Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Linux

  • Improving KDE start time

    One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.

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  • The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 6

    OK – there may be those that read the last entry and had some obvious “oh, you ought to look in the ***** directory for menu information.” On the issue I ran into with missing menu items after the upgrade. (And even after moving my .kde folder to .kdeold and logging back in.) OK – it’s been a while since I’ve taken a long hard look at HOW menu’s are built in Mandrake (Mandriva)….

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  • Adding swap space to a running linux system

    There are acouple situations where my systems memory needs have exceeded the supply. The most likely cases are running virtual machines and building cd/dvd images. Those things realistically take LOT’s of memory. I have a swap partition – I don’t recall the size right off. I have about 512 MB on the desktop and probably for what I do could use to double that. Swap space, of course, is what the operating system uses when all the physical memory (RAM) is used.

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  • Sendmail mail queue backed up

    Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I had been hit originally by a spam onslaught which had flooded the server and it had been throttled (VPS) to prevent causing problems for the other users and things got backed up.

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  • Neat grep intro

    Linuxgangster.org (??) has a good article up on the powerful grep command. GREP is one of the most useful command line tools in linux (really, there are so many it’s hard to choose, but this is one I use more frequently than most others…) grep can stand on it’s own to look for a term in many files (for example)

    grep soughtafterterm *.txt

    it will display which line numbers and which files it appears in.

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  • More Command Line Interface Magic…. Aliases

    Enterprise Linux has a good article on some handy aliases under linux that can make CLI usage much more handy. The only warning I would have is to be careful that an alias you want to create doesn’t conflict with another useful program. (One of the comments noted that ld is the executable of the linker).

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  • Linux sysadmin toolbox..

    This article from enterprise.linux.com is the second on those essential linux command line utilities for system administrators. Covered this time around are netcat, tcpdump, ethereal, nmap, MultiTail, find Xargs, awk and sed, bash and cvs. I’ve never used MultiTail, but it sounds like it’s worth looking at. Nmap is virtually essential in network auditing. Sed is one of those utitilies that it seems you can do most anything with.

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  • MySQL setting up database replication

    Database replication is one of those useful things that can really make your life simpler. It’s not really a way of backing up the data in a MySQL database, because if you inadvertently issue a command to delete the entire database, it won’t save you from yourself…. it will faithfully replicate the change to the slave servers. However, in the event of hardware failure or other abrupt disruption of connectivity, the concept of replicating from a master to a slave server is ideal.

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