__________________________________________________________________ issue 7 http://console-newsletter.hypermart.net __ __ _ _ __ __ )) __ console: tips,tricks & news about Linux ((_ ((_)((\( _))((_)(( (('________________________________________ [3/2000] "a good read.." + headlines UCITA is about to be law in Virginia! The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act is an attempt by big business to thwart consumer choice and the 'small guy' if this bill passes Open source will take a huge hit, folks this is important educate yourselves then take a stand: http://www.badsoftware.com/kaneropd.htm -- + hmm.. "At one presentation, a bunch of fifth-graders showed a product team what they had done in school with the software. The kids were thrilled to be on campus with a group of interested adults; their teacher beamed. A few people tried to make kid-friendly chitchat, but then a product manager abruptly exposed the true purpose of the children's visit. "Would each of you like to have this product at home?" he asked and was quickly greeted by a positive chorus. And then the suave stinger: "Do you know what kind of credit cards your parents have?" Not a hint of a smirk crossed the guy's face as he held his pen, poised to jot down their responses. Dickens couldn't have written it better." http://www.salon.com/sept97/21st/gates970925.html -- + humorix New Linux Distro: Red Neck Linux Red Neck Computers, Inc., of Chattafoocheeble, Alabama, starting shipping version 1.0 CD-ROMs of its new Red Neck Linux distribution yesterday. "We feel that RNL is a major step forward in bringing cheap, powerful, easy-to-use software to the millions of technophobes living in the South," Sandy Watkins, PR manager for Red Neck said in a press release. RNL features: * The X Winder System * DukesOfHazzard command line shell * Netscape 4 with preset bookmarks to such sites as The Big Show, How to Attract Your Cousins, Bubba's Farm Report, Branson.net, The Stag Beer Homepage, 101 Recipes for BBQ Sauce, Dukes of Hazzard Fan Club, and the Hee Haw Syndication TV Schedule. * Deer Hunter, Bass Fishing, and Civil War General games * Daisy Duke pin-up preset for root winder http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/jul98.shtml#RedNeck -- + review SuSE v6.3 by digs Prolog: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." -Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, where to begin... there should be a review of SuSE's new version of Linux in this spot but there's not. First, to the good folks at SuSE, my my most humble and earnest apologies. If this explanation fails to satisfy your requirements please contact me and I'll reimburse you for your loss. Now for the truth. In December of last year, console requested a press copy of the newly released SuSE v6.3 Linux distro. The SuSE teams response was a resounding YES. Within 2-3 days the boxed distro arrived. As I was busy preparing a review of Turbo-Linux I contacted a one Mr.Walt Taninatz and asked if would like the job of submitting a review for this distro. I told him that the review would have to be back to us by February the 10th. "Yes, I'd be glad to.." he stated. Straight away we, (console) mailed the package to Mr.Taninatz. Upon receiving the parcel he emailed us back with conformation that he had received the package in good order and would email the review to console within a week perhaps two weeks tops. He never did this. Repeated attempts (5) to gain some type of explanation as to the status of the review have been summarily ignored by Mr.Taninatz. He has in fact received our email as verified by '/var/log/messages' on my server which indicates that the emails in question were accepted for delivery by his ISP. In a last ditch effort to make sure his email was/is functioning properly, a question was posted to a email list that I know Mr.Taninatz to frequent. Just as a dog returns to his own vomit, Mr.Taninatz replied to this post. A normal scan of his email headers bear witness to the fact that: 1. His email is working properly and, 2. He is using the SuSE distro sent to him. I'm must admit I'm very humbled by this whole affair, Walt I've known you close to two years and numerous times you have emailed me seeking help and NOT A SINGLE TIME have I turned you out. How dare you take advantage of the good nature that this newsletter extended towards you. My disgust is second only to the apathy that you've displayed - 'You' left me to explain this whole terrible thing, without a distro to review and accountable to SuSE for 'your' actions. If you have the slightest shred of decency either return the distro pre-paid to me or SuSE. There are plenty of folks on this list who would have loved to have the chance that you had and the distro too! Walt if your reading this (and I'm sure you are) think about the prolog, sadly, I don't think such things matter much to you. To the readers of console I truly I'm sorry that this dirty bit of laundry had to be aired publicly, there was simply no way around it, I owed SuSE a review, I just never suspected it would be a character review. Let's move on now. -- + distro watch Traveller's Linux - a minimal floppy Linux distribution: http://cryogen.com/ror4/work/ PeeWeeLinux - small linux distribution for embedded applications. http://embedded.adis.on.ca/ -- + new apps CodeCommander 0.2.4 - all-purpose editor w/ syntax highlighting, undo/redo: http://CodeCommander.sourceforge.net XInvaders 3D 1.31 - Save your coins, these little puppy rocks: http://www.fiu.edu/~dllopi01/xinv3d.htm Textmode Quake (ttyquake) - yup, I've seen it all now: http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/ -- + review Winlinux 2000 - Brian L. Johnson Winlinux 2000 is an interesting distro. It downloads as a self-extracting Windows *.exe file (140mb), which is installed on a UMSDOS filesystem on the Windows partition in c:\linux. It is Slackware-based, and it is noteable that it handles all of it's configuration with a Windows utility. It uses the KDE desktop. After three days of downloading, I got Winlinux 2000 downloaded, and transferred it to my Win95 partition. I rebooted to Windows, ran the installer, and after a while, I had a UMSDOS installation in c:\linux. I ran it, and booted to it, only to find that it starts in runlevel 4 (graphical login under the KDM greeter). Only problem is, I run an Nvidia card, and the default X-server wouldn't work on it. X crashed and died, and I was told "Press any key to return to Windows". Well, it gave me NO choice. Wouldn't even let me re-init to runlevel 3 or anything. Using a Windows program that allows me to access my Linux partition, I extracted my special X-server from my Redhat system to the Windows desktop, and moved it into the UMSDOS filesystem. This was no easy matter, as filenames on UMSDOS are very very strange (as seen by Windows), but after a bit of deduction, I got the right filename and copied it in. I started WL2k again, and found that the video settings that the Windows-based configurator selected were very badly out of whack. I tracked down and found the xf86config file, and imported the right modeline setting from my Redhat installation, and redid the other settings. Much to my surprise, it had no effect. I finally had to boot back to Windows and run the Windows configurator and do some heavy tweaking to get it right. Where WL2k is getting it's modeline settings, I don't know. I even renamed the xf86config file, which had no effect on X... Once my video problems were fixed, I tried setting up my net connection with Kppp, only to find that it couldn't use the modem, apparently due to a modem lock somewhere. I tried tracking down the lock, and never found any lockfile. Even when I ran Kppp as root, it could not connect to the modem due to this phantom lockfile. Seyon and Minicom could not use the modem either. I verified at long length that the port base address and IRQ and port# were all exactly correct, even booting to DOS and running MSD to extract the info, and even pulling out the modem to check it's jumpers. Nada. I gave up on KPPP, and set up a peers file and chat script, and tried the classic "pppd call" method, and I got nowhere there either. Now what good is a Linux distro that can't connect to the net? Another thing that was out of whack was that the default dir colors were so as to render a directory listing absolutely unreadable on a white xterm or Konsole window. I had to go into /etc/profile and delete the entire dir colors settings to get a readable directory listing. Fortunately, WL2k lets you drop to a console with the standard CTRL+ALT+F? keys (my saving grace!). I re-edited the /etc/inittab so I would be able to start in runlevel 3 (console login), which made WL2k much more tolerable. I also fired up Pine, only to have it complain about "bad" permissions on the mailspool file. I checked, and found the spoolfiles to be set to 1777 (Readable, writable, and executable by EVERYONE). Ouch. I found a lot of other BAD permissions on critical files. (Like /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow being group and world readable/writable, or the /etc/security directory being 777). Talk about begging for a security incident! Another gripe, is that WL2k doesn't seem to include any config utilities on the Linux side of things, other than the commandline-based useradd utility... It seems that if you want to change a setting in WL2k, you either have to hand-edit a config file, or reboot back to Windows to run the Windows configurator (which GPFed and locked up Windows twice). There is the KDE control center, but that's just for KDE-specific stuff. I finally got WL2k running well, in spite of it's inability to communicate, but found that it was just much too much of a pain. My observation was that WL2k is aimed at brand-new users, who need the Windows-like ease of use, and know nothing about Linux system administration/configuration. With this in mind, I think WL2k fails because for me, it took a lot of advanced twiddling to get WL2k working acceptably, which would be well beyond the scope of newbies. If it is the intention of the WL2k developers to make an easy-to-use distro for newbies, then they fail miserably. Frankly, all the BAD permissions on system files and dirs is SCARY. My rating is five thumbs DOWN for WinLinux 2000. WL2k is gone now, thanks to a quick and dirty "rm -rf *". What a piece of (sewage)... A couple of footnotes: *) WL2k loads using the loadlin utility, which cannot recognize more than 64mb of RAM. I have a lot more than 64mb, and I had to add an APPEND statement to the loadlin commandline in linux.bat (again, could a newbie do this?) *) Linux is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL), which requires release of source code. Looking around the WinLinux site, I see no available source code, which would seem to indicate that the WL2k team is in violation of the GPL. Bleh! -- + quote of the month "Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward." -Robert C. Gallagher -- + article UUencode - digs For better or worse the internet is a pure text medium and email systems don't handle -non text- very well. To get around this uuencode was introduced. What uuencode does is to translate or convert a file or e-mail attachment (it can be an image, a tar file, or a program, etc..) from its binary or bit-stream representation into the 7-bit ASCII set of text characters. Uuencode means "UNIX to UNIX encoding", despite MIME's (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) popularity, uuencoding remains very much the method of choice when transferring files via: email, bbs's, newsgroups, shell accounts and as long term storage. And is available for all platforms (Winzip recognizes uuencoded files). To ENCODE a file: uuencode FILE.local FILE.remote >FILE.uu FILE.local is the name of the file taken as input. FILE.remote is the name the decoded file will have. FILE.uu is the name of the encoded file. To DECODE a file: uudecode FILE.uue FILE.uu will be decoded to FILE.remote as noted above. How can you tell if it is a uuencoded file? There is no standard file naming convention, although most u*ix based systems use a .uu as a suffix. DOS based computers, with their standard three-digit suffixes, generally use .uue. A uuencoded file can be identified by the first line of the file: begin 644 myfile.GIF When emailing uuencoded files don't change the file in any way. One may include the encoding as an attachment or embedded in the body of the email for instance after your message however, the first line of the encoding should start with the 'begin' line and the last line of the encoding should be the 'end' statement. The same holds true when extracting uu files from a message. Here's a command line example using uuencode and email together: (cat some.txt ; uuencode pic.jpg pic.jpg) | \ mail -s "subj" wendy@place If you intend to send any encapsulated material, somewhere in the body of the email (but not in the encoded parts) inform the recipient of the contents, for instance: Please find a uuencoded file embedded in this message. You'll need to uu[decode] the file in order to restore it's native format. Often its desirable to encode a large file then break it into manageable chunks, no body wants a 15meg download of your vacation photos :-) this is where split comes in. example, splitting a encoded file into floppy sized blocks: #!/bin/sh FLOPPY=1457000 split -b $FLOPPY FILE.uu The above produces several smaller files that wouldn't clog a mail system. To rejoin, save the encoded parts to individual files, (note its alot faster to create a unique directory & stash all the file parts there) then issue the command: cat FILE1.uu FILE2.uu FILE3.uu | uudecode or cat ./* | uudecode the second method assumes -ONLY- the parts of the encoded files exist in the current directory. Again this creates: FILE.remote Here's a small encoding to play with, just cut every thing 'between' the lines and paste the resulting buffer into your editor and save the file under a descriptive name like: save.uu --- cut here --- begin 644 bob.gif M1TE&.#=A5@![`/```/___P```"P`````5@![```"_H2/JD*7J-;JW+;76671&87,4QPI]313>TUH[G2*)O^P<'C^/9\E@/"4[<65Z>` ME`?5Y@>VY_.R6+CWJ+4AV=1XMZB!:1-6Q8GA*10J:D+JHV<:.)&J2D:(Y?KJ MR1!+6PNU4T0QR"J9RU*#"YQ(/.Q;O!/6BIPL\3G:.#T+(6W$"QV!G7UK_=#M MC0BN73[>3!V^C"Z;%LW>#JS<*_\G)KQM;TQ__L3G#TB\?U[J<1.7C5%`<@-I M*-2WSN"XA_C@2?1&T5G$_H4."W*\!ZVAN7=7TN$9F>S-,Y7S+)+JMZKEP5\F M\ZWZZ.X<1($D0>8T=(UES&\:[S5;F:H!S2I'8:8Y!5*HG:(H_>RJ%#,CT*`5 MY03JRLJ=HR^FD-(I9%5CQ1P/F]I,*S:L2X]SW,Y5IW1GI75V9R8YR?,OWD=. M5Y+%^FXP5K];N0H.W$KQXHV-*5NIS)0A":J4.P&.))EH:+Z;>\X]K*P$YY&H M+:J^C'FC')>E86>@,OH/$-"Y`X]EC8AW;-FS18]>+67,9YEY3>M^_5FP!+"\GZ144&+4'&>0&;>^/E.9`I91FLH)#S MYW]F\EX-=T,9TQ.``8(G%4MQN0%6@;@XIQ][MBT($V3*P6:(@13ZI%QQ.&VG M834>)A[0)5"VU+;E>4H.2YX\M9A+: M)Z"-VL>EB6@JR=:C^^27SJ7?(4JFIEZNYZE9DH;Z7I>DWK7 /dev/null To read from input, prog < some-file To redirect output to another tty, someprogram > /dev/ttyN where N is the console number To copy several files into one file, cat page1 page2 page3 > book To append a file, cat index >> book -- + jargon :bare metal: n. 1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing} needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in {The Story of Mel} (in Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems, and in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level control. -- + hobbes' internet timeline 1970 ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP), first host-to-host protocol. First cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. -- + funnies _______ (_)___oo) Ned the log --------- . Particle man -------------------- _______ | ::::::::::::: (_)___oo) | ::::::::::::: _______ levitating Ned | ::::::::::::: particle man parade ------------------------------------------------------------------- -- + wrap up Coming next issue: Poor Man's Net Mini HowTO - networking on a budget kewl... Filtering email with procmail - get yourself organized Ned and particle man continue to grab a laugh. The best apps, links, and news you can use! Special thanks to Brian Johnson, like so many of us he has one foot in the linux world and one in the windows world but with a difference. A shell for windows v3.1 that emulates the windows95 shell and (get this) its licensed under the GPL and the source is too. Its called Calmira check it out at http://calmira.org/ Hey-hey all you linux-fans were at the threshold of 400 subscribers WOW! thank you all. Your stories, reviews, articles are great console 'is' working thanks to its contributors, If you've just signed up, consider writing us with that nifty point of view you have, or that triumph over a tough problem you got a handle on. Were all human and like to hear how some else tackled a vexing job! Just submit that article - you know you want to ;) later on, digs -- + subscriptions & submittals To subscribe send an email to: console-subscribe@onelist.com To unsubscribe send an email to: console-unsubscribe@onelist.com To submit an article visit this link: http://console-newsletter.hypermart.net/submit.htm Past issues can be found at: http://console-newsletter.hypermart.net/past.htm -- + about This issue of console was brought to you by: digs - chief writer & layout Brian L. Johnson - contributor Hobbes' Internet Timeline (c)1993-9 by Robert H Zakon. http://www.isoc.org/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html Console (c)99-0 Michael S Sanders, All Rights Reserved. -- eof