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.
I’m 33 today. Feels exactly the same as yesterday and a year ago. But getting all those best wishes from people all around the world is, of course, super cool! Thank you all so much.
And while we are on the subject of age, here is a screenshot of hilarious comment from this Linux Questions thread (kudos to Chris for the link):
Here is something that touched and moved every geek out there:
Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away.
I think the following comment does the best job expressing the feeling:
There are so many who benefit from the community, and so relatively few who give back. So many people claim some excuse to not contribute anything to anybody without getting paid. Then there’s this guy. I am honored to have shared a planet with him.
I came across this blog post which praises text modes for /bin/chmod.
There are two ways you can change file permissions in Unix – one is using
chmod‘s symbolic (text) modes (likechmod ug+x file), the other is using the octal modes (likechmod 0660 file). It turns out that symbolic modes are more powerful because you can mask out the permission bits you want to change! Octal permission modes are absolute and can’t be used to change individual bits. Octal modes are also sometimes called absolute because of that.
I have to agree, they are superior. However I feel like the article needs more examples. So here we go.
Use “u” for user, “g” for group, “o” for others, and “a” for all, or you can use a combination of letters, similar to how you do for access rights:
$ chmod ug+rw *.php
This will make all .php files in current directory readable and writable by both user and group.
Use several permission changes within one command. Just separate them by comma.
$ chmod a-rwx,ug+rw,o+r *.php
The above will reset permissions on all .php files to readable by all and writable only by user and group.
And my favorite and most used example, which would be tricky with octal permissions is the “X”. In recursive change mode, “X” will affect executable bit only on directories. Difference by illustration:
$ chmod -R a+x /some/path
The above will add executable bit to all files and folders under /some/path.
$ chmod -R a+X /some/path
But the above will add executable bit only to folders under /some/path. The files will remain as they are.
Google Apps help page is a little bit outdated and I had to spend a few minutes working out the solution, hence this post. Here is how you add your Google Apps GTalk account to Pidgin.
I came across an excellent tutorial on how to do screencasts in Linux. The original article is in Russian, so I just grabbed the important bits and translated them below.
This is the kind of a guide that I need once in a while, but which I can’t seem to find when I need it. Hopefully now that I have it blogged, it’ll come handy.