I’ve grown more and more accustomed to that phrase. Being on IRC, blogs, forums, mailing lists, and other forms of digital social gathering, it still never ceases to amaze me the responses that come out of people these days. Case in point? The tragic ending to what should have been a happy one. I’m referring [...]
DISCLAIMER: This works on Debian testing, Debian unstable, Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10. I have not verified it to work on other systems. If you hose your box, because you gave it a try, and it didn’t work, don’t blame me. You’re the stupid one for trying it out on a production machine. If you’re [...]
I was hanging out in ##linux on Freenode this morning, willing to help anyone out who needed it, and I came smack into the middle of an argument about why Gentoo is the best distribution in the world, and Debian is the worst. As the conversation progressed, it was clear that the one running Gentoo [...]
I have a love/hate relationship with Debian. It is a solid operating system, with a lot of potential. When initially released in 1993, then following the subsequent years, Debian wan innovative. It was one of the first distributions to introduce package management that resolves dependencies, and it did so well. Leaving Debian decoupled, so it [...]
Taking a break from the humdrum LZMA stuff, I thought I would share with you what I use in my backpack to keep my systems in line. You may or may not of thought about this, and I hope you find it useful. Bootable CDs First, on the list is CDs. Seeing as though we [...]
A couple days ago, I covered the LZMA compression algorithm as it related to compression. Well, as pointed out in the comments, we need to see the other side of compressed data, and that is decompressing the data. I’ve kept all my data files, so, let’s decompress them with GZIP, BZIP2 and LZMA, and see [...]
I’ve known about the LZMA compression algorithm for a little while, but I haven’t really played with it. So, giving it a quick try, I thought I would sick it after all the text files in my /etc directory. I’m using GNU tar to archive the files, and the maximum compression possible with each algorithm [...]
There is a meme going on with Planet Debian right now about SSH tips. Here’s mine. I used to travel the country teaching Linux System Administrators. I have spent many a day in airports, hotels and training centers. Whenever there was a network connection available, I was on it, mainly with SSH. SSH is so [...]
So, due to the bad shape of the economy I was let go from my position as a Linux instructor and guru. As unfortunate as it is, I have to press forward looking for the best job that fits my skill set. However, the point of this post isn’t to complain about being laid off, [...]
About a month ago, while teaching a class in Philadelphia, a student in my class had an interesting BASH prompt. In fact, not only had he customized a prompt for BASH, but one for CSH and KSH as well, as apparently, he spends adequate time in those shells during work. Well, this got me rethinking [...]
I’m a big advocate of virtual desktops, sometimes referred to as “workspaces”. I’m curious how many workspaces you use, and what, if any, each workspace is assigned to. I use 6 workspaces, and have them organized into two rows of three columns as follows: Email Messaging Web Virtual Machines Miscellaneous Development
Thanks to David Evans and Christer Edwards, I’m now a Mutt user. I’ll spare the reasons why I switched, except to mention that I wanted a mail client that did mail standards correctly. Further, as stated on the Mutt site, “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less”. I am in agreement. So, seeing [...]
Red Hat made the announcement today that they have acquired Qumranet, the company behind KVM. This is awesome news on many fronts. First, KVM is the future for Linux virtualization- not Xen. Second, Red Hat has become the leader in open source contributions, both in the kernel itself, as well as many technologies, such as [...]
WARNING: IF YOU FOLLOW THE CODE IN THIS POST, YOU WILL DESTROY THE DATA ON YOUR DISK. Being a Linux instructor for Guru Labs, I get to travel the United States, and on occasion, other countries. When on the road, usually I’m teaching Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but do sometimes teach Fedora Linux, SUSE Enterprise [...]
Today, I found myself featured on the Linux Haters Blog. I’ve heard of this blog before, but didn’t give it much thought, as most of the posts coming from the author are nothing more than Microsoft fan-boy fanaticism. It’s hard to take any of the posts seriously. After reading his post regarding a couple of [...]
