Category: Linux

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.

On submitting trivial patches

Hacker News points to this Linux kernel patch, done by a 4-year old.  With some assistance, of course, but still impressive.  And while the story is cute, the comments are even better.  In particular, a link to this email from Linus Torvalds, talking about the importance of the small and trivial contributions.

To me, the biggest thing with small patches is not necessarily the patch itself. I think that much more important than the patch is the fact that people get used to the notion that they can change the kernel – not just on an intellectual level (“I understand that the GPL means that I have the right to change my kernel”), but on a more practical level (“Hey, I did that small change”).

CurlMail – easy way to send emails with cUrl

I am a big fan of small and simple yet practically interesting ideas, like this one.  CurlMail is a super easy API service that allows one to send emails from the command line, using nothing but curl, or a similar HTTP client.

It’d be extra cool if it there was a GitHub link to it too.  But even if it’s not openly available, one could use the service for emails which are not sensitive and implement something similar from scratch in a few minutes for private use.

Archiving web sites

LWN runs an interesting article, covering different ways of archiving a website.  It sounds trivial, but it’s not.  Even the simplest of ways – wget – will probably take you a few dozen attempts to figure out the following:

$ wget --mirror --execute robots=off --no-verbose --convert-links \
       --backup-converted --page-requisites --adjust-extension \
       --base=./ --directory-prefix=./ --span-hosts \
       --domains=www.example.com,example.com http://www.example.com/

There a few other interesting tools (like pywb) mentioned.

percollate – a command-line tool to turn web pages into beautifully formatted PDFs

percollate is a command-line tool to convert web pages into PDF files.  It supports single-page and multi-page files, can fetch the HTML documents from the web, understands accelerated mobile pages (see AMP), and even allows some control of the output with CSS snippets.

Using aws-cli –query Option To Simplify Output

Eric Hammond shares a super-handy tip for those of us who work with Amazon AWS via the command line:

I just learned about a recent addition to aws-cli: The --query option lets you specify what parts of the response data structure you want output.

Instead of wading through pages of JSON output, you can select a few specific values and output them as JSON, table, or simple text. The new --query option is far easier to use than jq, grep+cut, or Perl, my other fallback tools for parsing the output.

Read the rest of his blog post for a few examples of how to use it.