MaximumHoyt

Part of the fun of Linux, for me at least, is the ability to fix things when they go wrong. And things generally go wrong when you don't follow the advice of conventional wisdom. Plus, my personal mantra is "fix it until it breaks". One of those great pieces of common wisdom when discussing Mandriva is that you only upgrade within major versions, like from Mandriva 2010.1 to 2010.2, but when moving between major versions, like from Mandriva 2010 to 2011, you do a clean install. If you have followed other convention wisdom, you have a separate physical partition for /home . With that configuration in place, you can do a clean install of the root filesystem and keep all you personal files and settings. But that can also pose problems since there is not always a clean upgrade path for the personal configuration files that live in the dotfile and hidden directories of your home directory. More on that at another time. I wanted to upgrade (not update) from Mandriva 2010...

There are two things that can help you to have some fun with Linux. The first is VirtualBox . Since you are not using it for commercial purposes, you may download and install the full-featured version for your host operating system. If you are a MS Windows user curious about Linux, this is ideal for you. If you are a Linux user curious about different distros, this works as well. After you install VirtualBox on your host operating system, you need to learn how to use it. the VirtualBox site has excellent documentation . My suggestion for configuration are give the virtual machine the maximum amount of RAM and video memory that is practical and set the network choice to "bridged" rather than "NAT". Next stop is to download the NetbootCD . This CD contains enough of an OS to enable wired Ethernet connectivity and download and install several Linux distros via FTP. What can you install? Ubuntu Debian GNU/Linux Fedora openSUSE Mandriva Linux Scientific ...

The first release of Mageia 1 is out. You can download it from here and read the release notes here . If you've used Mandriva Linux , you'll feel right at home with Mageia. Mandriva has always had a reputation of working well for both the novice user and the power user. Installation is typically easy and hardware support is among the best of any distro. The user and administrative tools are comprehensive and easy to use. Of course, under the hood, it's all Linux and all configuration files are plain text files and all a competent administrator needs do is to choose a shell and a text editor. Mandriva has also been known for excellent default fully-featured configurations of the KDE, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE desktop environments as well as a broad range of available applications. Mageia is no exception in this regard. For the average user, the changes are mostly cosmetic. The Mageia art, colors and graphics are very well done (and contributed by the Mageia user communi...

I have a small auto shop and having Internet access there comes in handy when I need to find auto-related information, order parts or just surf the web and do some email. Until recently, I've used a EVDO modem and got 10x dial-up speeds, but at $65 a month, it just got to be too great an expense for such low speeds. My next-door neighbor came to the rescue and allowed me to share his fiber-optic Internet access via a wireless connection. But that arrangement came with a downside. Previously, I left the EVDO connection open and could ssh into my work computer (all my systems run Linux). But now I had no access to his router/firewall and when I asked my friendly neighbor about port-forwarding an ssh connection, all I got was a blank stare. Luckily, Jason from my TWUUG group suggested tunneling over ssh , diagrammed in the image above. This is how it's done. On my shop computer, I run: $ ssh -R 2222:localhost:22 hoyt@home.ip.net and then on my home computer, I run: ...

Running msec on one of my Mageia Linux machines turned up a number of world-writable files. These are potential security problems, especially on a machine that faces the Internet. The obvious solution was to use chmod to remove any world writable permissions. But there's the problem. The chmod command has a recursive directive, -R , that would work except that it would change permissions on the directories as well. After all in *NIX, all directories are files. Thanks to my friends at TWUUG , I discovered that the find command, used with its -exec directive could accomplish what I wanted. find /xxx -type f -exec chmod o=-w {} + ; Breaking this down: find - the find command itself. Depending on what files you are modifying, you may need to be root. /xxx - the path to where the files are located. -type f - this tells find to look for files; type d would tell it to look for directories. -exec - this directive tells find to execute the command that follows, in ...

I have always enjoyed computer games that are out of the ordinary. Postal2 by Running With Scissors is certainly that. It is both amusing and offensive in a very politically incorrect way, featuring Gary Coleman, the Taliban and dead cow heads. At postal2.maximumhoyt.com , I am in the process of documenting how to install and run the game on a Linux computer as well as run the win32-only 1409X version of the dedicated Postal2 server. The site is also providing me with experience in site development using SSI ( Server Side Includes ) and Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ). UPDATE I have no made any progress other than to realize that the 1409X version can only run well under MS Windows, so it looks like a VirtualBox WindowsXP instance would do the trick, but my webserver lacks the computing power to do that, so it looks like I'm waiting on a hardware upgrade to move forward.

The screen command has been very useful for running programs on remote machines because you can detach the sessions and log out of the remote machine and the application is still running remotely. It would be nice to do that with a graphical application since you can connect to a remote graphical application via X or VNC or similar applications, any graphical application terminates when you close the session. That's changed with xpra . Connecting to an X server (the special Xvfb server, basically an X server minus any video drivers so it can run on a headless computer -- yes, X with no video card) as a compositing window manager on the remote computer allowing you to log in later (even from a third computer), re-attach the session and the program is still running. The parent project that includes xpra is partiwm , a tiling window manager. The current version of xpra has many enhancements from the version originally reported here. Compiling and Installing on Mandriv...