I’ve recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. One of the big benefits (apart from getting the very latest Firefox and Thunderbird packages) is that F9 features KDE 4, the latest version of the KDE desktop window manager.
Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is [...]
I was recently reminded of the excellent ‘units’ program, available with all good Unix systems.
Units will convert quantities expressed in one unit in to another unit. Here’s an example:
$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 12 miles
You want: kilometres
* 19.312128
[...]
Fedora Linux is the operating system of choice for both my home PC and my work laptop. KDE is my preferred window manager.
The main reason I use KDE rather than Gnome or another system is the Fuzzy Clock. The clock in the lower right hand corner of my screen uses real English to tell the [...]
Today I was in the unfortunate position of not being able to use Thunderbird to read my email. I recently installed the Lightning calendar addon together with the Provider for Google Calendar addon. What’s supposed to happen is the calendar within Thunderbird (provided by the Lightning addon) is automatically updated from (and updates) my Google [...]
From Tactile Logic: “I Hate Macs”
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people [...]
Cron is a handy utility available on (as far as I know) all Unix systems. It provides a mechanism for starting specified jobs at pre-determined times. So, for example, on my Linux laptop I have a cron job which runs every day which removes any files older than 7 days from the /tmp directory. Cron [...]
This is a review of the book The Unix Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike.
Anyone familiar with the early days of Unix will recognise the authors as key members of the Bell Labs team that created and nurtured Unix through its early years. Brian Kernighan is rightly famous as the co-author, with [...]
I was in the situation recently where I needed to transfer about 500Gb of data from one HP-UX box to another.
Unfortunately most of these data were in small files - the largest probably a megabyte or so.
I ran some speed tests. We had gigabit ethernet connecting the 2 boxes on a little used LAN.
I wrote [...]
Sometimes you can find yourself in symlinking hell when you’ve inadvertently created a loop of links, where link A refers to file B, and file B is another link back to A, for example.
You can use the GNU version of ‘find’ to discover where the link loops are. This information is from a bug report [...]
If the first step in any procedure is ‘backup your data’, for goodness’ sake do as it says!
Don’t think that because you’re more technical/brighter/don’t really care about the existing data that you’ll be OK.
If you don’t have a back up Murphy’s Law dictates that something disastrous will happen and you’ll lose everything.
If you do have [...]