linux

One of the most powerful features of the bash shell is the command history . Using the up and down arrows, one can recall the commands typed previously into the shell, edit them, and execute them again, even after rebooting your computer or closing the shell window.

You can also dump the entire history file by typing in the command history. Much, much more can be done using the bash history. These functions can be explored by reading the manual page.

$ man history

Creating DVDs using mostly any playable file (.avi, .mpg, etc.) is very easy in Linux and, in my opinion, is easiest using the command line.

First, you'll need to install the tovid suite of tools. Tovid contains everything you need to convert a video to DVD format and to burn that video.

If you're interested in installing KDE4 on Kubuntu to try it out like their website suggests, don't. It sucks right now.

So when you remove the package they tell you to install, it doesn't remove all of the KDE4 packages. So you'll have two versions of konqueror along with other applications. Don't get me wrong, I love KDE and Linux, it just seems like KDE4 isn't mature enough yet.

BOINC is an open source program based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. BOINC is a software platform for Linux for volunteer computing and desktop Grid computing.

Using KDE, it is very easy to open and edit a remote file using pretty much any application (any application that uses KDE to open files that is). I use this method using Kate (a sophisticated text editing program), and Quanta .

To open a file using ftp, in the box in the middle at the top that shows the current path you are looking at, type:

ftp://user@site.com:port/

This tip was found at http://aymanh.com/tips-to-secure-linux-workstation.

An old school attack on Linux systems is called a fork bomb. There is demonstration code at the fore-mentioned website, but essentially, it is a command that will spawn an unending number of processes, eventually killing the system.

Managing users is easily done via the command line in Linux. For example, to get a list of users currently logged on, you can use the who or w command.

jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$ w
17:08:34 up 10 min, 1 user, load average: 0.44, 0.63, 0.46
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
jsteel :0 - 16:58 ?xdm? 60.26s 0.04s /bin/sh /usr/bi

jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$ who
jsteel :0 2008-02-24 16:58
jsteel@jsteel-desktop:~$

I had some problems with the "server not found" error and login doesn't exist error. I finally got this to work by using:

$ ncpmount -S SERVER -A server.fqdn.edu -U user.ou.ou.tree mnt/point

I had to use the -A option which had the fully qualified domain name of the server (an IP address might work) as well as my fully qualified username complete with ous and the tree.

Just a quick post. To get the number of files in a directory under linux, use the following command:

$ ls -l | wc -l

This will output the number of files in the present working directory which can be output by using the command 'pwd'.

Automatix is an automated installation program that offers many installations that are either unavailable in Ubuntu (for legal reasons or otherwise), or difficult. Automatix includes many installs such as Acrobat reader, Wine, Crossover, which allows the installation of Windows programs like Office and PhotoShop, pesky proprietary codecs, libcss2 for decrypting DVDs and much more. These are all installed using a GUI.