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issue 4 http://console-newsletter.hypermart.net
__ __ _ _ __ __ )) __ console: tips,tricks & news about linux
((_ ((_)((\( _))((_)(( (('_ _______________________________________
[12/99] "a good read.."
+ headlines
UK Government Chooses Linux
"Microsoft cannot realistically pursue the line that Linux is not
enterprise ready when it is the choice under test, by the official
government agency, for the largest user of computers in the UK -
the Government." http://www.it-director.com/99-10-20-1.html
--
+ hmm..
"Microsoft's long-standing plan to switch over to an annual rental
model for software sales could roll early next year, with Windows
2000 as the engine that drives it. As internal documentation that
has made it's way into the public domain thanks to the trial has
shown, the company has been trying to make the move for years,
but from what Steve Ballmer was saying yesterday, this time it
could really happen."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991014-000022.html
MS (and others) have had a provision authorizing this inserted
into UCITA (a revision to the Uniform Commercial Code that serves
as a standard for state commerce laws).
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?/features/990531ucita3.htm
Compliance is compulsory, hmm..
--
+ humorix
Want Fries With That?
OAK BROOK, IL -- Not to be outdone by the multitudes of vendors
creating their own release of the popular Linux operating
system, McDonald's President and Chief Executive Officer, Jack
M. Greenberg, monday announced the release of McDonalds McLinux
1.0 (Happy Meal Release).
"McDonalds recognizes the importance of having as many varieties
of Linux on the market as humanly possible, and we're just
happy to be a part of it" Mr. Greenberg said. Currently there
are roughly 750,000 different Linux distributions on the market.
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/mar99.shtml#McLinux
--
+ distro watch
Green Frog Linux - small compact Linux Distribution
http://members.linuxstart.com/~austin/index.html
Dialup router MINI - diald, IP-Masquerade, caching name server
http://mpsdr.unx.nu/MINI/
--
+ new apps
Speak Freely 7.1 - 100% free Internet telephone for Windows
and UNIX
http://www.speakfreely.org/
Mutt 1.1.1 - small but very powerful text-based MIME mail client
http://www.mutt.org/
icewm 0.9.50 - window manager able to emulate the look of Motif,
OS/2, Windows
http://www.kiss.uni-lj.si/~k4fr0235/icewm/
--
+ interview
Tom Oehser creator of Tom's Root Boot Disk (tomsrtbt)
http://www.toms.net/rb
To relate a funny(?) story earlier in the year I'd been talking to
a friend about the virtues of Linux & casually mentioned that if
he ever wanted to borrow my Slackware cd that he was most welcome
to do just that. A few weeks later he took me up on the offer,
I lent him my cd and install disks and sent him on his way saying:
"no rush, take your time."
Meanwhile I'd begun reordering the partitions on my hardrive
things were looking good, time to boot into Linux check my
mail, etc..
Oops- after messing around with the partition scheme,lilo refuses
to boot. "no sweat" I think I'll just rummage around in the
desk drawer & find my boot disk, then terror strikes.
I've loaned out my install disks & Linux cdrom. ARGHH!
Ok, back to windows > hop the net > search for a boot disk.
Honestly,I found several (even the disk images made for slackware)
but one catches my eye.I download tomsrtbt & reinstate lilo and
all is well.
>From the tomsrtbt website: http://www.toms.net/rb/tomsrtbt.FAQ
"tomsrtbt is, The most Linux on one floppy disk for: rescue
recovery panic & emergencies tools to keep in your shirt pocket
whenever you can't use a hard drive."
console: Glad you could spare a few moments to visit with us,
Tom their are alot of preexisting boot/root disks for Linux
already, your creation however is by far the most useful. What
brought about tomsrtbt?
Tom: Well, I wanted a rock-solid comfort when I started to
break^H^H^H^H^H fix my computer. What there was at the time
in Sunsite's system/recovery was yard, hal91, sash, and DLX.
I wasn't really happy with any of them, and I had frustrations
with minimal-versions tools like KISS, so I just started on
customizing my own. I didn't want two diskettes. And I didn't
want to have to figure out someone else's thinking. And I didn't
want space on the floppy taken up with giant stuff.
They all basically said "of course you can't make a
one-size-fits-all rescue disk since everyone's hardware differs,
so here is..." either scripts for building rescue disks, or
an image you are expected to customize. One thing that made
tomsrtbt unique in the first place was that I did try to make
the best one-size-fits-all compromise.
console: Notable is the fact that all the tools included are
built under
tomsrtbt itself this makes for a homogeneous product, what was
the motivating factor for this?
Tom: Well, I should clarify- by "builds under itself", I mean,
I can unpack, do customizations, and reform the floppy, all
booted from itself. It doesn't mean I do the compilations and
such there.
The motivation was that I want to be able to pull it out of my
shirt pocket, improve it, and then when I get home I don't have
to integrate. Essentially, it is it's own master, the tree I
build it from here is the same 1/ and 2/ that it unpacks into.
What I didn't want was something I could only work on with
tools that were not included on it. It led to some interesting
compromises.
console: I personally like the ability to customize tomsrtbt
via the included scripts, why go to this extra effort when most
similar products don't?
Tom: Well, here is the time to clarify, "tomsrtbt" just means
"Toms's (floppy) (that is both a) root(able filesystem and also)
boot(able). I basically built it for myself, usefulness to others
was way secondary. Note that it had token ring support up until
the day my work computer went Ethernet, and that it has the dmsdos
(Stacker and DoubleSpace) support. The customization scripts are
how they are to meet 2 of the primary goals- the above mentioned
"builds under itself" (meaning that I don't need _anything_
external to do work on it, therefore the scripts _must_ be on it)
and "as much as possible on 1 floppy", which forced me to make
them very lean. Mostly it was just, again, so that I could pull
it out of my pocket and work on it.
console: You make use of an alternate floppy size (1.7M) was
this a hard decision to make?
Tom: It was hard to learn what all the choices were, and hard
to decide not to go for the 1840M or 19xxM formats, but I had
known about the higher-formats since DOS or forever, as soon as
I knew Linux supported them and figured out they were bootable,
especially once I realized that the 1722 really is not harder
or less compatible on 99.99% of hardware, it was easy. I only
have 1 outstanding good reason to do a 1.44M version: tomsrtbt
cannot be created on an NT machine, but a 1.44M format can.
MUCH harder was the endless tweaking of the bzip2 cpio format,
the 3-area format where there is the boot area with kernel,
the root area with a bare minimum, and the bzip2 cpio archive.
Also hard is stripping executables and choosing small compile
options, and finding smaller versions of stuff. It is really
hard to make everything small *but* keep it mostly standard.
console: Perhaps one of the nicer things about your boot/rescue
disk is the choice of a native Linux installer and a dos/windows
installer, this is a great idea that effectively puts an end to
the problem of not being able to make a Linux disk on another
platform without additional tools, do you plan on continuing in
this manner?
Tom: It is easy to support now. There is also now a bootable CD
ElTorito release in the add-ons. The history of how it got this
way is complex, at first I used FDFORM18 to format 1.722 under
DOS, and a RAWR1722 to write the tomsrtbt.raw image under DOS.
It was never stable. Eventually it occurred to me that a
loadlin-initrd linux boot could do the whole installation.
The DOS distribution basically just loads linux with ramdisk and
floppy support and NOTHING else, then uses the linux utilities
to copy the same image that the Linux installer uses.
One thing you didn't mention is the man pages, I think that is
one of the really unique things. I just can't see not having
the man pages if I'm already in the midst of a system recovery.
The _LAST_ thing I need is to know that debugfs might help me,
or that I need an option to mount, and then not be able to figure
it out!
--
+ quote of the month
Prosperity tries the fortunate, adversity the great.
- Pliny The Elder
--
+ grok
Remote system logging is a beautiful thing if you have more
than one box that you want to keep eyes on. For the host,
the one that will be receiving the syslogs of other computers,
syslogd needs to be started with the -r option to allow remote
logging. On the hosts that will be sending their syslogs, put
an entry such as *.* @bighost to log everything to bighost in
your /etc/syslog.conf file and restart syslogd. Note that the
syslog.conf file only likes tabs, not spaces.
To disable all user logins (except for root) without taking down
the system into maintenance mode create a file /etc/nologin.
The content of this file will be displayed when a user tries to
log in.
Useful when doing service on the system which might affect users.
To set the CMOS clock from the system time,
clock -w
To set the system time from the CMOS clock,
clock -s
--
+ jargon
:C|N>K: n. [Usenet] Coffee through Nose to Keyboard; that is, "I
laughed so hard I {snarf}ed my coffee onto my keyboard." Common on
alt.fan.pratchett and {scary devil monastery}; recognized
elsewhere.
The Acronymphomania FAQ
(http://www.lspace.org/faqs/acronym-faq.g.html)
on alt.fan.pratchett recognizes variants such as:
T|N>K = `Tea through Nose to Keyboard' and,
C|N>S = `Coffee through Nose to Screen'.
--
+ hobbes' internet timeline
1961
Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: "Information Flow in Large Communication
Nets"
First paper on packet-switching (PS) theory
1964
Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks"
Packet-switching networks; no single outage point
--
+ article
Navigating directories within the shell -
Ahmet Ertem <ahmet@ertem.de>
0. Motivation.
Guided by the motto of the console newsletter this article briefly
introduces some capabilities of the Bourne Again Shell (bash)
which I hope you will find useful while finding your way there.
If you are like me then you probably groan when typing lengthy
names or commands or doing that same old typo again. But, there
is relief.
Read on, and in a couple of minutes you'll be able to move faster
up and down the directory structure and put together names almost
without typing errors.
1. Why bother about the shell ?
It is an indispensable and highly effective tool in Linux and
all other Unix-like operating systems. In fact, it is the tool
of choice for automating tasks and getting things done quickly
and efficiently.
You wouldn't have come to read this if you weren't curious. So,
I'll stop praising the shell's capabilities and just jump right
into the topic.
2. Getting home, getting back.
This is probably one of the first things you have learned. No
matter where you are
cd ~ or even shorter
cd
without any arguments will take you right back home. Need to go to
foo's home and pick up that file you were allowed to access ?
cd ~foo
and then proceed with what you were going to do or even nicer
cp ~foo/file ~
copies that file to your home directory. This technique is known
as the tilde (~) expansion of the shell. No need to know how the
system administrator chose to organize his users. Just know the
name of a user and you're all set.
Want to go back to the directory you just left and continue
working there ?
cd -
takes you one step back. Or do you wish to access a file in that
same directory you just left without having to go back ?
vi $OLDPWD/file
or use whatever utility is appropriate. The variable OLDPWD
always contains the full path of the directory you were last in.
3. Stack up everything you need.
Suppose you are going to work in a number of directories and
need to quickly move back and forth between them. Rather than
typing all the paths over and over again you could just stack
them like boxes and move them around.
As an example suppose you are at home and you want to go to
the Linux source directory tree where you know you'll be back
again. Here is what you would do: push its name onto a stack
rather than simply cd'ing to it.
pushd /usr/src/linux
This will do a couple of things: change your working directory
to the one specified and put this directory on the top of a
stack. It will also remember the directory you were just in by
storing it on the second position counted from the top. Finally
it will show you how the stack is currently populated:
/usr/src/linux ~
The top is always at the leftmost position and stack positions
are numbered starting from 0 and continue as +1, +2 and so on. The
plus sign is significant here. Let's put in some more directories:
pushd /usr/local/src
pushd /etc
The stack now holds:
/etc /usr/local/src /usr/src/linux ~
You can check the stack contents at any time by giving
dirs
Let's use the stack we have built up and go to /usr/src/linux:
pushd +2
and you're there. You virtually push the directory on that
position to the top of the stack and are automagically transferred
there. You also could have said
pushd -1
because as an alternative you may count the stack position from
the bottom up beginning with -0, -1, -2 and so on. You get it.
As one side effect the stack has been rearranged such that
/usr/src/linux and the remainder of the stack have been moved
to the top while the former top positions up to /usr/src/linux
have been appended to the end of the stack. But we don't care
as long as they are still there for use:
/usr/src/linux ~ /etc /usr/local/src
is the current stack content and order.
Going back to position +1 is a matter of swapping the two top slots
in the stack by a
pushd
without arguments. In many cases this would be equivalent to a
"cd -" as mentioned earlier.
Using "cd" to move to another directory does not disturb the stack
except for the top position which always reflects your current
work directory no matter how you get there. Therefore you may
wish to "pushd" to a directory that you actually don't need on the
stack in case you need to save your current one within the stack.
And once you'd like to get rid of a stack entry just use
"popd" with the appropriate position parameter and it will be
gone. However, your current position remains unchanged.
4. Conclusion
These two shell built-ins may come in handy whenever you are
about to traverse file systems. For the sake of brevity I'll
wrap up now and leave it up to you to experiment and explore.
--
+ funnies
_______
(_)___oo) Ned the log ------------- . Particle man ----------------
_______ |
(_)___OO) what was that noise? Ned | .} particle man with bow
| and arrow
-------------------------------------------------------------------
--
+ wrap up
Coming next issue:
Yeah Baby! - A newbie gets down
Safe mode for Linux? - You bet, it's easy too.
More nifty links to sink your teeth into
As always plenty of grok[age]
The further adventures of Ned the log and Particle man
We've passed 200 subscribers!
--
+ subscriptions & submittals
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Past issues can be found at:
http://console-newsletter.hypermart.net/past.htm
--
+ about
This issue of console was brought to you by:
digs <mjs@nts-online.net> - chief writer & layout
Ahmet Ertem <ahmet@ertem.de> - contributor
Hobbes' Internet Timeline (c)1993-9 by Robert H Zakon.
http://www.isoc.org/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
Console (c)1999 Michael S Sanders, All Rights Reserved.
--
eof