. It's just different enough from MS Windows to be confusing.

In contrast to a "cold-turkey" approach, I viewed my transition as learning a new skill. I read the first three or so chapters of few books, magazines, and TLDP tutorials before even installing the operating system. That way, I had a pretty good overview of the big picture. Things like the command line, shell scripts, and configuration .files weren't unexpected or scary. (Note: that dot is not a typo.) I knew about the limitations in hardware support by googling in advance for the documentation and user experiences. Thus many of the nuances and differences - like the unusual clipboard behavior - wasn't unexpected and allowed me to determine a fix or solution in advance. I understood Linux's inability to reliably write to NTFS partitions and planned my partitions accordingly. Then I partitioned, installed, and tried to break Fedora Core. I tried corrupting configuration .files and databases. I tried manually changing settings and installing hardware. I attempted uninstalling and reinstalling software. I played with dangerous uses of the root account and command-line tools (dd, rm, fdisk, etc...). I tried mixing parts of different desktop environments. I tested examples from my books and notes. In essence, I learned Linux before switching.

Granted there were a lot of things to learn, but I planned on a long transition period. The process never ends, but in about two months I learned a heck of a lot. At least it was enough to understand both the big picture and also the little details needed to accomplish routine tasks. Proper preparation was worth it too: I previously tried changing "cold-turkey" to Linux (over a year ago) and gave up after only two days!

There's a point to my previous three paragraphs other than to document another Linux switcher's success story. Instead of a confusing array of options, I looked at the 13 web browsers, 5 desktop, 3 office suits, 30 text editors and 101 dalmatians as a chance to evaluate my preferences with this new approach. There was time to try out each one and get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. I previously had no preferences by definition - being new to Linux. This helped me settle in with Fedora Core and enjoy its benefits compared to MS Windows rather than be annoyed by its differences.

It's all about attitude and approach!

When I first used gentoo linux, I was most impressed by the quality of the documentation provided.

And then I realized. It wasn't necessarily high qualty nor at the time did it contain better content than the guides for Debian and Red Hat. It was presented in a much cleaner format using CSS and a nice clean layout. Since then, the quality of the gentoo documentation has only improved.

Compare this gentoo page with this TLDP page.

See the difference? They both contain useful information. The TLDP documentation makes me feel like i'm reading a legal document. Blegh! The gentoo document is much less harsh on the user.

This is scary, considering that gentoo is widely considered one of the most difficult of the linuxes to use, as it contains absolutely no installer. Thanks to the clear documentation, I actually perfer the gentoo installation process over fedora's, as it's easy (thanks to the documentation), and gives me a tremendous amount of control. I think this fact can only be capitalized by the fact that I use a mac 95% of the time as my desktop machine.

Please... add some color. It helps. Lots of people are visual learners. It just so happens that most linux users aren't (Reading a monotonous 26-page manpage on ls of all things makes me want to gouge my eyes out)

Also I forgot to mention this: If anyone is willing to write a good CSS for DocBook XML content and GNU Public License it, please feel free to post at @ Linux Document Project Blog . Thanks.

http://validate.sf.net

Why would we the Linux community actively choose to NOT use stylesheets?

Have you ever seen the LDP?

They currently use no style information whatsoever. So it's not CSS versus FONT tags -- its CSS versus plain text informatinon that doesn't "need" much styling.

No problem. *grin* Welcome aboard, BTW. If you want more help, check out The LinuxDocumentation Project at some point as well, which has an enormous amount of good information about Linux. I would also thoroughly recommend the first Halloween document which has a comparitive analysis of Windows and Linux, written by a man who at the time worked for Microsoft, with commentary from the Open Source Initiative. This document contains a lot of information about Linux's strengths in comparison to Windows, and why Microsoft view it seriously as a competitive threat.

Another very good source of information are Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar, which explains the open source philosophy.

One other source of information which I've found very interesting is the GNU Philosophy pages. As you most probably know, GNU software is a major part of a Linux distribution, and these pages talk about the underlying philosophy of the GNU project. I hope this helps, and if you benefit from using Linux yourself, remember to tell some friends about it...We need to keep spreading the word.

Unless you want to define a whole god damn system-wide keyboard with XKB (THIS IS NOT FUN!!!!), the easiest way to do this is to create an xmodmap that maps the keys to the positions you want.

I know little about Dvorak keyboards.. I'm going to assume that the function keys and arrows of a regular Dvorak keyboard match the same keycodes as a left-handed dvorak. In that case, you could set your keyboard to Dvorak layout (KDE provides an easy facility for this) and then fix the keys with xmodmap.

See here: a HOWTO on TLDP.

Also, you may find a program called XKeyCaps useful -- it shows or allows you to create visually an xmodmap file on a representation of a keyboard.

Good luck.

because a LinuxBIOS could be configured to allow a serial console with full hardware control, just like a Sun box does.

Great point. This is functionality sorely missed in the vast majority of x86 systems for everyone that needs to run headless servers.

The Remote Serial Console HOWTO is a superb document, but following it only provides you with a system administrable via serial console once the bootloader (LILO, Grub) has been initialised. This means that everything before the bootloader is not accessible via serial console.

Having to install a video card and attach a monitor and keyboard to box in order to modify BIOS settings is major pain in the arse.

Basically, you'd be looking at doing the following things. Multiple outbound providers, which will need another routing table built for the second link. Then you'll need to dive into QoS to split up your traffic into your definitions of bulk (HTTP, FTP), priority (Gaming), and drop (P2P). I notice that you have no default set up, but I leave that up to you. Finally, you can use iptables to mark and NAT your traffic out the right interface.

Under Windows, you would need some advanced routing software I think. ISA may do it, but I doubt your budget allows it. By default, Windows does have the ability to enforce QoS terms, but you'd need something to apply those QoS marks (I doubt that games commonly mark their packets with ToS)...which means a bridge in front of the Windows router. Might as well use a Linux router instead.

If anybody knows of a way to get a Windows box to route based on ports, I'd love to hear it.

Oh, and a simple solution for the exact problem you describe (which I don't think is what you really want) would be a proxy for the HTTP and FTP link, and a router for the other link. All HTTP and FTP requests would be sent out the proxy, everything else would go the default route (to the router) which could be configured to drop P2P and route everything else. Optionally, you could do QoS on the router to prioritize certain traffic. If you go that route, I'm fond of AnalogX Proxy (for Windows) because it's free and simple. Of course, that does require client configuration....unless you use Transparent Proxying.

Absolutely false. Used to be true before 1999, but it is not true anymore. I wrote the Linux DVD Playback HOWTO, so I should know.

The interaction between region flags and CSS encryption is confusing and it is not surprising that people often get it wrong. For computer DVD players there are actually three levels of region playback enforcement:

1. A player application such as WinDVD or PowerDVD will refuse to play back discs that do not match the region setting stored in the application.
2. An operating system such as Microsoft Windows will refuse to read data from discs that do not match the region stored in the OS registry.
3. For RPC-2 drives manufactured after 1999, the drive firmware itself will refuse to apply CSS decryption to discs that do not match the region stored in the drive firmware.

GNU/Linux AI & Alife HOWTO

gameprogrammer.com is a decent place to start. So is icculus.org. If it's just general programming you need to learn, prior to jumping into a larger project, check out the Programming Howtos.

Print out the hardware compatibility list and bring it in with me to Best Buy?

Ok, this is tricky. First you have to right click here, and select "Open in New Window" off the menu. A window will pop up; move it over to the side. And then you click here. See how it works?

For a more advanced technique, we'll move onto "Tabs" in lesson two...

Try this.

Amazing how much free information you can get when you look for it.

I had a brief look at it and wonder why not submit this to The Linux Documentation Project?

New entries are always welcome.

'Non-Volatile' chips such as EEPROM or Flash have problems with limited writes (10^3 to 10^5) before they loose their ability to be non-volatile. See this guide to Non-Volatile Memory chips. And a nice diagram of all the families

Also write speeds for flash are very slow, (order of 10s-100s of milliseconds rather than order of 10-100 nano seconds for SRAM, however reads are fast, so for a static RAM disc that is loaded once and then searched this may not be a problem. There is also FRAM which is non-volatile but has 200 nano-sec read and writes, but write time is not infinite (about 10^8 to 10^9).

Also note that most electronically re-writable non-volatile techonologies are only guaranteed for 10 years. So it ain't forever.

There is the "Battery Powered Mini-HOWTO" up on the Linux Documentation Project site: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Battery-Powered/index.ht ml

Of course, you probably looked there first before you asked Slashdot :)

Seriously, read the section on syslogd(8). In addition to their suggestions, we have also setup a central log server which allows logging to only go over the network, and not to the local disk at all.

If you are in a LAN (or wireless) environment, you might want to consider that although the wireless might cost you more powering the NIC than it would hitting the disk (after you disabled syncing).

Just out of curiosity, I checked the license for the TLDP documentation, and it looks liberal enough that we could start dumping copies of the HOWTOs into the new project.

I have been using Wikipedia for a while and one of the biggest selling point IMO is the great browsing experience. I often find myself actually surfing again by going from hyperlink to hyperlink, trying to soak up all the information, something I have stopped doing a while ago with most other webpages. There is lot of very good, indepth content on there.
TLDP is a bunch of mostly technical articles (HOWTO's, guides, FAQs and man pages) that are very usefull, but don't really form a coherent whole. It would be wonderfull to have a somewhat more encyclopedia oriented linux documentation to consult, that is updated consistently to boot. A encyclopedia aproach also alows you to cover a wide spectrum of topic, from, say, obscure technical details to general *nix design philosophies.
However, wiki's for this type of large projects (like wikipedia) need a certain critical mass of contributors for it to, I would think. While I don't know if this project will be "it", I think a wiki aproach would be a great idea.

Sorry I botched the link to The Linux Documentation Project in my previous post.

What about The Linux Documentation Project? Provides plenty of knowledge to me about pretty much anything Linux related...

Well, it is actually documented in the LVM-HOWTO. In the FAQ section for LVM2.

You need to upgrade from LVM1 to LVM2. The first step is to have your old kernel and LVM1 use the device mapper (this should have been done in Fedora Core 1 to claim it kernel 2.6 ready), you need to download the device mapper and patch, compile, install, reboot everything.

Then, you can upgrade to LVM2 and your old device mapper will no longer be needed since LVM2 has the device mapper built-in.

I still haven't completed my own upgrade, mainly because I lack time. But, these are the steps.

This should have been documented here.

But, again, documentation lags behind software improvement. LVM2 is already here for at least a year or two. I doubt the old upgrade from LVM pre 1.0.8 to 1.0.8 is still required, so much bugs were solved since that time, I cannot imagine someone is still using pre-1.0.8.

Interesting idea, but there's actually already a Windows equivalent of exactly that.

So what if there is a Windows version. The way you say it is like saying: we don't need an other OS, we already have one.
Naturaly with Linux you could do soething like that with the advantage of not being able to run most virusses. If you only want to give browser access, you could use the Kiosk HOWTO. With some adaptation, you could let it also run the Email client. With the ability of user rights, there should be no risk for the OS, only for the (limited) user space of the individual user.

Second question, how does linux do with a second monitor?

Like anything with Linux, the answer is, "it depends on your distro, your [insert hardware model here] and what version of [insert relevant software here] you're running".

does it take any further customization?

Heh. Would it be Linux if it didn't? :-)

Seriously, though, check out this HOWTO. The HOWTO's title is slightly misleading in that it covers dual head configuration in addition to Xinerama (which is lucky for us).

FYI, the Xinerama extension is what allows XFree86 to support the use of multiple monitors with one desktop (e.g., you can drag your windows from one monitor to another or have them span both, etc.). In the old days, you used to have a separate X session for each monitor. Most modern session managers (GNOME, KDE, etc.) now have good support for Xinerama, but you'll need a relatively new version of XFree86 (if you have a newer version of most distros, you should already have this).

It will also help if your monitors are relatively new. If they're not, you may have to do some Googling to get the proper modelines (search for "[your monitor model] xfree86 modeline"), but for most newer monitors, this should be an issue.

Another point of recommendation: if you want hardware 3d acceleration, try and make sure all of your cards support it. Otherwise the contents of your OpenGL app windows will not display on monitors without it. Not a show-stopper, but sometimes a little confusing/annoying when you're running Blender. :-)

Although I can't tell you anything about getting a career in 'computer forensics', I have found some info that might help you.

Sun's BigAdmin security FAQs page has articles like "Basic Steps in the Forensic Analysis of Unix systems" and "Responding to Customer's Security Incidents". Some of them are from Sun, some from outside sources.

You might also want to try the Linux documentation project to find some good help files.

Okay, TLDs are gone. Who gets "whitehouse" -- whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.com? Yeah, any reasonable person would say "that's an easy one" (answer is left as an exercise for the reader, but how about tldp? The Linux Documentation Project or Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients?

6to4 is your friend. For linux please refer to the Linux IPv6 HOWTO

For windows, go to your network configuration. Find your lan, and enable their IPv6 driver. XP only.(SP1 only?) I believe it self configures to use anycast, so that should be it.

Mac....do not know. I assume something along the lines of what linux does will work.

Good luck.

SysRq - Not sure on this one, never used it, - possibly from mainframe terminal keyboards.

The "magic SysRq key" is a key sequence that allows some basic commands to be passed directly to the kernel. Kernel software developers use this interface to debug their software. Under most circumstances it can also be used to uncleanly reboot the computer, something that is otherwise difficult or expensive to do remotely.

RELEASE
The Linux man page maintainer proudly announces. . .

man-pages-1.65.tar.gz - man pages for Linux

POSIX
This release is the first to contain the POSIX 1003.1-2003 man pages. The directories man0p, man1p, man3p contain descriptions of the headers, the utilities, and the functions documented in that standard.

Permission to distribute these POSIX man pages has just been obtained, and the pages in man0p, man1p, man3p were derived from the POSIX html pages by some silly conversion script. No doubt the result is still full of flaws, and all of this can be much improved. Corrections, scripts, etc. are welcome - aeb@<snip>.

In order to use this, put in {/usr/share/misc/}man.conf{ig} or so your favourite order of looking at these pages, for example,
MANSECT 1p:1:8:0p:3p:2:3:4:5:6:7:9:tcl:n:l:p:o
or set the MANSECT environment variable.

OTHER PAGES
The remaining pages are most of the section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 man pages for Linux, and in addition section 1 man pages for the fileutils-4.0 utilities, and section 5 and 8 man pages for the timezone utilities.

[The latter were taken from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzcode2001a.tar.gz.] [The section 3 man pages for the db routines have been taken from ftp://ftp.terra.net/pub/sleepycat/db.1.86.tar.gz.] [The rpc man pages were taken from the 4.4BSD-Lite CDROM.]

Differences from version 1.64:

POSIX pages were added

The man pages

chroot.2 clone.2 intro.2 mkdir.2 remap_file_pages.2

errno.3

sk98lin.4

elf.5 protocols.5 raw.7

are new or have been updated. Typographical or grammatical errors have been corrected in several other places.

Here is a breakdown of what this distribution contains:

Section 0p = POSIX headers
Section 1p = POSIX utilities
Section 3p = POSIX functions

Section 1 = user commands (intro, and pages not maintained by FSF)
Section 2 = system calls
Section 3 = libc calls
Section 4 = devices (e.g., hd, sd)
Section 5 = file formats and protocols (e.g., wtmp, /etc/passwd, nfs)
Section 6 = games (intro only)
Section 7 = conventions, macro packages, etc.
Section 8 = system administration (intro only)

Usually, there are no section 1, 6 and 8 man pages because these should be distributed with the binaries they are written for. Sometimes Section 9 is used for man pages describing parts of the kernel.

Note that only Section 2 is rather complete, but Section 3 contains several hundred man pages. If you want to write some man pages, please do so and mail them to aeb@<snip>.

The following people (listed in alphabetical order by first name) wrote, edited, or otherwise contributed to this project:

<snip>

Copyright information:

For the POSIX pages permission to distribute was given by IEEE and the Open Group, see POSIX-COPYRIGHT.

For the remaining pages, please note that these man pages are distributed under a variety of copyright licenses. Although these licenses permit free distribution of the nroff sources contained in this package, commercial distribution may impose other requirements (e.g., acknowledgement of copyright or inclusion of the raw nroff sources with the commercial distribution).
If you distribute these man pages commercially, it is your responsibility to figure out your obligations. (For many man pages, these obligations require you to distribute nroff sources with any pre-formatted man pages that you provide.) Each file that contains nroff source for a man page also contains the author(s) name, email address, and copyright notice.

From the screenshots... The GameCube only runs 484.96 BogoMIPS? Sounds pretty reasonable considering the speed of the chip...

I think it did have tilt and pressure sensitivity, but I do not recall exactly. I know it wasn't included in the windows variant.

You might try looking here for configuration help, and perhaps tldp.org

Those fuckers can probably crack it, but it's worth it just to make their lives harder. I only encrypt /home personally, though I'll probably go all the way soon (especially now that I have enough RAM to go without swap).

-[ Attachment: virus.tar.gz 106k ]-

Installation instructions:

* Save the attached file. (In mutt, highlight the attachment and press s. In Evolution, right-click on the attachment and select Save As. For other mail readers, consult the manual page.)

* Uncompress the file in a new directory. (Open a terminal window and type tar xzf virus.tar.gz, or open the file in Karchiver, GUItar, EasyTar etc. See the tar and gzip HOWTO for more information.)

* In the virus-0.11.2 directory, run the following commands:
./configure
make all
make install (run this as root)
Note: you will need to install gcc (the GNU C compiler) in order to compile the virus, along with the kernel headers for your system. See the GCC HOWTO for more information.)

* Congratulations! The virus is now ready to run! Type virus at the command prompt.

* H4 |-|A i 0\/\/Nz3D y0O 5uC|eRR!!!!!!1

-[ Attachment: virus.tar.gz 106k ]-

Installation instructions:

* Save the attached file. (In mutt, highlight the attachment and press s. In Evolution, right-click on the attachment and select Save As. For other mail readers, consult the manual page.)

* Uncompress the file in a new directory. (Open a terminal window and type tar xzf virus.tar.gz, or open the file in Karchiver, GUItar, EasyTar etc. See the tar and gzip HOWTO for more information.)

* In the virus-0.11.2 directory, run the following commands:
./configure
make all
make install (run this as root)
Note: you will need to install gcc (the GNU C compiler) in order to compile the virus, along with the kernel headers for your system. See the GCC HOWTO for more information.)

* Congratulations! The virus is now ready to run! Type virus at the command prompt.

* H4 |-|A i 0\/\/Nz3D y0O 5uC|eRR!!!!!!1

wtf, you can run a firewall on debian. I am at such a beast right now. There's no mail server installed on it either. And I'm just your average, non-coder, hobbiest. Now it would be nice if there were a debian packaged firewall. That there isn't is no big deal since you can install your own. I guess it's a little risky doing a net install then, but if you unplug before you boot your new system, install your firewall, and reconnect, I think you're pretty safe. In other words, it's really just a minor matter of convenience.

Why will people gradually switch? What's the incentive? Why should I switch? All my computers speak IPv4. Some speak IPv6. What's my incentive to use IPv6 at all?

The motive will be that IPv4 will be increasingly a second-class citizen in a world where IPv6 co-exists.

My ISP only speaks IPv4, because all their customers support IPv4, but only a few support IPv6.

All the useful web sites are reachable via IPv4. Shutting off IPv4 is suicide for any company. (And please don't tell me about how IPv4 is reachable via IPv6. That kinda defeats the purposes of the changeover.)

The mistake is that IPv6 is not an extension of IPv4, just a complete replacement. Therefore, no way to have them "at the same time" (again, I don't mean gatewaying or tunnelling, I mean complete compatbility). Therefore, expensive to switch. No incentive to switch.

Am I the only one who finds the articly higly lacking any useful info?

Sure, I haven't touched DOSEMU since about 1998 but back then I remember all sorts of problems.

Even now, the article mentions nothing about setting up sound, midi playback, etc, is this all handled automatically by dosemu installer (doubt it).

This guide seems to be written by someone who just found DOSEMU yesterday and didn't know anyone used it for years before.

I mean there's even DOSEMU-HOWTO written which is the official linux dosemu howto, what's wrong with that one? It seems to be even kept up-to-date (as popular dos is these days, anyhow).

And most of the games he mentions on the site have way better native linux ports...

A keystroke-by-keystroke walkthrough of applying a patch.

So I guess the Linux Kernel-HOWTO just mysteriously disapeared all of a sudden. get over it people, linux has GLOBS of docs, more than any one human should ever have to read, FAR more than windows or any other OS for that matter considering all the user contrib'd sutff out there now.

Get them here:
and for some more reading on this subject go here

Yeah, I see a lot of people stuck like that with insecure POP, and a lot of people who use the same password for their home account (which is almost always POP only) as they do for their work account. Bad bad bad.

One thing you could do, if you want to be a bit more secure, is to port forward port 110 using SSH to a server at home. Your POP password is still going out in the clear then, but it's going in the clear from your house, which is presumably more secure that going out over open wireless.

the tunnel would be something like this:

ssh -L 110:www.yourhomeserver.com:110 -f -N yourname@www.yourhomeserver.com

Here's a howto that goes into a little more depth.

You managed to describe in a single post the feeling (and my reason for) using freebsd better than I could in several. Its been only for 3 months now, but that's exactly how I figured mount_msdosfs should work on a digital camera, once someone told me it uses fat.

This is where the care, money and resources spent writing that handbook pays of - it easy to read even for absolute beginners, yet it gives you in-depth information about the system. And it leads you with a gentle hand - you don't even notice that you have learned more from it than any documentation I had on linux (saw mandrake's and rh's documentation - they are answers to questions between how and what :)) - maybe except for one perhaps: The Intro Linux Guide. A good guide for those wanting to learn more about linux (and yes, gentoo documentation is still more like a how-to, as far as I can see).

Another (free) resource is the very readable, very thorough Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide [http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/]. Mendel Cooper has done an excellent job with this project. If a person wished to learn more about Bash, I would direct them here *first*.

And free as in beer:

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

The LDP includes the "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" which is available in both HTML and PDF (1MB!) formats, and there is even a version for PalmOS! Since I found it, it's been the only reference I've *ever* needed when I've stumbled over some obscure nuance of shell scripting.