How-to forge has what they describe as a copy and paste how-to up on the Perfect setup for Mandriva 2006 to meet the needs of ISP’s and hosters. It’s copy-paste because they suggest copying the commands and pasting them into the putty/xterm/console window on the machine that you’re setting up. It’s welcome to see this kind of “handholding” so people can see that it really is quite straightforward to get up and running with a linux server.
Category: Linux
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Making backups simpler
Linux.com is running an article on easy automated backups with a new program called sbackup. Sbackup is a product of Google’s summer of code and is a GUI to pick and choose what to backup and when to routinely back it up. Apparently the project was also sponsored by Ubuntu. (I’d expect integration into their distro’s admin tools if not already then.)
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Disabling KDE 3.4.x sound notifications
Ok, one of the first things that I got annoyed with in the new Mandriva 2006 install on the laptop was the event triggered sounds. Popup notification window one sound, error message – glass breaking, etc. etc…. So, I started trying to remember where to cut all that stuff off. It took a bit of digging to find it, because it’s not in the KDE control panel under “sound” where it might be found in a Windows setup…
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Make panoramic pictures with a digital camera (or any other)
There’s another great article at newsforge this evening. I remember seeing some time back a camera which took panoramic pictures. The photographer would hold it steady over his head and the camera would slowly circle around to get a 360 degree photo. In fact I think I remember seeing a large group picture where someone played with the idea and ran around to be in the picture twice.
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Running Windows applications under Linux
There are a number of Windows applications that may not have suitable replacements under linux. I know a lot of people that have considered switching, but there was “one program holding them back.” Fortunately there are several options on how to keep that one application from holding you back.
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Wine help
No, not red or white. I’m talking Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) , which allows windows applications to run under linux. One of the sites that I’ve found that has some great tips regarding Wine is Franks Corner. For several years this site has been a good resource of “how to” get things to work whether it’s games, office applications or other software.
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Administrative access on linux systems
Tux magazine has a comparison of su and sudo as ways to administer a linux system. Many people are under the mistaken impression that you just login as root (gui or otherwise) and that’s the only way to do it. In fact, I’ve used su primarily. Although in some circumstance sudo has it’s benefits.
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A tun of trouble….
Sorry, VERY bad pun but I couldn’t resist. I mentioned that I was having tun difficulties that kept me from playing around with anything fancy networking-wise with qemu. For starters let me see if I can explain what tun is. Tun is a method of creating a point-to-point “imaginary” network connection between a program and an operating system. For instance, Qemu sets up a device called /dev/tun0 in the host operating system. This /dev/tun0 can communicate with the kernel and then the outside world. /dev/tun0 behaves just like any other network interface to the viewers on the outside (even getting it’s own ip address that is network reachable.)
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Linux: Using Mandrake (Mandriva’s) URPMI tool
As background for this, I’ve used Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) for my main desktop since around 8.2 I can’t remember quite how long ago that’s been, but around 3 to 4 years I think. The why is something best saved for another writeup. Early on I was frustrated by installing software. I read everyone give instructions on installing from source. That went along the following lines….
from a command prompt type the following….
tar -xzvf yournewsoftware.gz
cd yournewsoftware
./configure
make
su
enteryourrootpassword
make install
and your done!Well…. no it isn’t always that simple
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