Archive for December, 2007
Fedora Linux by Chris Tyler
Now that I’m moving onto some of the more advanced Linux features and ones that rely upon the GUI, the library-borrowed books I’ve been using are becoming less and less useful. It is not that they are bad books, just that they are old editions. So on Friday I had a trip to London’s excellent [...]
Filed under: Books | Leave a Comment
I’ve never been a fan of when computers insist on having the operating system CD inserted when they ought to be able to get whatever they need from the internet. Fedora would sometimes ask for the CD when using the Add/Remove Software (package manager) feature. Fortunately, it’s easy to stop [...]
Filed under: Fedora 8 | Leave a Comment
At and batch
While cron is used to schedule regular tasks, the at and batch commands are used to schedule one-off tasks at some point in the future. The difference between at and batch is that at does a task at a given time in the future, while batch does the task when the [...]
Filed under: Processes | Leave a Comment
Cron is the method of getting Linux to repeatedly do a task at regular intervals. For example, it can automatically produce a backup in the middle of the night or save some status information to a log file. It can send an email reminding people to file their TPS reports every [...]
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Important directories
Linux installs a range of directories on the hard disk. Here are some of the most important:
/ is the root of the filesystem.
/boot is where the Linux Kernel and Bash are stored.
/home is where the each user’s files are stored.
/root is where the root user’s files are stored.
/etc contains configuration files.
/etc/skel [...]
Filed under: Filesystem | Leave a Comment
File and directory permissions
Every file and directory on a Linux filesystem has permissions attached to it. They can be referred two in two formats: by a six digit set of letters or by a set of three numbers. Here’s an example in letters:
rwxr-xr-x
The first three letters mean that the file can be read, [...]
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There are a number of useful commands for dealing with processes. One of them is called top. This command lists, in an continually-updated way, the processes running on the system and has an inbuilt facility to a kill a particular process. However, I prefer using the command ps, in the following [...]
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Archiving with Gzip and Tar
The best archiving tool to use on Linux is probably Gzip. By best, it is a format that everyone else using Linux can understand, and it is better at compressing files that the older compress command. A newer format called bzip2 has better compression rates but apparently not everyone can understand [...]
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Booting into command line or GUI
One of the machines on which I’ve installed Fedora boots directly into the GUI, the other into the command line. On the latter, I have to type startx before I get to the GUI, which is inconvenient. The reason it has defaulted to this arrangement is that I had to use [...]
Filed under: GNOME and KDE | Leave a Comment
FTPing in Bash
FTPing has always been a graphical, drag-and-drop thing for me. When I was running a Red Hat web server a few years ago, I used to use the wget command sometimes, especially when the hosting company sent an email around asking for the software to be upgraded. But for FTP itself, [...]
Filed under: Network clients | Leave a Comment
Colourful ls
Some systems display the ls command’s output in black and white. On Fedora, it’s in colour, thanks to the settings of a file called /etc/DIR_COLORS (individual users can set their own colours with a .dir_colors file in their home directory). By default (on Fedora at least) ls is set up [...]
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Concatenate
The cat command is short for concatenate, which I looked up in the dictionary and which means “to link or join together”. Essentially, it will display the contents of a text file with another text file (or files) directly under it, as in:
cat file1.txt file2.txt
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Towards the exam
As you may be aware, I’m learning to take a Red Hat Certified Technician exam. I’m a fairly knowledgeable geek, yet there’s a lot of material for this exam that I’m learning for the very first time. The really difficult bit in the exam, it seems to me, is the hour where they put you [...]
Filed under: RHCT | 1 Comment
Using KDE instead of GNOME
GNOME vs KDE is often a flame war and I don’t feel like pouring any petrol over that. That said, given that GNOME is the default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (along with SUSE, another major business Linux distribution), and as I’m learning for a Red Hat exam, GNOME’s where I’m going to be spending [...]
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The Bash command prompt
I hadn’t picked up on this until today: the Bash command prompt changes depending on whether you are root or not. If you are root, it looks like # while if you are a regular user it looks becomes the $ sign. Neat.
Filed under: Bash and its associates | Leave a Comment
