Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.
And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.
Apparently, it is possible to search for packages with apt. Here is it works:
apt-cache search mplayer
Masks are also supported. Consider the difference (package descriptions were removed for cleaner output):
[leonid@ltsp ~]$ apt-cache search lad glade2 intltool libglade libglade libglade2 libglade2-devel pygtk2-libglade qt-designer Gtk-Perl ladspa ladspa-devel mplayer xine-lib [leonid@ltsp ~]$ apt-cache search '^lad' ladspa ladspa-devel
My new office workstation was behaving very strangely. Once in a while it would slow down to a crawl and hang doing something. I checked the processlist, but nothing was going wrong. I disabled all the services. I checked my scheduled tasks. Nothing. I left it with top running, but it showed that 100% of CPU was idle and more than 500 MBytes of RAM was free. Nothing was eating up resources. Neither was there any significant network traffic. The machine wasn’t swapping or anything. Non-the-less the load average would go up as high as 4.0 or even 7.0!
I know that everyone is waiting for it, so I’ll break out the good news – Fedora Linux Core 4 is out. I am currently downloading it from one of the mirrors, but the speed is dicreasing. Hopefully I’ll have it before everything stops completely. I will upload all 4 CDs to Thunderworx FTP as soon as I have them. Meanwhile, you can read the Release Notes.
Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 is available via bittorrent.
Update: Official announcement.
Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 ISOs are uploaded to Thunderworx FTP. You can get them from here.
If you have nothing better to do, read man 7 locale.
I think I’ve heard about find2perl before, but I never used it. Today I was trying to invent a wheel once again and somehow remembered about this useful tool. Here is a quote from the man 1 find2perl:
NAME
find2perl – translate find command lines to Perl codeSYNOPSIS
find2perl [paths] [predicates] │ perlDESCRIPTION
find2perl is a little translator to convert find command lines to equivalent Perl code. The resulting code is typically faster
than running find itself.
This utlity usually comes together with perl.