or read TWDT
Good incentive for publishing your personal accomplishmentsJust thought the TAG group would appreciate this story.
I wrote a small script to handle scanning of all my financial documents into my computer. It's real simple and easy to use. Well, I have moved since I used it, about a year ago. So, now with tax time coming, I decided it was time to start scannnig in all my financial papers and shredding the files I do not need to keep. Plus, I can burn them to cd and have a backup for the safety deposit box.
Well...
I did real well, when I moved last year. I didn't lose one thing. I really mean it. I've been in the house and I haven't missplaced anything. Until last weekend. I couldn't find that #@#%#! script anywhere. I searched all my servers, and backup CDs. I was pretty ticked and about half way through rewriting it, when I remembered something.
I wrote an email talking about it to my local LUG a couple years ago. After digging in my mail for a while I found a reference that said, and I quote,
"If anyone is interested in the script scan_docs.sh, you can find it on my web site http:///www.brayra.com/downloads/scan_docs.sh"
I am an idiot.
Expect some articles from me. I have many other little programs I've written
over the years. I need to write up nice documentation for them all and post
them for the gazette. I would hate to lose them too.
[Rick] Richard, you might perhaps appreciate a quotation from the Penguinus Maximus:
"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." - Linus Torvalds
Immortalize those cool scripts of yours too, send them in to Linux Gazette as either articles or nice little tips. -- Heather
typo? 0wnz0red? prankster on staff?Reading Linux Gazette is like a treasure hunt, you never know what you'll find. Do you mean for this to be published? http://linuxgazette.net/issue99/lg_mail.html Did you get cracked by a polite cracker? A prankster on your staff?
===== Check out KNOPPIX Debian/Linux 700MB Live CD: =====
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-old-en.html "C00K13 M0N573R 0WNZ J00!!
PH34R C00K13 M0N573R 4ND 0SC4R 4ND 3LM0 4ND 5NUFFL3UP46U5 4ND 7H3 31337
535AM3 57R337 CR3W!!" .dotgoeshere.
cheers, Carla
I almost took that entry out because it seemed the first part had been lost, but I assumed Thomas or Heather had wanted it in so I left it. I don't remember when I wrote the original or whether I cc'd it to TAG. -- Mike
Well, it went right over my head. Sorry! It is a funny sig, I may have to emulate it in some fashion, like OMG WTF ROFFLE lol HAHAHAA or somesuch.
Oh, *that!* It was just an extremely cute .sig that was in the email (I immediately stole a copy for my quote file.
The original sender really had that in his sig. Thomas and I normally strip signature blocks, but especially amusing ones that make Linux just a little more fun - sometimes I let 'em live :D -- Heather
[Rick] I'm pretty sure she's referring to the tongue-in-cheek 31337-speak down at the bottom of Dave Bechtel's letter. Unless the Cookie Monster, Oscar, Elmo, Snuffleupagus, and the Elite Sesame Street Crew have suddenly turned malevolent, nobody has much to fear (or is that PH33R?).
Oh, cuteness in .sigs is a well-established meme. We have nothing to PH33R but PH33R itself.
Welcome to the influence of the bunnies! With ky00t, we will rule the world! -- Ben
[LG 98] 2c Tips: #4Robin Chhetri wrote:
Thanks a lot for your answer.I will add here that I send this questions
months ago(I don't remember the exact date) and I had figured out the
solution to the problem too a long time back.
That's OK. The particular tip was interesting, so we published it
nonetheless.
But I am indebted at least for your reply.
Not at all. You're quite welcome.
If you don't mind could you tell me the link in which this question was published.
Robin
It can be found here:
http://linuxgazette.net/issue98/lg_tips.html#tips.4
We also have a small laundry note about this tip: -- Heather
[Faber] I must be missing something. If you simply want to print to STDOUT, try this:
$( whereis libcrypto | awk '{print $3}' )
which will print to STDOUT. If you simply must put it into a variable, then: $robin=$(whereis libcrypto | awk '{print $3}') ; echo $robin ^^^^^^^
That is in error, since in bash prefixing the variable name with a $ sign is returning/using the value given. It should read:
robin=$(whereis libcrypto | awk '{print $3}') ; echo $robin
Whether Faber meant the initial '$' as the prompt or not... is
still ambiguous
-- Thomas Adam
Search page at LG now operationalPlease take a look at it, folks. Any additions, subtractions, corrections, anything I've missed - let me know.
Feeling Better.I'm pleased to say that Thomas Adam, our Weekend Mechanic, is feeling well again, and we hope you enjoy the article he has in this month's issue. Warm thanks to everyone who thought kindly of him while he was recovering.
Backporting packages.Some of you will have expressed questions like: "When will XYZ be in stable" or "is there a backport for such and such". You can in fact backport packages yourself. For such cases, the following procedure works:
(note: I maintain a number of backported debs, and this routine works)...
1. Add a deb-src line for sid to your sources.list. Typically:
deb-src http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main
2. Run:
apt-get update
3.
apt-get build-dep <package> && apt-get -b source <package>
(where: <package> refers to the package name in question). What this will do is install the build dependencies for the given package, and then will build the package.
4. All that is left then is to do:
dpkg -i ./deb_files.deb
Pushing files to multiple hostsWhen I teach a class, I often need to push one or more files to my students' systems. Previously, I would write a "for-do-done" loop and use "scp" to get the files across, laboriously logging in and exiting out of each system every time I wanted to do a transfer - painfully clunky.
Then I did some searching on the Net and found "sshtool" by "noconflic". Written in Expect, it allows multiple host logins and copying. However, it did not have a "no password" mode (i.e., logging in when ".ssh/authorized_keys" contains your key) and read the list of hosts from a list defined within the program. I've modified it to read an external file called "pushlist" and added a "no password" mode; this last, of course, requires that you first push a "~/.ssh/authorized_keys" to the host list.
See attached sshtool.expect.txt
First, create your "pushlist", possibly from an "/etc/hosts" on one of the local machines. It should contain all your target hosts, one line per host. Next, create your ".ssh/authorized_keys" in the directory where you keep "sshtool" by copying your public keys into it:
ben@Fenrir:~/sshtool$ mkdir .ssh; cat ~/ssh/*pub > .ssh/authorized_keys
Then, push it out to your hosts (NOTE: this replaces the remote hosts' "authorized_keys" files!):
# Log in as user "student" and send the local file ben@Fenrir:~/sshtool$ ./sshtool -c .ssh/authorized_keys student
After this, I can upload any file or list of files to the entire pushlist simply by typing
ben@Fenrir:~/sshtool$ ./sshtool -C <file[s]> student
I can also execute a command on all the systems via the "-U" option.
Note: I'm not an Expect programmer; otherwise, "sshtool" would accept a
"local:remote" syntax so files wouldn't need to be in identical
locations. It would also allow you to specify per-host usernames in the
push list (not an option I need, but something to make it more
flexible.) Anyone adding these features - please send me a copy.
compression speedBased on something I saw on the "swsusp" list, I've done a bit of experimentation with "lzf" compression. It's not any more effective, size-wise, than some of the common compression utilities - in fact, it's less so in many cases. What it is, however, is fast.
Results for compressing my 45MB "Sent_mail" box:
rar 0m46.314s bzip2 0m29.840s arj 0m7.396s zip 0m7.008s gzip 0m6.756s compress 0m3.094s lzf 0m0.997s
File sizes:
47668763 Sent_mail 35446476 Sent_mail.lzf 32227703 Sent_mail.Z 25119004 Sent_mail.arj 24836842 Sent_mail.zip 24836720 Sent_mail.gz 23355061 Sent_mail.bz2 22877972 Sent_mail.rar
For applications where speed matters more than size, "lzf" is clearly a win. For size where speed is not an issue, it's "rar" (which matches the results of my previous, much broader testing with many file types and scenarios.)
2.6.2 kernel woes: Will not find root fsI have been compiling and recompiling the 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 kernels the past three days trying to find a configuration that will work for me. I have performed many kernel compiles in the past and never had this problem occur on my machine which is currently running 2.4.24.
This is the error I get when I boot into the 2.6.1 or 2 kernel:
VFS: Cannot open root device "302" or hda2 Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on hda2
[Thomas] Believe it or not I had this and it was related to a ramdisk issue. Try adding:
append="ramdisk_size=5120"
to /etc/lilo.conf
and then:
/sbin/lilo -v
Reboot and pray.
Now I have done some searching around google and saw that other people have had this problem. I have implemented a number of suggestions they were given but nothing has been fruitful. This is what I have tried:
Verified the following are compiled in (which they are):
CONFIG_IDE=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK=y (I have tried both IDE and IDEDISK separately also) CONFIG_EXT2_FS=y CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
I have removed support for Advanced Partitions.
Should have no effect -- I support advanced partitions all the time in my kernels so I can mount other-OS drives in my lab station. -- Heather
I have toggled between DEVFS support (initially I said no, but enabling does not seem to make a difference anyway).
By the time devfs really causes pain you're in userland already - you didn't get that far. Didn't I hear a rumor they're deprecating it? -- Heather
I verified my settings in /etc/lilo.conf were correct. I even tried passing the root=/dev/hda2 parameter to the kernel at boot.
Nothing has worked.
I have tried to see if there are any error messages during the boot but where I would suspect there being an error message, it scrolls by way too fast. Nothing gets logged at this point either.
As I said, I have been running 2.4.24 for a bit now having patched that from 2.4.9 along the way. My distro is slackware-current which reports to have support for the 2.6.x series kernels.
Any further suggestions would be much obliged.
Thanks for your time.
[dann] I fell pray to the post to TAG curse again, which usually has me finding the answer within a few hours of emailing TAG.
I had replaced a failing drive about 6 months back with a used drive I picked up along the way. This drive had EZ-Bios installed in the boot sector. Initially I was concerned with this but when I had no problems with running linux after I transferred over my partitions, I put it out of mind a bit too far.
I compiled a 2.6.2 kernel enabling everything possible under the IDE device drivers into the kernel. This slowed down the boot process enough for me to see this line:
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0 p1[EZD]
Sure enough, I knew EZBios was going to come back and bite me one day. I guess EZBios was somehow preventing the kernel from seeing the drive properly.
After removing EZBios the 2.6.2 kernel booted without a complaint.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your time and effort.
[Ben] Surely that would be "The TAG blessing" rather than "curse", Dann?
That is true. Perhaps I should take advantage of that blessing more often and post sooner. Maybe the luck will work the other way. Instead of three days of trial and error, post on day one and the answer will appear.
[Ben] (Yes, we managed to enlist the Universe and The Gods of Fate and Time in helping us. We thought the negotiations would be tough, but, you know, Gods are intelligent beings and therefore use Linux. It was a shoe-in.)
Well heap some more offerings on the pyre. I'm going in for another round of video capture and editing soon!
Live Linux CDsHi all,
Someone on my LUG found a really useful site[1] that has a list of all the Live Linux CDs that are available. Not just Knoppix you know!
-- Thomas Adam
[1] http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
[Raj] A lot of effort is going to create the regional language flavor of Linux. Linux + Live CDs has provided a fertile ground for internalization of software and demoing the capabilities of Linux to the people.
For example, one of my friends demoed a Bengali version of Knoppix (Ankur Bangla Linux) in the LinuxAsia 2004 held in Delhi, India. It was a great hit. People watched open mouthed as he typed away happily on gedit to produce a small Bengali poem.
[Ben] Oh, excellent! This is sorta the "dark area" of computers - generally solved by "simply" learning English. Not that I mind the world moving toward a common language, but the exclusion field and the entry requirements are keeping the computer culture very small compared to what it could be.
I'm really looking forward to the day when someone invents an input method that is multilingual, portable, and at least as fast as a keyboard (they'll be billionaires overnight.) I've heard of various "fist keyboards" like the Twiddler and OrbiTouch, but... we're not quite there yet.
script for finding ssh-agent at loginHi,
I ran into an annoying problem with ssh-agents. If you don't start one on the very first login screen from which you start X you can't access the agent from any xterm started from the window-manager. Starting new ones is no good idea if one is already running. This script will look for a running ssh-agent and set the environment variables so it can be contacted. If none is running it will start one. As on ssh-login with enabled "AGENT Forwarding" the environment variables will be set and the remote ssh-agent (where you are connecting from) one will be used.
See attached sshssearch-old.bash.txt
unfortunately there has been a change in "interface" of "ssh-add -l" -- before it was giving exit code 0 for "agent is there, with or without keys" and 1 for "no agent".
Now it's finegrained to: 0 for "agent with keys" , 1 for "agent without keys" and 2 for "no agent".
See attached sshssearch-new.bash.txt
of course you have to "source" the script to set the local environment variables:
source sshsearch.sh or . sshsearch.sh
to make it automatic call it from .profile (or .bashrc).
Ben (or whoever feels its to clunky): feel free to make it into a
one-liner
K.-H.
[Ramon] I'm familiar with the problem and found a small tool to deal with it. It was written by Daniel Robbins.
Here's the relevant part of the manpage:
|
............... NAME keychain - a program designed to keep ssh-agent processes alive across multiple logins. DESCRIPTION Keychain is an OpenSSH key manager, typically run from ~/.bash_profile. When run, it will make sure ssh-agent is running; if not, it will start ssh-agent. It will redirect ssh-agent's output to ~/.keychain/[hostname]-sh, so that cron jobs that need to use ssh- agent keys can simply source this file and make the necessary passwordless ssh connections. In addition, when keychain runs, it will check with ssh-agent and make sure that the ssh RSA/DSA keys that you specified on the keychain command line have actually been added to ssh-agent. If not, you are prompted for the appropriate passphrases so that they can be added by keychain. ............... |
Although it creates a security risk, (don't leave any consoles open unattended, all your keys are cached) I've found it extremely pleasant to work with.
- Here's the link:
- http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain.xml
Can't beat homegrown scripts though
Hope it's useful
Xine problemI am using RH8 linux and successfully installed xine for video play. Video cds(.dat format) are functioning well with xine. But I cannot play the video files (in .dat format) copied to hard disk.
Hi, Rename the files from .dat to .mpg or .mpeg. Works for me.
Regards,
Aditya Godbole.
Even the laws of nature cannot produce the right results unless
the initial conditions are entered correctly.
Prof. Yash Pal
(Techfest 2004)
Floppies on CD - the ultimate collectionHi,
This is a cool tip. For people who are too lazy to do all the work (like me) they can download a program called the Ultimate Boot CD which allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives.
For information on the CD and the tools included with it visit: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com. You can download it from the above site or from my mirror at: http://mirror.suramya.com.
The site also has instructions on how to customize the CD for your specific needs.
Hope you all find it as useful as I do.
- Suramya
Local Eth/Internet PPP can work togetherOn RedHat/Fedora, if only the subnet your computer is part of needs to be accessed over the LAN card, I believe this simple trick will work. If not, it is easy to undo.
On set up of the network, simply do not enter an IP for the gateway. If this is already configured then shut down your network (/etc/rc.d/init/.d/network stop) and remove the "GATEWAY" line from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Restart your network and the "route" command should show no default gateway, but also a route via eth0 to the subnet your computer is on. Something like : 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
kppp should then happily create a default route to ppp0 when executed.
Ron H.
No need to shut it down, just do:
route del default gw <IP_ADDR>
You'll need to be root to do it. -- Thomas Adam
Sometimes it's not the websiteI'm still not seeing it there. The entries are alphabetical and go from "Firebird Modern" directly to "Lush", and I can't find "LittleFirebird" on the page anywhere.
after some poking around... -- Heather
This is really strange. I checked again and I can see LittleFirebird theme. I asked other people to check it and they could not find it either.
No idea why this is happening. I am on broadband connection. My ISP (Sify broadband) has put a LAN in the neighbourhood and we connect through a proxy server. Do you think this could be an issue with the cache ? (The other people I asked to check were not part of the ISP's LAN)
[Mike] Either your ISP is not updating the page properly, or your browser isn't. I assume you've done shift-reload, restarted the browser, or tried a different browser. Sometimes the browser cache can be subtle and stubborn, although I've had less problems with that since I stopped using Netscape 4. If your ISP has a malfunctioning proxy server, I guess there's nothing you can do except tell them to fix it.
Securing a dial in?Hello answer guy,
I need to be able to secure an external modem that has been connect to a Solaris box to protect against unauthorized calls.. What I mean is that I want to be able to allow people to connect to the box based purely on the phone number they are calling from. Is there a way on the modem to only allow certain calls to go through while rejecting all other calls?
Thanks,
George
[John Karns] See the "mgetty" open source pkg (http://www.google.com/linux for it). It offers this capability, provided that your modem line has caller id. The pkg includes pretty good documentation as well as good example cfg files.
Full r/w to NTFS from LinuxThought Linux Gazette might like this one. A project called Captive has taken a wine like approach and combined some features from ReactOS.... Microsoft Windows ntfs.sys driver and actually getting full r/w this way.
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive
Is the URL.
James
re: Renaming Ethernet DevicesIn response to 2 Cent Tip #14 in issue 64 (http://linuxgazette.net/issue64/lg_tips64.html#tips/14) which itself claims to refer back to February 2000 (issue 50). Must be a y2k bug, though, because I couldn't find the more ancient reference myself. The fact is, this hasn't changed any, the tip is just as valid as ever, and more useful now that more people might use multiple ethernet cards to run their house LANs. Enjoy. -- Heather
After reading your post I found this. I figured it would help someone.
http://www.scyld.com/expert/multicard.html
Anonymous batch FTP -> SFTPUntil recently we had a remote machine doing a nightly FTP-job over anonymous FTP to a local machine. Both machines have ssh2 installed, so we started using sftp instead. Here's how we did it:
On local machine:
- create a normal user sftp
- mkdir /home/sftp/.ssh/
On remote machine:
- su <user-who's-doing-the-nightly-jobs>
- ssh-keygen -t dsa
- give ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub to admin of local machine
On local machine:
save contents of retrieved id_dsa.pub into /home/sftp/.ssh/authorized_keys
On remote machine:
sftp sftp@local_machine
That's it. To make the sftp-account more restricted, we use scponly (http://www.sublimation.org/scponly).
- close that audio stream
Third times a charm
Last night I left my zinf (streaming audio) player running. I felt bad because doing so wasted bandwidth playing music to a muted amplifier in an empty room. Here is my bash solution, a la run-mozilla.sh
[allan@array14 workarea]$ cat ~/bin/run-zinf.sh
#!/bin/sh
# June 25, 2003
# Kills zinf after HR_LIMIT
AUDIO_STREAMER="/opt/bin/zinf"
HR_LIMIT=8
$AUDIO_STREAMER $@ &
echo "killall ${AUDIO_STREAMER}"| at now +${HR_LIMIT} hours
[allan@array14 workarea]$
As a general note, just want to remind folks ... do send in your answers and tips of all sorts! In case you're wondering to where -- that's tag@linuxgazette.net. They don't always get published in the month we receive them, but we do collect them and mix them up a bit. And sometimes we find strays -- this one had been sent to the editors, not to the normal tips-and-tag mailbox. -- Heather
X is Smarter NowHello Gang,
I have a NEC MultiSync 77F monitor and a Matrox Millenium II video card. When running the SuSE configuration program Sax, X configuration occurs sort of automatically.
All parameters were correct except the modelines associated with my monitor. I say this because the horizontal centering was incorrect when running X.
I tried modelines generated via the XFree 3.3.6 version of xf86config, and incorporated the modelines generated from that tool. Those modelines were proper and usable for XFree86 4.3.0.
As I read on, I saw that X is smart enough to figure out the appropriate timing without modelines. Thus, I deleted all of the generated modelines, and now the Modes section looks like this.
Section "Modes" Identifier "Modes[0]" EndSection
The file that I edited is:
/etc/X11/XF86Config
I hope that this helps other SuSE 8.2 users.
[Heather] The flip side of this clue is just as important; if you're on a more modern setup that doesn't generate modelines because the internally generated ones will do, but you don't like them and feel they can be improved, then all the old tuning tricks will still work, as will modelines found on the net that match your monitor more perfectly.
The Answer Gang
We have guidelines for asking and answering questions. Linux questions only, please.
We make no guarantees about answers, but you can be anonymous on request.
See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LG
Search Engine
shell and pipe question
Font rendering with GTK-2.0
Radeon 7500 PCI Card Monitor Autodetect - My Solution
Updating Libc and Gcc Support on Older Distros?
What are the top five webmail applications of the Open Source world
suppress terminal messages of other processes
building MP3 playlists
Greetings from Heather SternGreetings, folks, and welcome to the world of The Answer Gang. It's been a fine time getting up to speed in our new digs, but now I'm indulging in some spring cleaning.
Taking a look at my hard disk I'm way overdue, too. Let me see... multiple chroot environments being used as development areas, some of which distros aren't even supported by their own vendors anymore. Rescue a few bits of actual code trees, then tarball these things off to a CD, Poof! Hey, that's not too bad. What else can I toast here? (BTW, has the state of the art in DVD burning gotten anywhere close to "just buy one at the computer store and Linux will deal with it" quite yet? I've been too lazy to check.) Some stray PDFs while I was planning my kitchen remodel... from years ago. I haven't even started thinking about cycling off backup tarballs yet.
Then there's mail cleanup. I've got quite an email humor collection. There ought to be lots of dupes in that, but it'll be amusing reading all through the summer to clear my way past it all, deleting attached pics that aren't funny, and making a little gallery of ones that are. (There are oodles of gallery software available on Freshmeat, but I probably won't make it public; my bandwidth isn't up to that.) While not a direct relation to how much disk space I'm eating, some serious antispam principles could at least do spring cleaning on my available time. Jim's been thinking of instituting greylisting on our mail server.
Now I have to note the term is a mite overloaded. I mean, we've been talking about whitelists (our good friends) and blacklists (mail never to be seen again, whether you use the RBL/MAPS servers and their kindred or not) but grey, what's that? The fact is that just seeing your friend's raw address isn't nearly enough; viruses steal names out of address books freely to spoof headers. Clued people like me can add header checks to spot they are really coming from their expected route or mail agent ... but those can change and when they do, your friends will be out of contact. Ouch. Also, mailing lists that are very open (hmm, do I know any of those? *wink*) are often targeted by spammers who hope their mail will hit many at once, while their traces are hidden by standard list-header mangling. The fact is that even the good guys need a little checking, and anyone who needs to receive mail from completely unknown people has to do something serious. Separating off how much checking to really do reduces CPU load for some cases, but that is where it gets a bit greyer. There's ASK and TMDA for making new folk at least reply before you'll talk to them. This greylisting practice is pleasantly sneaky, doing something similar but at the transport layer. Systems run by real people sending real messages really have to have mechanisms for trying again if a server's too busy, a little overloaded, maybe drop back and visit the secondary MX. But spammers don't have time to waste on all that - they've umpty squadzillions other suckers to mail. So greylisting responds with a temporary error condition, but logs who came by; at some vaguely random later point but within popular and reasonable human timeouts it will accept the mail from that server knowing it's a repeat call... and the chances that it's someone utterly normal increase drastically. And even the spammers who follow normal protocol will be stuck hosting their own stupid mail during the delay, costing them resources instead of legitimate ISPs. The downside is not really getting instantaneous notes from your correspondents, but I'm sure this can be tuned a bit.
Of course, you could always just take the classic techie's option - get
a bigger hard disk. With all that I'm up to in my development and
experimenting, it looks like I'll have to do that. Hah. Watch me
complain, twist my arm
Now I should really figure out about backing up this stuff in a way that
would be easy to restore if I have a problem... um, on something that
doesn't take more space than the original does. Otherwise trying to
clean up the house in general will have us wondering where to put all
this. Gosh, laptop drives are getting better capacities these days.
Much easier than dealing with tapes and discs, a mere 4G per disc
disappears pretty quickly nowadays, worse if you're sticking with CDs.
I'm about to attend a music convention; my crew's running an Internet Lounge at Consonance. So all the older systems in miscellaneous condition are being brought up to speed and truly dead parts are finally being tossed. Wow. I'm starting to have shelf space in my hardware cabinet again. That's more like it.
And of course, I've improved the preprocessing scripts I use to match the new stuff we have going on here. So I'm pleased to reintroduce the TAG in threaded form. Thomas did nearly all the work marking it up (for which we can thank his Ruby scripting talents) but the layout tricks are still mine. Let us know if you find any dust that still needs cleaning out of 'em. Have a great month, folks.
Readers with good Linux answers of their own, in local mailing lists or published to netnews groups are encouraged to copy The Answer Gang their good bits if they're inclined to see their good thoughts preserved in the Linux Documentation Project, by way of the Linux Gazette. Ideally the answers explain why things work in a friendly manner and with some enthusiasm, thus Making Linux Just A Little More Fun! If they're short and sweet they'll be in Tips, longer ones may be pubbed here in TAG. But we don't promise that we can publish everything, just like we don't promise that we can answer everyone. And last but not least - you can be anonymous if you'd prefer, just tell us when you write in.
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Jon Johansen
As has been reported in previous months, Jon Johansen, the Norwegian man charged in relation to the DeCSS computer code, has been successful in his legal travails. Now, it has been reported that he is going to attempt to turn the tables and seek compensation from the Norwegian white collar crimes unit.
PATRIOT Act
DVD CCA and DeCSS
The DVD Copy Control Association (also known as the DVD CCA) has abandoned its case against Andrew Brunner. Brunner found himself at the sharp end of legal action as a result of having distributed the DeCSS computer code on his website. The thrust of the DVD CCA legal action was to assert that Brunner was a violator of trade secret laws. However, the legal action taken by the DVD CCA, which was one many cases, proved unsuccessful in halting the global distribution of the computer code, which is now anything but secret.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a DVD-CCA v. Brunner case archive.
GNUstep Live CD (based on Morphix)
Converting an existing system to use the 2.6 kernel.
An interesting article by B. D. McCullough on errors in the statistics functions of Excel and Gnumeric. The two packages shared some of the same errors, Gnumeric has been fixed, Excel has not. (courtesy Linux Today).
developerWorks on the improvements in Linux kernel development from 2.4 to 2.6.
IT Manager's Journal sees embedded Linux as a disruptive force.
PC World takes a look at Mozilla.org's new Firefox web browser
Six Things First-Time Squid Administrators Should Know
Which Linux distribution is the most popular? Which is growing fastest?
Linux and the distributed chess-brain.
Munich's switch to Linux facing a bumpy road
Nonprofit Open Source Primer
NOSI (Nonprofit Open Source Initiative), has released a primer document for nonprofit bodies considering the use of open-source alternatives to closed-source applications. The PDF document can be downloaded from their website
Linux
The Linux kernel has been updated to a new stable version: 2.6.3. Changelog is available.
The old stable line has also received an update, to a new version: 2.4.25, while the previous stable tree has also seen a fresh addition in version 2.2.26.
Firefox
The browser formerly known as Firebird (and before that as Phoenix) has now changed its name to Firefox. Though you may be interested to read the background FAQ to the name-change, it is probably more useful to look at the new features included in this release
wxWindows
wxWindows is to change name to become wxWidgets following pressure from Microsoft regarding possible trademark infringement of Microsoft's "Windows" name. The agreement appears to be relatively amicable.
The Battle for Wesnoth
Debian
Fedora
Fedora, as reported by eWeek, appears to be the first major Linux 2.6 based distribution. LXer has a review of the 2.6 based distro online.
Linux From Scratch
The LFS Development Team has announced the release of LFS-5.1-PRE1, the first pre-release of the upcoming LFS-5.1 book. You can read it online or you can download the book from to read it locally at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
This being a test release, the team would appreciate any feedback, in particular bugs in the installation instructions. Any and all feedback should be sent to the lfs-dev mailinglist.
Xandros
REALbasic 5.5
REAL Software has released REALbasic 5.5 Professional Edition. This software enables developers to compile Visual Basic source code under Linux.
AP Intelligent Mail SwitchT
Secluda Technologies has launched the AP Intelligent Mail Switch, an SMTP perimeter-gateway solution for e-mail productivity. With the company's existing product InboxMasterR, the AP Intelligent Mail Switch gives IT professionals greater ability to monitor and manage e-mail environments; improve the performance and reliability of e-mail applications including anti-spam filters, virus scanning, and e-mail servers; and prevent false positives and other problems caused by e-mail filters.
Secluda's AP Intelligent Mail Switch runs on SUSE, Red Hat, and Mandrake Linux, and is priced on a user/server basis starting at $195 up to $3,995 for an unlimited server license.
Mick is LG's News Bytes Editor.
![[Picture]](../gx/2002/tagbio/conry.jpg)
Born some time ago in Ireland, Michael is currently working on
a PhD thesis in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University
College Dublin. The topic of this work is the use of Lamb waves in
nondestructive testing. GNU/Linux has been very useful in this work, and
Michael has a strong interest in applying free software solutions to
other problems in engineering. When his thesis is completed, Michael
plans to take a long walk.
By Thomas Adam
With all the hype and attention surrounding desktop managers such as KDE and Gnome you could be wondering "why bother using other window managers when those have got everything included in them?" Integrated file managers, nice shiny gadgets, etc. The answer is simple. Both KDE and Gnome take up vast amounts of memory, and if, like me, you have aging hardware, you often look for alternatives that will make your system usable.
You might think that, as KDE and Gnome have everything the user ever wanted, why bother changing? Or to put it another way, is there some way that I can emulate some of what KDE and Gnome do, at less memory cost. The answer is "yes". One of the most requested features from users over the years has to be about the use of session managers, which is the focus of this article.
Session management allows the state of applications that are running to be saved and remembered. This includes attributes such as the size of the windows, their geometry (location on screen), and which page/desk it was on (if you're using a virtual window manager which supports those).
It works by the session manager handing out client-IDs. The application to which this is given to is usually the main window, and any other sub windows do not get any (these sub windows, we call transient windows), since they are event-driven specific and only show when such events within the application are triggered.
However, the parent window has to register itself directly with the session manager so that the session manager knows the originating window so that any transient windows that can be attached. Such a window has a property called: WM_CLIENT_LEADER. This is used to talk to the session manager. A further property WM_WINDOW_ROLE is used by fvwm to define the state of the window. These underlying calls come from the X server itself, which communicates them to the window manager that is running.
So a session manager is a program that handles these protocols, talking both to the underlying X server and the window manager to determine how these windows are to be setup. It is the job of the window manager, if running under a session manager, to communicate with the session manager to learn of these 'hints'.
There aren't that many true session managers out there. But for those that do exist, getting them to work with fvwm can be a challenge. I shall look at each in turn and evaluate their performance.
In order for fvwm to use session management, it must be compiled with --enable-sm at ./configure time. Once this has been done, you can use any session manager you like.
When fvwm loads up, without the use of a session manager, it looks for a
defined file, usually: $HOME/.fvwm2rc or:
$HOME/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc
But fvwm, in its configuration file, allows us to define two startup/restart sections. One for running under a session manager and the other without. As an example, here is a sample InitFunction for fvwm:
DestroyFunc InitFunction
AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Module FvwmBanner
+ I xsetroot -solid cyan
+ I Exec xterm
+ I PipeRead 'Wait exec run_parts.rb'
This will load up normally each time fvwm loads without a session manager. Yet the session manager specific startup looks like this:
DestroyFunc SessionInitFunction AddToFunc SessionInitFunction + I Module FvwmBanner
Thus it allows the user to define separate definitions for instances where the user may or may not be using a session manager. It should be noted that if running under a session manager that it will only look for the SessionInitFunction (and related) sections, and will not run the InitFunction sections at all.
It is also a bad idea to launch xterms and other applications from within the session functions since this can often interfere with the way that the window manager interprets how to handle the window.
In order for us to use the session manager though, we need to ensure that
it is loaded up in the correct order. Whenever one starts X, whether it is
from the command-line (startx) or from a graphical display manager such as
xdm, kdm, gdm, or wdm, a certain file is read: $HOME/.xsession.
Normally, it might look something like this:
#!/bin/bash program1 & program2 & exec fvwm
In order to have the session manager work correctly we have to make sure that it is the last program that is executed, hence:
#!/bin/bash program1 & program2 & smproxy & fvwm exec some_session_manager
Making sure that "some_session_manager" above is replaced by the actual name of the session manager.
smproxy is required since there are some programs which do not natively support the program calls that define session management. In such instances smproxy will try and sniff them out.
This is the original session manager, and is quite limited compared to some of the other session managers we'll be looking at. To use it with fvwm, is done exactly as described above. Once everything loads, you should see a window which looks like the following...
This is pretty self-explanatory. By clicking on the 'Load Session' button, you can select previous sessions to load. When you initially start X, this is what you'll see. You can suppress this window, but to do so, you have to create a session.
Figure 2, shows what is presented after everything has loaded. Using this window, you can get an idea of the applications that it already recognizes, and save the session etc. The only drawback with using xsm is it is very limited in the applications it can recognize. If the application is not strictly X aware then xsm will not be able to handle it.
To save the state of you session (and hence to see whether xsm can identify any more windows, you can press the "checkpoint" button, to get a screen such as Figure 3.
From here you can enter the name of the session that you want to save. I
said earlier that you can by-pass Figure 2, by having it load up the session
name of your choice. Once you have saved the session, edit the file:
$HOME/.xsession and change the line: exec xsm to:
exec xsm -session [name] where '[name]' is the name of the
session.
xsm also causes problems with fvwm in that you have to quit xsm in order to save the session, since xsm is the governing process. I found this to be quite annoying. I would however, recommend it to anyone who uses simple apps, or to someone whom only wants certain apps to run and doesn't want the hassle of install Gnome or KDE to use the session features that they have.
This is the best session manager to use with fvwm. This is because fvwm is
Gnome-compliant and should work with it well (the specifics of the support is
to do with EWMH support). Unlike xsm, gnome-session
handles applications much more efficiently. Under Debian, this can be
installed by the command: apt-get install gnome-session. Just like xsm,
the ~/.xsession file will need modifying, this time to look like
this:
#!/bin/bash program1 & program2 & exec gnome-session
Be advised that starting 'program1' and 'program2' above, before the session manager will cause two instances of the same program to load each time you fvwm again since it loads them as normal, and then the session manager will load them because it would have (hopefully) save their state. That's just something to bear in mind.
When you login to X this time, initially Gnome will load up -- don't panic. The pain and suffering won't last for long. What we need to do is to replace sawfish or metacity (depending on whether you're Gnome1 or Gnome2) with fvwm, while keeping gnome-session running so that when we save the session it knows to load fvwm and not some other window manager.
To do that we can try and kick the current window manager out of the way and have fvwm replace it directly. The command:
fvwm --replace &
...when run in an xterm might do the trick. If not, it will be a case of
interfacing with gnome-session itself. Oddly enough, there is a Gnome
application which provides this very interface:
gnome-session-properties. This is a really useful application for
tweaking the session manager. But for the purposes of getting fvwm running
under it we have to explicitly remove either sawfish or metacity.
Figure 4, shows (rather blankly) the programs that it knows about and has loaded. Then all that remains is to kill fvwm that was running previously, by typing into an xterm:
killall fvwm
Then, going back to the session-properties window, select the window manager which is running (sawfish or metacity), and clicking on the 'Style' button set the active state to Normal. You must then click on 'Apply'. What this has done is to ensure that when the session restarts the window manager that was previously loaded isn't. Then in an xterm type:
killall [wm] && sleep 5s && fvwm &
Where [wm] above is either: metacity or sawfish. As soon as that has worked, save the session. It should be pointed out that for those applications that really aren't session aware, there is an option to have gnome-session launch applications, by using the 'startup programs' tab (figure 4).
There is a known issue with all session managers (Gnome session in particular) that causes it to spawn multiple instances of certain programs. Noticeably with fvwm is xclock. All the information about which programs to launch, etc, are stored in a file, and is a simple task to fix. This script (written in Ruby) will fix that abnormality, should it become annoying. To use it simply do the following:
1. copy the script to /usr/local/bin 2. chmod 711 /usr/local/bin/cprocess.rb 3. edit the #! line in the script to point to the ruby binary 4. edit ~/.xsession, and add the following line: ruby /usr/local/bin/cprocess.rbbefore gnome-session loads.
That's really all there is to setting up and using gnome-session with fvwm.
This has been a very brief look at how different session managers can be used with fvwm. There are others out there such as KDE's ksmserver and XFCE4's xfce-session, but I have not tried them with fvwm and do not know what they are like. Session managers aside, there are also two modules of interest native to fvwm, namely: FvwmSave and FvwmSaveDesk. While these are not session managers, they do provide functionality very similar to them. These will be discussed more fully in other articles next month.
I was born in Hammersmith (London UK) in 1983. When I was 13, I moved to
the sleepy, thatched roofed, village of East Chaldon in the county of Dorset.
I am very near the coast (at Lulworth Cove) which is where I used to work.
I first got interested in Linux in 1996 having seen a review of it in a
magazine (Slackware 2.0). I was fed up with the instability that the then-new
operating system Win95 had and so I decided to give it a go.
Slackware 2.0 was great. I have been a massive Linux enthusiast ever
since. I ended up with running SuSE on both my desktop and laptop computers.
While at school (The Purbeck
School, Wareham in Dorset), I was actively involved in setting up two
Linux proxy servers (each running Squid and SquidGuard). I also set up
numerous BASH scripts which allowed web-based filtering to be done via
e-mail, so that when an e-mail was received, the contents of it were added to
the filter file. (Good old BASH -- I love it)
I am now 18 and studying at University (Southampton Institute, UK), on a
course called HND Buisness Information Technology (BIT). So far, it's great.
Other hobbies include reading. I especially enjoy reading plays (Henrik
Ibsen, Chekov, George Bernard Shaw), and I also enjoy literature (Edgar Allan
Poe, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin to name but a few).
I enjoy walking, and often go on holiday to the Lake District, to a place
called Keswick. There are numerous "mountains", of which "Great Gable" is my
most favourite.
I am also a keen musician. I play the piano in my spare time.
I listen to a variety of music. I enjoy listening to
Rock (My favourite band is "Pavement" (lead singer:
Stephen Malkmus). I also have a passion for 1960's
psychedelic music (I hope to purchase a copy of
"Nuggets" reeeeaaall soon).
I write the recently-revived series "The Linux Weekend Mechanic", which was
started by John Fisk (the founder of Linux Gazette) in 1996 and continued
until 1998. I'm also a member of The Answer Gang.
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All HelpDex cartoons are at Shane's web site, www.shanecollinge.com.
![[BIO]](../gx/2002/note.png)
Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs
around in a pair of colorful tights fighting criminals. During the day... well,
he just runs around. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.
By Jim Dennis
I've been thinking about doing a new column for Linux Gazette for a few months now. Of looking back to our first issues, reading them with an Epimethean perspective. (Epimetheus, of Greek Mythology, was brother to Prometheus --- his counterpart; while Prometheus could see into the future, Epimetheus had perfect "hindsight").
So that's what this will be. It seems fitting somehow that we should start the new regular column at issue 100, reminiscent of the long running column in Scientific American for "50 and 100 Years Ago." Of course such number are completely arbitrary.
In future issues I might cover multiple back issues; or look for threads that wove their way through a history of discussion.
In most cases I will be looking for things that have changed; updates that need to be voiced. However, I expect that most of each issue is still relevant; that only minor retrospective commentary would be needed.
In this issue we'll be looking back at the very first issue of Linux Gazette.
John Fisk was trying Slackware 2.0.0, had been using a 2400 baud dial up to get to the 'net via a VAX/VMS account. The first version of Slackware I used was version 1.0 --- I'd been using the now forgotten SLS (Soft Landing Systems) and Yggdrasil's "Plug & Play Linux" before then and had ignored Slackware's pre-releases.
Slackware is still maintained and is now up to version 9.1 --- and the project is still headed by Patrick Volkerding.
John's install was only 120Mb.
For comparison, modern Red Hat and Fedora installations require a minimum of 250Mb just for the root filesystem! However, a reasonably minimal Debian can reasonably fit in well under 120Mb; so we can't complain that Linux as a whole has become bloated.
He presents a simple PPP "keepalive" shell script. (Could use the persist directive with a modern pppd but some still might need something like the shell script)
while [ -e /var/run/ppp0.pid ]; do
ping -c 1 $REMOTE_ROUTER > /dev/null
sleep $DELAY
done
Another approach would be:
ping -i $DELAY $REMOTE_ROUTER 2>&1 > /dev/null &
PINGPID="$!" while [ -e /var/run/ppp0.pid ]; do
sleep $DELAY
done
kill $PINGPID
... which starts one ping process that sends a ping every $DELAY seconds; then polls slowly on the pid file and, when that's gone it kills the background task. This is no great technical improvement. There's minor improvement by not spawning so many ping processes --- we only load ping once and let it run like a daemon; then kill it when we're done with it. So this alternative approach is only valuable for edification --- and example of how to manage a backgrounded task under the shell.
The next item amounts to a 2-cent tip: that Slackware (among some other distributions) have rcS scripts (rc.sysinit on Red Hat, Fedora, and related distributions) that overwrite our /etc/motd and/or /etc/issue files. So you have to comment out that code if you want your changes to these files to persist.
My 5-penny tip over the top of that is that every Linux system administrator should read their /etc/inittab file from top to bottom and recursively follow through them by applying the following procedure:
Following this procedure, you will wend your way through your entire system start-up sequence. You will know almost EVERYTHING about how your system boots up. (This ignores the possibility that you might have an initrd --- and initial RAMdisk, with a /linuxrc script or binary embedded in it).
As part of my LPI classes I teach this procedure and recommend that all students do this for each new distribution that they ever try to manage.
In the next article we see our first 2-cent tip. ~ (the "tilde" or "twiddle" character) is expanded by the shell to the current user's home directory. I'd add that ~foo will look up the home directory for the user "foo" and expand into that path. This notion of "look up" can actually be quite involved on a Linux system --- though it usually just means a search through the /etc/passwd file. On other systems it would entail NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, or even MS Windows "Domain" or "Active Directory" operations. It all depends on the contents of the /etc/nsswitch.conf and the various /lib/libnss* libraries that might be installed.
The aliases he lists are all still valid. I might add another tip to point to Ian MacDonald's bash programmable completion project which is now shipped as examples with the GNU bash sources; and is thus installed on many Linux distributions by default. To use them, simply "source" the appropriate file, as described in Ian's article under "Getting Started." Ian's article has many other tips and tricks for bash and for the readline libraries against which it's linked. (On my Debian systems Ian's bash completions are in /etc/bash_completion).
In his next article John also talks about bash custom functions. A nitpick and CAVEAT is appropriate here. The version of bash that was in common use back then would accept all those shell functions as he typed them. However, newer versions of bash 2.x and later, require that we render them slightly differently:
# Now, some handy functions...
tarc () { tar -cvzf $1.tar.gz $1 ; }
tart () { tar -tvzf $1 | less ; }
tarx () { tar -xvzf $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 ; }
popmail () { popclient -3 -v -u myname -p mypassword -o /root/mail/mail-in any.where.edu ; }
zless () { zcat $* | less ; }
z () { zcat $* | less ; }
... all we've done is insert semicolons before those closing braces. This is required in newer versions of bash because it was technically a parsing bug in older versions to treat the closing brace as a separator/token. We could also have simply inserted linebreaks before the closing braces. (To understand this consider the ambiguity caused by: 'echo }' --- historically the } did not need to be quoted like a ')' would be. if that doesn't enlighten you just accept it as a quirk and realize that these old examples from 1995 must be updated slightly to run on newer versions of bash).
In the next article the old links to sunsite.unc.edu are ancient and obsolete. The sounds to which he was referring can still be found at:
... which is has all the old sunsite.unc.edu contents after two name changes (it was metalab.unc.edu for awhile, too).
Alas I couldn't find the "Three Stooges" sounds at the ibiblio site; but a quick Google search suggests that we can get some audible zaniness at:
His article on /etc/fstab entries, particularly for "noauto" devices like CD-ROMs and floppies is still relevant. Essentially nothing as changed about that. Some new distributions have programs like magicdev which run while you're logged into the GNOME or other GUI, polling the CD-ROM drive to automatically mount any disc you insert (and to detect the type and optionally dispatch music players for audio CDs or launch file browsers for file CDs, etc). Personally I detest these automount features and disable them as soon as I can find the relevant GUI control panel.
I'd still consider this to be a 2-cent tip of sorts.
For the next article (about making serialized backups of files before editing them) I'd simply suggest using RCS or CVS. RCS is installed with most Linux distributions. To use it, simply create an RCS directory under any directory in which you wish to maintain some files in version control. Then every time you're about to edit a config file therein, use the command: ci -l $FILENAME; the file will be "checked in" to the RCS directory. This will automatically track each set of changes. You can always use the rcsdiff command to view the differences between the current version and the most recent --- or between any arbitrary version by using the appropriate -r switches. CVS is basically similar, but allows you to maintain a centralized repository across the network --- optionally using securely authenticated and encrypted ssh tunnels. The advantage of tracking your files under CVS is that you can restore your settings and customizations even after you've completely wiped the local system (so long as you've maintained your CVS repository host and its backups).
Tutorials for CVS and RCS:
... there are several others on the web; Google for "RCS tutorial" or "CVS tutorial".
I'd also suggest that some of us look at the newly maturing Subversion at:
... which just attained the vaunted release version 1.0 this month.
In the next article: "Accessing Linux from DOS" I notice that the old link for the LDP still works (graciously redirecting us from the old sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/ URL to the current ibiblio LDP mirror). Historical note: MDW are Matt Welsh's initials! Of course the current canonical location for the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) is now:
As for the EXT2TOOL.ZIP link, it's dead. However, a quick perusal of Freshmeat suggests that anyone who needs to access ext2/ext3 filesystems from an MS-DOS prompt might want to use Werner Zimmermann's LTOOOLS package ( also at: http://www.it.fht-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/software/ltools.html Professor Zimmermann's home page). LTOOLS is the MS-DOS counterpart to the mtools package for Linux.
Apparently the LTOOLS package includes a "web interface" (one utility in the package and serve as a miniature web server for the MS Windows "localhost") and it include a Java GUI as well. LTOOLS allegedly still supports MS-DOS, but also have features for later Microsoft operating systems like '95/'98, NT, ME, XP, and Win 2000. It's also apparently portable to Solaris and other versions of UNIX (So you can access your ext2 filesystems from those as well).
mtools allows Linux users to access MS-DOS filesystems, mostly floppies, but also hard drive partitions, using commands like: mcopy a:foo.zip . or mtype b:foo.txt or just mdir (defaults to the A: drive, /dev/fd0 on most installations). mtools has been included with mainstream Linux distributions for most of the last decade, and has been available and widely used on other versions of UNIX for most of that time as well. However, when I'm teaching my LPI courses I still find that its new to more than half of the sysadmins I teach. The principle advantages of mtools are: you don't have to mount and unmount the floppies; you can mark it SGID group "floppy" and set the privileged=1 flag in /etc/mtools.conf to allow users to access MS-DOS filesystems on floppies from their own accounts (without sudo etc).
The last article in this premier issue was one on building a Linux kernel. The basic steps outline there have remained true for the last eight years. Today we use bzImage instead of the old zImage make target. Also, I usually use:
make menuconfig; make dep make clean bzImage modules modules_install install
... and now, with the recent release of the 2.6 kernels we'll be dispensing with the "make dep" step (which was used to make or modify sub-Makefiles among other things). Also the new 2.6 kernel builds are, by default, very quiet and clean. Try one to see what I mean!
Another minor change: newer kernels can no longer be booted raw from floppies. As of 2.6 Linux always requires some sort of boot loader (SYSLINUX, GRUB, LILO, LOADLIN.EXE, etc). The rdev command is basically useless on modern kernels (though one might still use its other features to patch in a default video mode, for example). This isn't a major issue as almost everyone has almost always used a bootloader through the history of Linux; the ability to pass kernel command line parameters is just too bloody indispensable! Of course Linux kernels on other architectures such as SPARC or PowerPC have their own formats and bootloaders.
Overall most of the content of this old issue, almost nine years ago, is still usable today. In less than 3 pages I've summarized it and pointed out the few things that have to be considered when using this information on modern systems, updated a few obsolete URLs, and just pointed to some newer stuff in general.
That doesn't surprise me. Linux follows the UNIX heritage. Things that people learned about UNIX 30 years ago are still relevant and useful today. Things we learned about Linux 10 years ago are now relevant on new Mac OS X systems. The legacy of UNIX has spanned over half of the history of electronic computing.
Jim is a Senior Contributing Editor for Linux Gazette, and the founder of The Answer Guy column (the precursor to The Answer Gang).
Jim has also worked in other computer roles, and also as an electrician and
a crane truck operator. Jim has also worked in many other roles. He's been a
graveyard dishwasher, a janitor, and a driver of school buses, taxis, pizza
delivery cars, and even did some cross-country, long-haul work.
He grew up in Chicago and has lived in the inner city, the suburbs,
and on farms in the midwest. In his early teens he lived in Oregon--
Portland, Clackamas, and the forests along
the coast (Brighton). In his early twenties, he moved to
the Los Angeles area "for a summer job" (working for his father, and learning
the contruction trades).
By then, Jim met his true love, Heather, at a
science-fiction convention. About a year later they started
spending time together, and they've now been living together for
over a decade. First they lived in Eugene, Oregon, for a year, but now they
live in the Silicon Valley.
Jim and Heather still go to SF cons together.
Jim has continued to be hooked on USENET and technical mailing
lists. In 1995 he registered the starshine.org domain as a birthday gift to
Heather (after her nickname and favorite Runequest persona). He's participated
in an ever changing array of lists and newsgroups.
In 1999 Jim started a book-authoring project (which he completed
after attracting a couple of co-authors). That book Linux System
Administration (published 2000, New Riders Associates) is not
a rehash of HOWTOs and man pages. It's intended to give a high-level
view of systems administration, covering topics like
Requirements Analysis, Recovery Planning, and Capacity Planning.
His book intended to build upon the works of Aeleen Frisch
(Essential Systems Administration, O-Reilly & Associates) and
Nemeth, et al (Unix System Administrator's Handbook, Prentice
Hall).
Jim is an active member of a number of Linux and UNIX users' groups
and has done Linux consulting and training for a number of companies
(Linuxcare) and customers (US Postal Service). He's also presented
technical sessions at conferences (Linux World Expo, San Jose and
New York).
A few years ago, he volunteered to help with misguided technical
question that were e-mailed to the editorial staff at the Linux
Gazette. He answered 13 questions the first month. A couple
months later, he realized that these questions and his responses had
become a regular column in the Gazette.
"Darn, that made me pay more attention to what I was saying! But I
did decide to affect a deliberately curmudgeonly attitude; I didn't
want to sound like the corporate tech support 'weenie' that I was
so experienced at playing. That's not what Linux was about!"
(
curmudgeon means a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man,
according to the
Merriam-Webster OnLine dictionary.
The word hails back to 1577, origin unknown, and originally meant miser.)
Eventually, Heather got involved and took over formatting the column,
and maintaining a script that translates "Jim's e-mail markup hints"
into HTML. Since then, Jim and Heather have (finally) invited other
generous souls to join them as The Answer Gang.
Jim has been using Linux since kernel version 0.97 or so. His first
distribution was
SLS (Soft Landing Systems). Jim taught
himself Linux while working on the technical support queues at
Symantec's Peter Norton Group.
He started by lurking alt.os.minix and alt.os.linux on USENET
netnews (before the creation of the comp.os.linux.* newsgroups), reading them
just about all day while supporting Norton Utilities, and
for a few hours every night while waiting for the rush-hour traffic to subside.
The Ecol comic strip is written for escomposlinux.org (ECOL), the web site that supports es.comp.os.linux, the Spanish USENET newsgroup for Linux. The strips are drawn in Spanish and then translated to English by the author.
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![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-147-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-148-e.png)
![[cartoon]](misc/ecol/ecol-145-e.png)
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All Ecol cartoons are at tira.escomposlinux.org (Spanish), comic.escomposlinux.org (English) and http://tira.puntbarra.com/ (Catalan). The Catalan version is translated by the people who run the site; only a few episodes are currently available.
These cartoons are copyright Javier Malonda. They may be copied, linked or distributed by any means. However, you may not distribute modifications. If you link to a cartoon, please notify Javier, who would appreciate hearing from you.
By Ben Okopnik
from Raspal
Many years ago (1996-97), I was learning computer hardware, had just learned basic electronics, and had hardly started with computer hardware when I got a 486 DX4 assembled by an assembler-friend of mine. He put Win95 in it and a lot of software that I had asked for. I learned Win95 by playing with it.
Well, after a month or two, I had lots of theoretical and a little bit of practical knowledge about assembling a computer. So, equipped with this knowledge, I opened up my computer's case one night to get some "practice". I removed the motherboard completely, then removed the processor along with its fan to check what it was really like, taking care not to touch the pins. Before removing it from it's socket, I tried to see pin 1 of the processor, but failed since it was covered by the heatsink and the fan. It wasn't visible from below either unless the fan and the heatsink were removed. But I had to remove the fan and remember to put it back the same way. So, I carefully marked one end of the fan which was near the socket "clip", with a marker, then removed the CPU from its socket, confident that I would now be able to put it back the same way without any problems.
With the processor out of socket, pin 1 still wasn't visible, and since I also wanted to check if the processor was really an AMD DX4 100MHz, I removed the fan and heatsink carefully and checked that it really was. Then I put the heatsink and the fan back over the CPU. Now seeing the marked side of the fan, I inserted the CPU back in its socket, locked it and put the motherboard back in to the case, covered it and tightened the screws. Then I sat and switched it on. Booooom! it went and there was lot of smoke from the SMPS at the back. I panicked and quickly powered it off but it was too late.
What had happened was that I had put the heatsink and the fan attached to it the other way round on the processor, and since the mark on the fan was now also backwards, put the CPU backwards into the socket. Later I discovered that the motherboard was fried, but the CPU had survived. Since it was in warranty though, I got a new motherboard. But after this incident, I have always been extremely careful how I insert a CPU. Now Pentium processors can't be inserted the wrong way I think, but it was possible in the case of 486 sockets.
from Ben Okopnik
A number of years ago, when I was teaching PC hardware repair classes, I had a student who was in the process of switching from mainframes to the "little machines". He was a very interesting guy to talk to, with lots of stories of "The Old Days" and how much more manual things used to be than what we're used to now. The day that I was teaching the data recovery module, I saw a certain gleam in his eye (which made me think "oh-oh, he's up to something..."), which got progressively more evil as the day went on, particularly when I said things like "...this shows that you can get your data off the hard drive in most situations, even when it seems hopeless."When he came in the next day, he was carrying a platter that was about two feet across, with deep circular grooves cut into it. He gave me an innocent look and said "can you help me recover this data?" After we all had a good laugh, he explained that in the drives his company used years before (boxes the size of washing machines), the read/write heads were actually mounted on a carrier that rode on a pair of rails, with the driver motor also mounted on the carrier. The rails extended from the edge of the platter toward its center. The problem with these drives was that the screws holding the inner end of the rails (over the hub of the platter) would vibrate loose - and the whole assembly, a pound or so of metal, would come crashing down onto the spinning platter... I told him that if he really wanted his data, he could probably vacuum it up from the bottom of the drive casing; the zeroes and the ones should be almost large enough to see.
Ben is the Technical Editor for Linux Gazette and a member of The Answer Gang.
Ben's subsequent experiences include creating software in nearly a dozen
languages, network and database maintenance during the approach of a hurricane,
and writing articles for publications ranging from sailing magazines to
technological journals. Having recently completed a seven-year
Atlantic/Caribbean cruise under sail, he is currently anchored in St. Augustine, FL,
where he works as a consultant and a technical instructor for Sun Microsystems.
Ben has been working with Linux since 1997, and credits it with his complete
loss of interest in waging nuclear warfare on parts of the Pacific Northwest.
Ben was born in Moscow, Russia in 1962. He became interested in
electricity at age six--promptly demonstrating it by sticking a fork into
a socket and starting a fire--and has been falling down technological mineshafts
ever since. He has been working with computers since the Elder Days, when
they had to be built by soldering parts onto printed circuit boards and
programs had to fit into 4k of memory. He would gladly pay good money to any
psychologist who can cure him of the resulting nightmares.
By Pramode C.E
The Python programming language's support for generators is described in PEP 255. This article demonstrates a few simple programs which make use of this feature to do some fun stuff like filtering out prime numbers, representing an `infinite' series expansion in a finite way, applying the Euler `accelerator' to make a series converge faster etc. Many of the programs which I describe here have been taken from `test_generators.py' which is available with the Python source distribution. A few ideas have been stolen from the Computer Science classic, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
A generator is, simply put, a function which can stop whatever it is doing at an arbitrary point in its body, return a value back to the caller, and, later on, resume from the point it had `frozen' and merrily proceed as if nothing had happened. Here is a simple example:
[ Listing 1 ]
from __future__ import generators def foo(): print 'hello' yield 1 print 'world' yield 2
I am using Python 2.2 - in order to use the generator facility, a special `import' statement should be placed at the very beginning of the file. It may not be required in later versions.
Note the `yield' keyword. A function which contains a yield statement anywhere in its body is considered to be special by the Python interpreter - it is treated differently from ordinary functions. Let's see how:
>>> from gen1 import * >>> a = foo() >>> print a <generator object at 0x8158db8>
We note that calling the function did not result in the function getting executed. Instead, the Python interpreter gave us a `generator object'. This is one of the implications of using the yield statement in the body of the function. Now, what do we do with this generator object?
>>> a.next() hello 1 >>> a.next() world 2 >>> a.next() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>" line 1, in ? StopIteration
Calling a.next() resulted in the function beginning its execution - it prints hello and comes to a dead stop at the `yield' statement, returning the value 1 to the caller. The function has gone back to its caller, but its `local state' has been fully preserved. Another invocation of a.next results in the function restarting from where it had stopped earlier - it prints `world' and stops after returning the value 2 to the caller. Yet another invocation of a.next results in the function `falling off' the end - because our function is a special `generator function', this will result in an exception, StopIteration, being raised.
Let's now try running a for loop on our generator:
>>> a = foo() >>> for i in a: ... print i ... hello 1 world 2 >>>
The for loop works by invoking a.next() and assigning the value obtained to i, which then gets printed. The strings 'hello' and 'world' get printed as part of the execution of `foo'. It would also be interesting to try out invoking the `list' function on the generator object - we will get a list [1,2] as the result. In both cases (for loop as well as `list'), iteration stops when the StopIteration exception is raised.
The body of a generator function should not contain a return statement of the form `return expr' - a simple `return' is allowed. The PEP discusses this and many more things. You should try running the following code:
[ Listing 2 ]
from __future__ import generators def foo(n): if (n < 3): yield 1 else: return yield 2
Try running a for loop over the generator objects returned by say, foo(10) and foo(1). Also, try calling next() on these objects.
Generators present us with some fun ways to manipulate infinite sequences - though some people might question their practical utility! As far as we are concerned, being fun is reason enough!
[ Listing 3 ]
from __future__ import generators def foo(): i = 0 while 1: yield i i = i + 1
What we have above is the simplest possible `infinite' generator. Try calling next() on the generator object returned by calling `foo'. Give this object as an argument to a `for' loop - you will see that the loop keeps on printing numbers. If you wish Python to eat up memory, try running `list(foo())'. Try writing a more interesting function, say a Fibonacci series generator.
Here is an infinite series of alternating positive and negative terms:
1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...
This series converges to PI/4. We will write a Python generator for it.
def pi_series(): sum = 0 i = 1.0; j = 1 while(1): sum = sum + j/i yield 4*sum i = i + 2; j = j * -1
Each `yield' statement keeps on returning a better approximation for PI. Test it out by calling `next' on the generator returned by invoking pi_series. We note that the series does not converge very fast.
It would be convenient to have a function which would return the first N values yielded by a generator.
def firstn(g, n): for i in range(n): yield g.next()
Note that the first argument to this function is a generator object. Here is what I got when I tried out `list(firstn(pi_series(), 8))':
[4.0, 2.666666666666667, 3.4666666666666668, 2.8952380952380956, 3.3396825396825403, 2.9760461760461765, 3.2837384837384844, 3.0170718170718178]
We can apply a `sequence accelerator' to convert a series of terms to a new series which converges to the original value much faster. One such accelerator, invented by Leonhard Euler, is shown below:
![Sn+1 - [(Sn+1 - Sn)*(Sn+1 - Sn)]/[Sn-1 - 2*Sn + Sn+1]](misc/pramode/euler.jpg){kind=small}
(Sn+1) stands for the (n+1)th term, (Sn-1) for the (n-1)th term.
If Sn is the n'th term of the original sequence, then the accelerated sequence has terms as shown in the equation above.
Let's try writing a generator function which accepts a generator object and returns an `accelerated' generator object.
def euler_accelerator(g): s0 = g.next() # Sn-1 s1 = g.next() # Sn s2 = g.next() # Sn+1 while 1: yield s2 - (sqr(s2 - s1))/(s0 - 2*s1 + s2) s0, s1, s2 = s1, s2, g.next()
Here is what I got when I tried printing the first few terms of this series:
[3.166666666666667, 3.1333333333333337, 3.1452380952380956, 3.1396825396825401, 3.1427128427128435, 3.1408813408813416, 3.1420718170718178, 3.1412548236077655]Note that the series is converging much faster! You can get the program as a whole:
[ Listing 4 ]
A cute idea for `filtering out' prime numbers, invented by the Alexandrian mathematician Eratosthenes, works as follows. Suppose you want to find out all prime numbers below, say, 1000. You first cancel all multiples of 2 (except 2) from a list 1..1000. Now you will cancel all multiples of 3 (except 3). 4 has already been canceled, as it is a multiple of 2. Now you will take off all multiples of 5, except 5. And so on. Ultimately, what remains in the list would be prime numbers!
Let's start with a generator which gives us all integers from `i' onwards:
def intsfrom(i): while 1: yield i i = i + 1Now let's write a generator which will eliminate all multiples of a number `n' from a sequence:
def exclude_multiples(n, ints): for i in ints: if (i % n): yield iAn invocation of the generator, say, list(firstn(exclude_multiples(2, intsfrom(1)), 5)), will give us the list [1,3,5,7,9].
Now, its time for us to build our `sieve'.
def sieve(ints): while 1: prime = ints.next() yield prime ints = exclude_multiples(prime, ints)You can get the source file containing these function definitions from here:
[ Listing 5 ]
Generator functions can call themselves recursively. It takes some time getting used to it. Let's try analyzing the way the following functions work:
[ Listing 6 ]
from __future__ import generators def abc(): a = deff() for i in a: yield i yield 'abc' def deff(): a = ijk() for i in a: yield i yield 'deff' def ijk(): for i in (1,2,3): yield i yield 'ijk'An invocation of abc will yield a generator object. Calling `next' on it would result in `abc' starting execution. The very first line of `abc' invokes `deff' which returns a generator object. After that, a.next() is invoked as part of the very first iteration of the for loop. This results in `deff' starting execution the same way. The body of `deff' builds a generator object by calling `ijk' and calls its `next' method as part of the for loop. This results in `ijk' starting execution and yielding 1, `deff' also yields 1, and `abc' also yields 1. Calling the `next' method (of the generator object returned by invoking `abc') two more times will result in the values 2 and 3 getting propagated up. Yet another invocation will result in the string `ijk' propagating up the call stack because the for loop in the body of `ijk' has terminated. Calling `next' again will result in the body of `ijk' terminating, with the result that the `for' loop in `deff' gets a StopIteration exception, which results in that loop terminating and the function yielding the string `deff'. Subsequent invocation of `next' will result in `abc' being returned to the top level caller. The final invocation of next (again, note that we are invoking `next' on the object returned by calling `abc') will result in the caller getting a StopIteration exception because the body of `abc' has also been executed in full.
Let's now look at Guido's binary tree example. The classical inorder traversal is coded as below:
def inorder(t): if t: for x in inorder(t.left): yield x yield t.dat for x in inorder(t.right): yield xLet's think of invoking inorder on a tree with only one node (say containing data 50). Doing `for x in inorder(t.left)' is same as:
a = inorder(t.left) for x in a: ....Because t.left is 0, calling a.next() (which the for loop does) results in a StopIteration exception - this terminates the loop immediately. The next statement in the body is `yield t.dat' - this returns 50. The next for loop also terminates immediately because of a StopIteration. It should be easy to visualize the way the code works for more complex tree structures. Here is the source for the program - [ Listing 7 ].
Let's define a `signal' as a stream of positive and negative integers.
1 2 -1 -4 3 2 -3 -4 2 3 4 -2 ...
A zero-crossing detector outputs a signal which describes the zero crossings of the input signal - the resulting signal is +1 whenever the input signal changes from negative to positive, -1 whenever input signal changes from positive to negative and 0 otherwise. We shall assume that 0 is positive.
Here is the zero-cross detector:
[ Listing 8 ]
def zerocross(g): a = g.next() b = g.next() while 1: yield cross_detect(a, b) a, b = b, g.next()If the signal is coming from a sensor, noise will lead to spurious zero crossings. So, we can think of `smoothing' the signal (using some form of `moving average' computation) and then detecting the zero crossings.
Most of the code has been `lifted' from `test_generators.py', which comes with the Python source distribution. Thanks to the Python community for many hours of pleasurable code reading, and for creating the BEST programming language in the world! Thanks to the authors of SICP for making such a classic freely available on the web!
I am an instructor working for IC Software in Kerala, India. I would have loved
becoming an organic chemist, but I do the second best thing possible, which is
play with Linux and teach programming!
Linux ( and other Unices ) have lots of nifty small utilities which can be combined together to do interesting things. There is a certain joy in creating these software or using them to tweak your programs. In this series we shall look at some such tools which are useful for a programmer. This tools will help you to code better and make your life easy.
After we have designed and coded a software comes the stage of optimizing the program. Before we talk about profiling and optimization in general I would like to draw your attention to two quotes regarding optimization.
There are mainly 2 types of profiling information we can get :-
The source code has to be compiled with the -pg option ( also with -g if you want line-by-line profiling ). If the number of lines in the Make file is small you can append these options to each compilation command. However if the number of compilation commands is large then you can define/redefine the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS parameter in the makefile and add this to every compilation command in the makefile. I will demonstrate the use of gprof using the gnu make utility.
Unpack the gzipped tarball $ tar zxf make-3.80.tar.gz $ cd make-3.80 Run the configure script to create the makefiles $ ./configure [configure output snipped]Edit the CFLAGS parameter in the makefile generated to remove optimization flags and add -pg to CFLAGS. GCC optimization flags are removed as compiler optimization can sometimes cause problems while profiling. Especially if you are doing line-by-line profiling, certain lines may be removed while optimizing source code.
Build the source code $ make [build output snipped]We can use this make to build other software such as Apache, lynx and cvs. We build apache using this make as an example. When we untar, configure and run make on the source of Apache , a file called gmon.out containing profiling information is generated. You may observe that make may run slower than expected as it is logging the profile data. An important thing to be remembered while collecting profile data is that we have to run the program giving it the inputs we give it normally and then exiting when it is all done. This way you would have simulated a real-world scenario to collect data.
In the last step we have got a binary output file called "gmon.out". Unfortunately there is no way currently to specify the name for the profiling data file. This "gmon.out" file can be interpreted by gprof to generate human readable output. The syntax for the same is :
gprof options [Executable file [profile data files ... ] ] [ > human-readable-output-file] $ gprof make gmon.out > profile-make-with-Apache.txtyou can find the whole file here
A section of the flat profile is shown below -
Flat profile: Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds. % cumulative self self total time seconds seconds calls ms/call ms/call name 33.33 0.01 0.01 207 0.05 0.05 file_hash_2 33.33 0.02 0.01 38 0.26 0.26 new_pattern_rule 33.33 0.03 0.01 6 1.67 2.81 pattern_search 0.00 0.03 0.00 2881 0.00 0.00 hash_find_slot 0.00 0.03 0.00 2529 0.00 0.00 xmalloc 0.00 0.03 0.00 1327 0.00 0.00 hash_find_item 0.00 0.03 0.00 1015 0.00 0.00 directory_hash_cmp 0.00 0.03 0.00 963 0.00 0.00 find_char_unquote 0.00 0.03 0.00 881 0.00 0.00 file_hash_1 0.00 0.03 0.00 870 0.00 0.00 variable_buffer_outputFrom the above data we can draw the following conclusions :
This is however insufficient data for gathering information. So this specially compiled make was used for building lynx, cvs, make and patch. All the renamed gmon.out files were gathered and profiling data was compiled using the following commands.
$ gprof make gmon-*.out > overall-profile.txtThis file can be found here
Flat profile: Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds. % cumulative self self total time seconds seconds calls ms/call ms/call name 18.18 0.06 0.06 23480 0.00 0.00 find_char_unquote 12.12 0.10 0.04 120 0.33 0.73 pattern_search 9.09 0.13 0.03 5120 0.01 0.01 collapse_continuations 9.09 0.16 0.03 148 0.20 0.88 update_file_1 9.09 0.19 0.03 37 0.81 4.76 eval 6.06 0.21 0.02 12484 0.00 0.00 file_hash_1 6.06 0.23 0.02 6596 0.00 0.00 get_next_mword 3.03 0.24 0.01 29981 0.00 0.00 hash_find_slot 3.03 0.25 0.01 14769 0.00 0.00 next_token 3.03 0.26 0.01 5800 0.00 0.00 variable_expand_stringAs we can see, the picture has changed a bit from the make profile we got from compiling apache.
Let us now have a look at a snippet of the call graph profile from compiling Apache.
index % time self children called name
-----------------------------------------------
6 eval_makefile [49]
[25] 3.7 0.00 0.00 6 eval [25]
0.00 0.00 219/219 try_variable_definition [28]
0.00 0.00 48/48 record_files [40]
0.00 0.00 122/314 variable_expand_string [59]
0.00 0.00 5/314 allocated_variable_expand_for_file [85]
0.00 0.00 490/490 readline [76]
0.00 0.00 403/403 collapse_continuations [79]
0.00 0.00 355/355 remove_comments [80]
0.00 0.00 321/963 find_char_unquote [66]
0.00 0.00 170/170 get_next_mword [88]
0.00 0.00 101/111 parse_file_seq [93]
0.00 0.00 101/111 multi_glob [92]
0.00 0.00 48/767 next_token [70]
0.00 0.00 19/870 variable_buffer_output [68]
0.00 0.00 13/2529 xmalloc [64]
0.00 0.00 2/25 xrealloc [99]
5 eval_makefile [49]
-----------------------------------------------
We can make the following observations from the snippet above : Using gprof you can also get annotated source list and line-by-line profiling. These might be useful once you have identified the the sections of code that need to be optimized. These options will help you drill down in the source code to find inefficiencies. Line-by-line profiling along with flat profile can be used to check which are the code paths which are frequently traversed. The annotated source listing can be used to drill down within function calls themselves up to the basic block (loops and branching statements), to find out which loops are executed most and which branches are taken most frequently . This is useful in fine tuning the code for optimum performance. There are some other options which are not covered here. Refer to the info documentation of gprof for more details. There is a KDE front end which is available for gprof called kprof. See the reference section for the URL.
Profiling tools such as gprof can be a big help in optimizing programs. Profiling is one of the first steps for manual optimization of programs to know where the bottlenecks and remove them.
Vinayak is currently pursuing the APGDST course
at NCST. His areas of interest are networking, parallel
computing systems and programming languages. He
believes that Linux will do to the software industry
what the invention of printing press did to the world
of science and literature. In his non-existent free
time he likes listening to music and reading books. He
is currently working on Project LIberatioN-UX where he
makes affordable computing on Linux accessible for
academia/corporates by configuring remote boot stations
(Thin Clients).
By Thomas Adam
Sluggo wrote:
% lsd zsh: command not found: lsd
Pete Jewel wrote:
pete@pete:~$ apt-cache search lsd kmerlin - Instant messaging (IM) client for the MSN messenger network libsdl-ocaml - OCaml bindings for SDL - runtime files libsdl-ocaml-dev - OCaml bindings for SDL - development files lsdb - The Lovely Sister Database (email rolodex) for Emacs patchutils - Utilities to work with patchesHmmm, they all sound like they'd work better on acid :)
Sluggo wrote:
I was just trying to type 'ls'. Really.
Ben wrote:
To: The Answer Gang <tag@linuxgazette.net> Subject: Test, do not open or read <fnord> I *told* you not to read it, didn't I? And did you listen? Boy, I bet you went right out and played in the mud when your Mom told you not to. It's kids like you who are responsible for the mess our society is in! </fnord> Robos says that his mail to "tag@" got swallowed up, so I'm just checking. Move along, nothing to see here.
Brad Chapman wrote:
Mr. Okopnik
Ben wrote:
Well, *if* you're going to be formal, you might as well address me by my
rightful title - "Your Sublime Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, Ruler of
the Known Universe and the Reaches Beyond and the Sun and the Stars,
Light of the World, Power of the Trinity, the Earth's Rightful Ruler,
Elect of the Gods, as revealed to us in his wondrous person. And, like,
just a generally cool dude besides."
Or you could just stick with "Ben". Most people find it simpler, for
some odd reason.
Brad Chapman wrote:
Like I've said before on this list, I'm polite by default....
Jason Creighton wrote:
Ah, let's see if we can fix that:
~$ bradley --help
Usage: bradley [OPTIONS] TOPIC MAILING LIST
Post to MAILING LIST about TOPIC, using OPTIONS.
-t, --tone=ATTITUDE ATTITUDE is one of rude, casual or
polite. Default is polite.
-w, --witty Enable "witty" mode. (Note: Not always funny.
See "BUGS" section of manpage.)
Report bugs to <kakadu_croc@yahoo.com>
~$ bradley -t casual --witty "Any topic at all" 'tag@linuxgazette.net'
~$
Sluggo wrote:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 09:04:56AM -0800, Mike Orr wrote:
> Christoph, it would help if you give us some examples of exactly what
> messages you are saying. That would help us narrow down which modules
^^^^^^
seeing
Gosh, am I writing with an Irish accent today?
Ben wrote:
Our Master Blacksmith, Brad, is a Londoner who's been living here in
Florida for about 8 years now and has a - ready for this? - Leprechaun
Gangsta Rap that could easily result in loss of bladder control.
"Eat me Lucky Charrms, bitch, or I'll pop a cahp in yer arse!"
He's a bad, BAD man, possibly with a secure future in the world of
comedy.
Ben wrote:
The [airport] I've been flying out of, SGJ (Saint Augustine). Let me know,
and I'll buy you guys lunch at the Fly-By Cafe; if you do it sometime soon,
we can watch the F-86 Sabre doing his rolls and loops...
Thomas wrote:
If you're _really_ lucky, you'll be able to fly by and drop lightly pieces
of food into waiting mouths below, assuming the wind is in the right
direction.
Oh _Fly-By_......
Ben wrote:
Boy, Thomas; no matter how hard I try, I _still_ can't get the point
across to you. We lightly drop _flies_ into the waiting mouths, etc.
Hasn't your Mum ever mentioned not keeping your mouth open for that very
reason?
:)
Thomas wrote:
Yeah, but she was too busy fly fishing, Ben.
:)
I was born in Hammersmith (London UK) in 1983. When I was 13, I moved to
the sleepy, thatched roofed, village of East Chaldon in the county of Dorset.
I am very near the coast (at Lulworth Cove) which is where I used to work.
I first got interested in Linux in 1996 having seen a review of it in a
magazine (Slackware 2.0). I was fed up with the instability that the then-new
operating system Win95 had and so I decided to give it a go.
Slackware 2.0 was great. I have been a massive Linux enthusiast ever
since. I ended up with running SuSE on both my desktop and laptop computers.
While at school (The Purbeck
School, Wareham in Dorset), I was actively involved in setting up two
Linux proxy servers (each running Squid and SquidGuard). I also set up
numerous BASH scripts which allowed web-based filtering to be done via
e-mail, so that when an e-mail was received, the contents of it were added to
the filter file. (Good old BASH -- I love it)
I am now 18 and studying at University (Southampton Institute, UK), on a
course called HND Buisness Information Technology (BIT). So far, it's great.
Other hobbies include reading. I especially enjoy reading plays (Henrik
Ibsen, Chekov, George Bernard Shaw), and I also enjoy literature (Edgar Allan
Poe, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin to name but a few).
I enjoy walking, and often go on holiday to the Lake District, to a place
called Keswick. There are numerous "mountains", of which "Great Gable" is my
most favourite.
I am also a keen musician. I play the piano in my spare time.
I listen to a variety of music. I enjoy listening to
Rock (My favourite band is "Pavement" (lead singer:
Stephen Malkmus). I also have a passion for 1960's
psychedelic music (I hope to purchase a copy of
"Nuggets" reeeeaaall soon).
I write the recently-revived series "The Linux Weekend Mechanic", which was
started by John Fisk (the founder of Linux Gazette) in 1996 and continued
until 1998. I'm also a member of The Answer Gang.