I created a Debian package for Salt, doing my best to adhere to the Debian Policy. You can find it at http://mentors.debian.net/package/salt. If you’re not familiar with Salt, head over to http://saltstack.org and check it out. From the author’s website: Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer servers in [...]
Too often, I see the recommendation on forums, IRC, and elsewhere across the internet to use improper tools for creating ISO images. For example, consider the following two commands, both of which are not the correct way to build a CD/DVD image: $ dd if=/dev/scd0 of=cdimage.iso # NO! Or worse yet: $ cat /dev/scd0 > [...]
This post comes from BashFAQ/081 on Greg’s Wiki. He argues why you should not be using which(1) to determine if a command is in your $PATH at the end of the page. I’ll put that argument at the front: The command which(1) (which is often a csh script, although sometimes a compiled binary) is not [...]
This post is a quickie to see what the current generation is like these days. I’m an old fart (not as old as many reading this post), but I remember when 5 1/4″ floppy drives were “standard”, and 3 1/2″ were the new fad. Then came Iomega Jazz drives, and the like. CDRW hit the [...]
Quick post, outlining what I think makes the Unix family of operating systems superior, including “unix-like” operating systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD, and others. Of course, the list isn’t exhaustive- it’s just something I threw together in 10 minutes. The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode. The command line interface. [...]
I’ve been tasked at work with shredding drives. Not physically, mind you, but digitally. Usually, I grab a copy of the latest version of Knoppix, boot up, pull up a terminal, and grab GNU Shred. Something like: shred -n 3 -v /dev/sda It works well enough. However, it doesn’t display a real useful progress meter, [...]
Just over the past couple of weeks, I have done a few Debian GNU/Linux installations for various people, including myself. I am a minimalist. I like to have installed on my system only exactly what I specify. However, I’m also a realist, and know that Debian has likely chosen sane defaults in the installer when [...]
I just finished reading 7 Reasons Why I Switched to Google Chrome from Firefox. I found the article a bit on the fanboy side, and I’ll address each of his points here, while also saying my reasons why I’m still holding on to the Firefox browser as my default browser. First, Andrew mentions that Google [...]
Tommorow is the Big Day for GNU/Linux, when Ubuntu goes through it’s regularly 6 month upgrade. Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed “Jaunty Jackalope” is due for release. The consequence is, these servers will get slammed, meaning that’s it’s difficult for people who use other distributions on some mirrors to update their distribution. As a result, rather than [...]
My bank allows customizing the front of the card with an image of your choice. So, I figured why not represent Free Software and Linux everywhere I use my card? I struggled for some time finding the right image to represent Free Software. The GNU logo is almost as horrid as Tux, the Linux kernel [...]
Last night, I spent a few hours migrating this production server from Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” to Debian 5.0 “Lenny”. Many have asked me online and in person why I would make the switch, especially being a heavy Ubuntu advocate. I hope I can explain that in a clear manner in this post. But first, [...]
With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 about 2 months out, Mark Shuttleworth will be announcing the codename of Ubuntu 9.10 fairly soon. This gets the community excited, as historically, Ubuntu releases have had entertaining codenames with interesting patterns. For example, the first three releases were after badgers: Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty Warthog”, Ubuntu 5.04 “Hoary Hedgehog” [...]
I’ve had this discussion a couple of times with some friends about which looks better: Ubuntu or Fedora. So, I decided to take a poll from my readers, and see what you think. Which vendor does a better job at artwork? I’ve provided screenshots of the default wallpaper for each release on both distributions. Now, [...]
I can’t sleep, so what do I do? Hit the Google Machine, and begin wasting time, hoping I’ll get sleepy, and go back to bed. During my time wasting, I come across an old article (5 months old) about the top four alternatives to Ubuntu Linux. Of course, everyone who reads the article are going [...]
After about 4-5 hours last night, and early this morning, I finished creating a board book for my 15-month old daughter. Of course, what better topic to choose than that of operating systems? So, I settled with GNU/Linux, UNIX and other operating systems as the main categories for the book, and it turned out great! [...]
