linux

I had struggled with a very frustrating problem when printing to my USB HP Deskjet printer using Ubuntu. The printer would sometimes print an entire job then refuse to print any more after that. The documents would show in the queue but you could not cancel or release them. 
 
Another symptom of the problem would be tasks on the machine, owned by a user lp, that you could not kill. These were USB print jobs that also caused a high load average although the machine performance was not affected. These conditions would sometimes persist between reboots. 
 

I encountered this error today in our Postfix based mail archive server (mailarchiva). We use it to archive email from Google Apps and route our email through it.

We received complaints of people not being able to send attachments, getting an error message similar to:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

Technical details of permanent failure:

I am typing this from a text based browser on my son's laptop over my wireless which was configured using wpa_supplicant. I have to admit, it took quite a bit of work.

I know I can do most everything using the command line including:

*browsing the internet
*use gmail
*use a mail client
*edit documents
*ssh, telnet, etc
*chat using text based clients
*listen to music

Some tasks I cannot do:

*use a virtual machine
*remote desktop
*use flash
*use gnucash
*view movies
*view images (maybe)

Weta Digital, co-founded by Peter Jackson, is a digital visual effects company that worked on the flora and fauna of Pandora in the wildly popular movie Avatar.

Jordanopensource.org is reporting Ubuntu Linux is the core OS that runs on their massive 4,000 server, 40,000 CPU farm, one of the most powerful in the world. Imagine the cost savings on licensing alone.

While Novell supports Linux, it mostly supports SuSE, which uses rpm and not deb packages. But it's still fairly easy to install the Groupwise client on an Ubuntu based system.

First, you'll need some software to do this.

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-sun-java6-bin alien

Then download the client. After you download it, use alien to extract the contents

$ alien -t --veryverbose novell-groupwise-client-8.0.1-88138.i586.rpm

"Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"

Linux Magazine ran an article highlighting x2go, a free, open source terminal server project that includes clients that run on any Linux distribution, and Windows as well.

I just "found" kdirstat for KDE. It is a very nice program, that does have a Windows clone called WinDirStat. To install this program using Kubuntu, just use

$ sudo apt-get install kdirstat

and use the CLI to invoke it using kdirstat. There is no menu item..at least one didn't show up for me.

Working with grub used to be somewhat of a pain. The biggest complaint being that if you, say, disabled apic using the noapic boot option, and updated the kernel without updating the grub file, you could be stuck with a kernel panic. This was happening to me tonight when working with jeos and VirtualBox.

Automagic has made this a whole lot easier. There are automagic options in /boot/grub/menu.lst that are used when any kernel is installed into the system.

A very handy trick using the Bash shell in Linux involves the curly braces. The Bash manual at gnu.org defines brace expansion as "a mechanism by which arbitrary strings may be generated."

I use this mostly when working with files, especially making back ups of configuration files. For example, to copy /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup, you could do this:

$ cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

or you could use brace expansion