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Complete Kickstart: How to Save Time Installing Linux

December 14th, 2008 by sikor

via linux-mag.com

If you have to perform a lot of Linux installs, there’s a fast and easy way to do so quickly and efficiently without having to babysit the installation process each time. By making use of Kickstart, you can save time and effort by setting up a Kickstart server and spend your time getting more useful work done.

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Lazy Linux: 11 secrets for lazy cluster admins

December 7th, 2008 by sikor

via ibm.com

Cluster means different things to different people. In the context of this article, cluster is best defined as scale-out — scale-out clusters generally have a lot of the same type of components like Web farms, render farms, and high performance computing (HPC) systems. Administrators will tell you that with scale-out clusters any change, no matter how small, must be repeated up to hundreds of thousands of times; the laziest of admins have mastered techniques of scale-out management so that regardless of the number of nodes, the effort is the same. In this article, the authors peer into the minds of the laziest Linux® admins on Earth and divulge their secrets.

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Getting a grip on Python: six ways to learn online

December 3rd, 2008 by sikor

via arstechnica.com

Programming language tutorials either appeal or do not appeal based on any number of personal factors. Some developers prefer simple lessons that move learning forward in stages. Others like the facts to be laid out in familiar terms with a minimum of hand-holding. Each of the following sites presents its own approach to mastering Python, which you may or may not find useful for your learning path. These represent just a fraction of the available online Python tutorial resources.

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The 7 Deadly Linux Commands

November 21st, 2008 by sikor

via junauza.com

If you are new to Linux, chances are you will meet a stupid person perhaps in a forum or chat room that can trick you into using commands that will harm your files or even your entire operating system. To avoid this dangerous scenario from happening, I have here a list of deadly Linux commands that you should avoid.

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The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO

November 9th, 2008 by sikor

via tldp.org

This document is intended to help Linux and Internet users who are learning by doing. While this is a great way to acquire specific skills, sometimes it leaves peculiar gaps in one’s knowledge of the basics — gaps which can make it hard to think creatively or troubleshoot effectively, from lack of a good mental model of what is really going on.

I’ll try to describe in clear, simple language how it all works. The presentation will be tuned for people using Unix or Linux on PC-class machines. Nevertheless, I’ll usually refer simply to ‘Unix’ here, as most of what I will describe is constant across different machines and across Unix variants.

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MySQL databases backup using mysqldump

November 8th, 2008 by sikor

A script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. Features - Backup mutiple databases - Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB - Compress backup files - Backup remote servers - E-mail logs.

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smartmontools: control the health of your hard disk

November 8th, 2008 by sikor

via debian.net

Particularly for hard disks, the tool in charge is smartctl from the package smartmontools. IDE disks (if they’re not of the age of dinosaurs) have an integrated self-testing tool called SMART which means “Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology”. Modern SCSI disks have it too if they’re SCSI 3 or newer. It happens that inside the disk chipset there are routines to check parameters of disk health: spin-up time, number of read failures, temperature, life elapsed… And all of those parameters are not only registered by the disk chipset, but they have designated security limits and both parameters and limits can be checked by software who access the disk using the appropriate I/O instructions.

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The ultimate guide to graphics card

October 1st, 2008 by sikor

via techradar.com

There’s a good chance the most powerful chip inside your PC, in raw computational terms, is on your graphics card. So, how did graphics get so powerful, what are graphics cards good for right now and how on earth do you choose from the baffling array of 3D chipsets on offer?

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5 Cool Apps to Make the Linux Terminal More Productive

September 18th, 2008 by sikor

via makeuseof.com

If you work on Linux you’ll know that the command line is the way to go (in some cases at least). If you are in GUI mode than you can access the command line via the Terminal. Here are some applications/utilities that will transform your command line experience.

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The ultimate guide to motherboards

September 15th, 2008 by sikor

via techradar.com

As with every other component, motherboards have come a long way from the original IBM PC of 1981. If you’re old enough to remember the first De Lorean DMC-12, perhaps the original PC XT mobo still casts some dark shadow over your memory? At the time there were certainly wonders to behold; these days, they simply look a mess with integration the last thing on the designers mind and all the IO having to be decidedly off-board.

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10 quick tips to make Linux networking easier

August 16th, 2008 by sikor

via techrepublic.com

Networking is a must-have on all levels of computing. Be it home or corporate, networking is the one aspect of computing that is, without a shadow of a doubt, a deal breaker. And with some help, the Linux operating system can be the king of networking, in both ease of use and security. But that doesn’t mean the average (and sometimes even the above-average) user can’t use some help. These tips should help make Linux networking go a little more smoothly.

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19 Most Essential Open Source Applications That You Probably Want To Know

August 13th, 2008 by sikor

via smashingapps.com

Today, we are listing here 19 Most Essential and useful open source applications that you probably want to know to use in your daily life. Most of them are top of the list projects that have an open source industry leading popularity and many of them are not listed here but over all the list has variety of projects for every one of you. Just take a look at them and share your thoughts here.

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Using free software for HTTP load testing

August 13th, 2008 by sikor

via linux.com

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites. If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer maintained, non-free, or fail the installation process in some obscure way, you are left with five candidates: curl-loader, httperf, Siege, Tsung, and Apache JMeter.

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Ubuntu and Your iPod

August 9th, 2008 by sikor

via linuxjournal.com

This article is from a new book published by No Starch Press: Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook by Rickford Grant. This excerpt covers using your iPod with Ubuntu and it is full of tips, tricks, and helpful pointers. Reprinted with permission from No Starch Press, all rights reserved. More information about the book and its autho

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Anatomy of the Linux file system

July 28th, 2008 by sikor

via ibm.com

When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS)—sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch—in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.

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OpenBIOS

July 28th, 2008 by sikor

The OpenBIOS project provides you with most free and open source Open Firmware implementations available. Here you find several implementations of IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among its features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without native initialization code. It is Open Firmware’s goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM and Mips. With its flexible and modular design, Open Firmware targets servers, workstations and embedded systems, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal and reduces porting efforts noticably.

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Downloading Torrent from the Terminal

July 28th, 2008 by sikor

via linuxhaxor.net

There are quite a few applications in linux that has the ability to download torrent from the terminal. rtorrent is perhaps the easiest to use and widely configurable out of all of them. To kick off with downloading any torrent file, you simply have to provide the link location of the torrent file,

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Convert Filenames to Lowercase

July 28th, 2008 by sikor

via linuxjournal.com

Back in the good old days, there was an operating system that didn’t seem to think NAME and name were different. The result was that sometimes when you transfered files from a floppy disk (remember them?) created on that Dumb Old System, you would clutter your directory with uppercase filenames. As us UNIX old-timers learned a nifty trick to get directory names to sort before filenames in the output of the ls command (namely, start directory names with an uppercase letter), having filenames with uppercase letters was irritating.

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Setting up a Local Area Network

July 23rd, 2008 by sikor

via ibm.com

This article describes how to build a Local Area Network (LAN) consisting of two or more computers running the Red Hat Linux operating system. The article begins with the basics: an overview of the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol) suite, and an explanation of assigning IP addresses in a LAN. Then the article covers the LAN hardware and configuration using a tool called LinuxConf in the Red Hat Linux operating system environment. Lastly, the article walks you through the critical steps of testing and troubleshooting your LAN.

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Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins

July 23rd, 2008 by sikor

via ibm.com
Learn these 10 tricks and you’ll be the most powerful Linux® systems administrator in the universe…well, maybe not the universe, but you will need these tips to play in the big leagues. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

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