Unix Toolbox is not for newbies. It’s the real stuff: command line commands that you need if you’re doing real work with real systems. Want to set disk quotas? Change MySQL logins? Set file permission? Encrypt partitions? All those questions, and more, are answered here.
Warning: if you don’t know what those things are (or even if you’re not sure), Unix Toolbox probably isn’t for you. If you want to know what those things are, check it out when you’re ready to experiment.
Ever wanted a very serious server for cheap? Here’s one way: Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900. It runs Linux. You’d have to a few hundred bucks (at least) if you wanted it to run Windows, though.
Remember the 1980s? When everyone was investing big bucks in their own PBX systems? Well, guess what. One open source project, Asterisk, is changing that entire (big) business. Here’s Forbes’ take on the new world of open source PBX, Dial D for Disruption.
We’ve had these incredibly great, vastly powerful, little PCs sitting on our desks for the past quarter century, and most of the cycles have been going to running solitaire or screen savers. The great thing about open source is that it gives smart people ways to figure out how to make all these great computers actually DO things of value, especially things that previously would have required expenditures of hundreds of thousands of dollars for specialized (that is, proprietary) hardware and software.
At the very least, I hope developments like these will spur the big, established firms into action in the R&D front. Because too many have gotten used to slapping their software into COTS components, slapping their logos on the boxes, and shipping them out to big, deep-pocketed companies. If you can build your own, adequate, PBX for $100, then commercial PBX vendors need to start building better–much better–PBXs.
This, Making Animated GIFs With Free Software in Four Steps, is just the kind of "howto" article that I like best: it explains what you’re trying to do, tells you just enough to do it, and gives a couple of examples. Nice!
Got an old laptop? I do: it’s about ten years old and almost ludicrously out of date. A Sony Vaio with 192Mb of RAM and a 5Gb hard drive.
I’ve also got a brand new laptop, the Asus Eee PC. But don’t bother too much with the "official" site, there are better places to get more info on the Eee, starting with Amazon.com. You can learn a lot from the customer reviews. But here’s the best resource I’ve found so far: Eee User is the "Unofficial Asus Eee PC" blog/forum/wiki/community, and they’ve got articles and links to resources for turbocharging this little laptop.
If you’re thinking about buying an Eee, here’s fair warning: the default user interface is kind of dreadful. It reminds me of those little PDAs that were all the rage 5-10 years ago, that had teensy-tiny QWERTY keyboards and fit in a (big) pocket. But the Eee is big enough to run an actual desktop environment, even if the screen is a bit pinched, so why not?
Anyway, this post is going to be a catchall, covering not just ways to fiddle around (and potentially brick) your Eee, but also going into some of the options available for running Linux on laptops (old and new) as well as turning a USB drive into a portable workstation. Now, that idea is hardly news (I wrote about my experiment with a LiveCD and a USB drive back in the March 2005 Computer Power User Magazine, "My Knoppix Adventure"), but what is news is that people are actually starting to do it.
For example, here’s a nice writeup: Travel Without the Laptop, Carry Your Computer on a USB Drive that’s not even about Linux, but there’s a very good warning in the comments about keyloggers, which can be either hardware or software that records all the keystrokes you enter on a computer. Google them up yourself, and you’ll find that they can be integrated into the actual keyboards of public computers, so you might want to be wary of using any PC that you don’t own–meaning that the Eee is an even better option than you might think. I’d rather drag a 2-pound Eee PC around and be safer than jettison my own hardware entirely.
Anyway, without any more ado, here’s some links about fiddling around with the Eee:
But meanwhile, what about booting from a USB stick? I had to do that when I charged ahead and "edited" a configuration file that caused my Eee to fail to boot. Once I booted Linux from USB, I could "correct" that edit and recover my system. Long story short, the answer for me was Damn Small Linux because the only USB drive I had handy was just 256Mb, and all the other how-to’s I found listed required ingredients that began with "IGb or greater USB drive". DSL is just awesome, and it works so well. All I had to do was burn the distro to CD, boot it on any old system with the USB stick plugged in, and run a quick little app from the DSL Apps/Tools menu to transfer the OS to the USB stick.
OK, so what about all those other cool options for running Linux in super-portability mode? Here are some links, with my comments:
Finally, if you’ve got an old laptop, you might like to read Give an Old Laptop New Life with Cheap (or Free) Projects from Lifehacker, with some pointers to distros already cited above as well as hints about deploying laptops for various uses (I’m thinking my old Vaio, with a wireless LAN card, could work a treat in the kitchen).
One key–but unstated–objective of commercial operating systems (that is, Windows and Mac) is to make using a computer like using a car. The idea is to hide all the messy technology bits.
The problem with that approach is that the OS designers assume they know exactly what all users want to do. So, you get the traditional three-panel graphical file browser model, for example. But if you want some feature or function that the OS designers didn’t foresee you would want, you’re often out of luck with Windows/Mac OS.
Not the case with Linux. Check out Display Structure of Directory Hierarchy for a one-line Linux command that will display your system’s directory hierarchy. Sure, it’s a complicated little command:
ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e ‘s/:$//’ -e ‘s/[^-][^\/]*\//–/g’ -e ‘s/^/ /’ -e ‘s/-/|/’
but with Linux, that can be turned into a shell script, which acts like any other command line command.
Why throw away your old obsolete PCs when you can re-purpose them as a file/print server, firewall or some other single-purpose appliance? People have been doing this forever–at least since about 1988, when those old dual-floppy IBM 5150 PCs started getting obsoleted by PCs powered by Intel’s 386-based processors, and businesses were installing Ethernet-driven, Novell-powered LANs.
What could be more sensible than to re-use older PCs that aren’t fast enough to use for desktop computing anymore? It’s far better than simply throwing out the old machinery, which is full of toxic waste. I’m as guilty as anyone of promoting the idea of re-using old PCs for this kind of thing, but I wonder why people are still promoting it, as in this article, "Simple Home File Server (Based On Ubuntu)". I love HowtoForge, but this is kind of silly for home/family users, and here’s why:
The thing is, we’re at the point where most of the functions you can use an old PC for can more economically be incorporated into single-purpose appliances (like the iPod, for example). Why run a full-blown PC as a printer server when you can buy a printer with the required functionality built-in? Why run a full-blown PC as a file server when you can buy a solid state USB file server?
So, what should you do with an old PC? I don’t know what the answer is these days. In general, schools and charities aren’t any more interested in using ancient computers than you or I; so you might not be able to find anyone interested in accepting them as donations.
What do you do with your old PCs?
There are tons of reasons to use encryption on your computers, especially if you store sensitive information on them. But I won’t go into that stuff right now. I will point you to a couple of how-to pages that explain how to install and use encryption software on Ubuntu Linux systems:
Want to know more about the directory structure that Linux uses? Like, why it’s that way, and how it works? Here’s an article that might be worth starting with: Linux Directory Structure.
But definitely consider that a start, because the Linux directory structure can vary slightly (or more) from distribution to distribution. So read the article–and read the comments! Especially the suggestion to Google "Linux File Hierarchy Binh Nguyen", for more comprehensive documentation of the directory structure.
And you can check out my previous post, Ever Wondered about the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy? on the same topic, more or less.
One of the many puzzling things about Linux, at least if you’re a typical end-user (like me), is figuring out what the difference is between a desktop environment and a window manager.
But puzzle no longer after you read this: Flipping the Linux switch: Desktop environments vs. window managers. Kristin Shoemaker wrote this succinct essay for Download Squad. Now I know that a desktop environment is kind of like Windows: it’s not just handling the windows and applications running therein, but a desktop environment includes all the fancy little utilities and applets as well as providing lots of user-friendly knobs and switches for configuring everything. Window managers just manage windows.
Why would you want a window manager? With fewer features and less eye-candy, they run faster and leaner, and work better on stripped down or older hardware, especially hardware being used for a single purpose application (e.g., firewall, video appliance, etc).
Why would you want a desktop environment? If you’ve got enough RAM and CPU power, and if you need a user-friendly GUI that will be useful for doing all kinds of computation.
The biggest little notebook of this past season is the Asus Eee, which is sort of like the OLPC XO, except it’s a commercial product that you can actually buy in the store (if you can find one). These things have minimal RAM and disk space, so you can forget about getting the full Vista experience even if you could install the latest Windows on them.
If you want a "modern" GUI OS with Linux, you’d opt for something like the GNOME or KDE desktop environments: they both offer many of the same kind of eye-candy features that Vista promises, but you won’t have to upgrade your computer to get them.
No one who’s been paying attention will be surprised that Linux can run on a system that’s light on resources. But what you may be surprised at is that new versions of Linux and associated desktop environment software will run great on these bantam weight systems. Consider this story, KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel! about running KDE 4 on an old Thinkpad X60.
That story inspired this story, The little computer that could …, about getting KDE4 to run on the Asus Eee PC.
And as if that’s not enough, eeeXubuntu, which is "a custom version of the Xubuntu 7.10 Live CD with
fully-integrated hardware support, including native wireless drivers,
functioning Ethernet support, tweaks for low-resolution desktop
environments, and other miscellaneous fixes." For the Eee PC.
If my fingers weren’t getting bigger, stubbier and more clumsy every year, I’d have a heck of a time deciding between the Eee and the OLPC XO, I can tell you that much. Times for portable computing are getting a lot more interesting.
