Linux Zone

You have a linux box? Then you probably know how to spend time when you have nothing to do. I know that most linux users when they have nothing to do, spend time reading mans or looking in the "bin" folders such as /usr/bin or /bin for a new discovery. The "bin" folders are gold mines for those who want to know more or to find new commands. Since I was at the university, my way is very simple: I open a terminal, I write a random letter and I push the "TAB" key twice and a list of all commands which start with that letter is displayed.

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Installing linux never has been so easy. HP developed LinuxCOE, where a user could choose some basic options through a web interface, and a small (30MB or less) ISO image is created that can be used for a "hands-free" installation using either Kickstart, AutoYAST, or the Debian Preseed autoinstallers. It is useful when installing in a network environment.

Here is a step by step guide to generate your ISO installer from the web interface:

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I asked Will linux kernel move to GPL 3? after the start of discussion in the Linux kernel mailing list about adopting the GPL3. And as I said in a previous article developers were divided about the subject.

The final answer to the previous question came in the same mailing list from Linus Torvalds, the creator and the maintainer of Linux kernel. Here is what he says:

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Never tried Linux before and want to see what it looks like before you jump? LinClips offers screencasting for 15 Linux distributions: Fedora5, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Mandriva, SUSE, CentOS, Kubuntu, KANOTIX, KNOPPIX, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS, SLAX, VectorLinux and Xandros.

You need a flash player to see the screencasting.

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The Linux kernel mailing list started discussing about adopting the GPL3. Leading Linux developers are divided on whether Linux kernel should use the GNU General Public License version 3 or not. The discussion is started although the GPL3 is only a draft. The final version should be released in 2007.

Here are the main thoughts from some developers:

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I have never used KDE. May be because I have never had a problem with my Gnome desktop. I'm not saying that Gnome is more secure than KDE and wasn't happy when the French Security Incident Response Team (FRSIRT) published details about a critical vulnerability in KDE reported by Maksim Orlovich. It's about an incorrect bounds check in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences.

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If you are a linux programmer, this is for you. Yes, an another good article from IBM entitled "Boost socket performance on Linux" published 3 days ago and updated today(to correct an error in the calculation for Bandwidth Delay Product). The article gives 4 tips to boost the performance of sockets. For each tip there is a description of the problem and then a solution. Here are the 4 tips discussed by the author:

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BetaNews reported today that Hewlett-Packard plans to sell PCs running Linux across 37 countries in Latin America, and has selected Mandriva to provide the open source operating system. Mandriva says it will work with HP on sales, support and marketing in all Latin American territories, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. HP will provide technical support in both Spanish and Portuguese.

This is a great news! For the first time a big company will sell PCs to the public with Linux installed. THIS IS A GOOD NEWS!

Linux kernel version 2.6.15.1 is released 2 days ago after the identification of multiple vulnerabilities in the version 2.6.15 and prior which could be exploited by remote or local attackers to cause a denial of service.

[root@mylinux ~]# uname -a
Linux mylinux.home 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 #1 ... GNU/Linux

Oooops! >:)

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A good article by Tom Lynema about building a home media center using linux. In this article Tom describes how he managed to setup a wireless home media center based on Linux without changing his home configuration. He used Linux Ubuntu distribution for that.

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The Bellevue Linux Users Group has published an article entitled "25 Reasons to Convert to Linux". This is not the first Linux vs. Windows text I saw. There are many threads on the newsnet about the subject, but this is one of the concisely written articles.

If I have to give one reason to use Linux vs. Windows, I'll say: IT'S FREE. You keep your money and you get a better OS, but I think the problem is not there. The real problem is most of the people who use Windows don't even realize there are other operating systems out there.

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You know probably the good quality of IBM's articles. 2 days ago, IBM has published a new article in the "developerWorks" corner written by Vladimir Silva. In this article, "Secure Java apps on Linux using MD5 crypt", he described the GNU extensions to the crypt() system call and provided an implementation of MD5 crypt for use with Java applications.

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Although Linux systems are among the most resistant to virus attacks, Grisoft has introduced yesterday a new free ( for home use ) version of its software AVG Anti-Virus specifically for the Linux desktop.

Peter Lipa, President of Grisoft said:

With its growing popularity, it is only a matter of time before the Linux operating system becomes more widely targeted by virus and malware writers

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Chris Blizzard, manager of Red Hat's desktop group, announced on his blog, ReadHat will include Mono in FC5. Mono is an open source project that implements the Microsoft's .Net and sponsored by Novell.

Mono includes software called the Common Language Runtime to execute programs written in the C# programming language. With Mono, developers can write C# applications for Linux.

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I read an entry today at the Debian review / information site that tells that Debian Etch, the next major version of the Linux distribution will have number of supported platforms reduced to eight, down from twelve in the current version.

The dropped platforms are those based on the ARM, Motorola 68k, IBM S/390 and Sun SPARC architectures.

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The thread “Linux is obsolete” was started Jan 29 1992, 2:23 pm between Andy Tanenbaum the father of MINIX and Linus Torvalds the creator of linux to become the famous historical debate.

I was googling to search for a way to prevent Google from archiving my posts in a Google news group and I came across this post in the comp.os.minix group.

The debate was started by Andy on Jan 29 1992, 2:23 pm and closed by Bill Mitchell on Feb 10 1992, 4:31 pm. There are 73 posts in this thread and many people have participated to the debate about Minix and Linux.

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Linux Distribution Chooser is an online wizard that helps beginners to choose the appropriate Linux distribution for their need. The wizard asks some questions and then displays a list of distributions that fets the criteria.

Try it! Here is the url: http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

Jeff park, a database administrator for PeopleSoft and Oracle shop, tells his experiment with Linux in an article entitled "My desktop OS: Xandros" and published at http://www.newsforge.com yesterday. I found it a good article.

It is not always easy to move from one OS to another, but when that happens, it means that one has a good reason.

I decided to try Linux because I had become frustrated with Windows not being able to things like multiple desktops, forwarding the display of a remote server onto your box to run apps remotely, and connecting with SSH.

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The Linux kernel 2.6.15 is released yesterday.
In this version of the kernel there are 889 files added (472073 lines of code), 512 deleted (325233 lines of code) and 6327 changed.

Note: In the 2.6 kernel it is generally preferred to build the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS so that it produces readable dumps that can be used as-is (this also produces better output than ksymoops).

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From Soup To Nuts - Linux Tips
Need to Delete a File for Good -- no one can recover.

You have a file "secret". The following makes it so no one can read it. If the file was 12 bytes, it's now 4096 after it has been over written 100 times. There's no way to recover this:

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