Lockergnome's Compendium of Linux Knowledge Focusing on the core functionality built into every Linux distribution, these tomes contain a wealth of information on everything from the kernel, to core services, to networking and printing issues. Find your way around the command line functionality, so that your Linux install works the way you want it to. You won't be an expert overnight, but it will certainly lead you in the right direction. Dowload your Linux tips today.

"I think Linux is cool, but it just isn't ready for the desktop."

"Linux isn't your Grandmother's operating system."

"But I don't want to do everything from the command line."

You, by and large, are Linux users. I'm sure you've heard these very phrases from your computing buddies as they rush to change the subject away from that subversive operating system.

A new consortium, announced on Wednesday, is out to change all that. In a press release announcing the formation of the Linux Desktop Consortium (DLC), Linus himself made the boldest pronouncement.

We already have all of the tools, in open source software, necessary for 80 percent of office workers in the world: an office suit including spreadsheet, word processor, and presentation program; a Web browser, graphical desktop file manager, and tools for communications, scheduling, and personal information management. The Linux desktop is inevitable!

Frankly, I think it's about time we turned our full attention to the Linux desktop. With the ongoing collapse of the Desktop Linux Conference, there's yet to be a truly unified body working toward the advancement of Linux on the desktop. The companies represented in the DLC carry the cachet to make the most serious stab yet at this great goal. They include ArkLinux, CodeWeavers, Debian.org, DesktopLinux.com, KDE, Linux Professional Institute (LPI), Lycoris, MandrakeSoft, NeTraverse, OpenOffice.org, Samba.org, theKompany, SuSE, TransGaming Technologies, Xandros, and Ximian. Adding to the strength of DLC is Bruce Perens, who's serving as the interim executive director. Maybe, just maybe, this could be the beginning of the momentum necessary to put a Penguin in every computing home.

There are a few names that are conspicuously absent from the participants in the DLC. It's a bit painful to see the absence of one, while the other comes as no surprise. It appears that Red Hat is notably AWOL from the DLC. Though I try to stay reasonably neutral in Penguin Shell, I've been a longtime Red Hat user. In fact, I've been a pretty hardcore Red Hat advocate face-to-face or by email. Their recent actions have, sadly, begun to smell a bit elitist. Yes, they're the biggest. Yes, they're onboard with the Linux Standards Base (LSB). But more and more, they've appeared to be working toward creating an island unto themselves. This is certainly an area to which Red Hat could provide great support. It would even help their business interests. Their absence is disappointing. Of the seven boxes for which I'm directly responsible, five are Red Hat installations. While I do truly like Red Hat, I can't stomach too much community cold-shouldering. The next machine, or the next ten, may end up being Debian or Gentoo boxes, instead.

The other company missing from the DLC is Lindows. As they're rearranging the Desktop Linux Summit to suit a Lindows marketing plan, much of the Linux community has moved in a more productive direction.

Now that you're caught up, get out there and have a great Linux day.

Happy just sittin' here in my tux,              
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

GnomeTWEAK

A Bigger Partition

Configurability. That's the name of the Linux game. Most elements of Linux are vastly more configurable than comparable elements on other systems. From desktop tweaks to tweaks deep within the system, most changes to your Linux system can be configured quite easily.

When I still lived primarily in the Windows world, Partition Magic was a tool I swore by. It served the purpose of changing partition sizes, adding and removing partitions quite nicely. The problem was, it was a third-party program that had to be purchased independent of my Windows purchase. There were no robust partitioning tools in Windows.

Linux has just such a tool in parted. If you find a need to resize a partition, parted is your tool. Here's a quick procedure for resizing a Linux partition using parted.

First, you'll need to hunt down your rescue disk. For major distributions, this is part of the installation medium. Reboot your system with the installation or separate rescue disc in the drive:

/sbin/shutdown -r now

At the prompt, type rescue. This boots the most minimal of systems, mounting only your / filesystem.

Next, run parted:

parted /dev/hda

This assumes that /dev/hda contains the partition you'd like to resize.

Now, you'll need a quick snapshot of the partitions on the drive:

print

From the data returned by print, you'll need to know the minor number of the partition (/dev/hda2, for example, where 2 is the minor number), and the start and end points of the partition.

resize is the parted command that will perform the action. You'll need to supply the minor number and new beginning and ending points (in Mb) with the resize command:

resize 2 2048 10240

Use the print command again to assure that your partition is the right size and type, then reboot in normal mode.

Most of the tools you'll need for system changes or maintenance are native to Linux. parted is a great example of the ability to make major changes in Linux with minimal effort.

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GnomeSCRIPT

VMStat
Scribbled by Paul Wilson

"Here's another script, considerably smaller this time ! It runs vmstat for an hour at a time putting the output into a file for later. I run it permanently, just so that I can keep track of how the server's behaving. Unsophisticated, but useful.

"Anyone who wants to collect it online can go here:"

http://www.hooksprogress.org/Code/Shell/Perf.sh.txt

Recommend It!
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GnomeCORE

Get your favorite Linux flavor on CD: Pick your favorite Linux flavor and get it on CD for as low as $1.95. Find Linux gear, books, and software for Linux at Linux Central . Check out the selection today!

Modules in Linux are something close to the equivalent of device drivers in Windows. They facilitate the communication between the kernel and the device. Many hardware manufacturers are still a bit reluctant to release Linux drivers for their devices. As a result, you'll find that quite a few of the Linux modules are reverse-engineered from those created for other OSs.

Modules differ from drivers in Windows in that they can be built directly into the kernel. Most drivers in Windows are loaded dynamically. The advantage of a monolithic kernel - that is, one with the drivers an integral part of the kernel - really lies in customizing your machine to a clearly defined set of hardware. A monolithic kernel can be very, very fast and stable. If you know exactly the devices on your machine and the modules to use, you can build a monolithic kernel that will easily operate a very stable system.

However, there's a huge range of devices in the computing world. By the sheer number of modules it may take to operate all the devices attached to your system, it often makes sense to use a more modularized approach, in which the drivers are loaded and unloaded as needed. In other words, these drivers don't exist directly in kernel space but rather can be moved in and out as necessary.

Modularization also makes the task of transitioning to Linux a bit easier for new users. The major distributions use a sort of blanket approach during install, in which the most commonly used module types will be loaded at boot. Many of these will be unloaded if left unused. The result is that new Linux users need know very little about the process of building and loading modules in order to utilize multiple devices.

If you've built a custom kernel on your system rather than leaving the kernel configuration in the default, you can also build and add kernels nearly "on the fly." Log in as root, change to the /usr/src/linux directory, and open a configuration menu using either:

make menuconfig

or

make xconfig

Select the modules you'd like to add, then save the modified configuration. You'll need four more steps to make those modules available:

make dep
make modules
make modules_install
depmod -a

This rebuilds and installs the selected modules.

If you have a small system, a monolithic kernel is definitely the way to go. If, on the other hand, you're running several devices (or plan on adding several devices), modularization makes a lot of sense.

In either case, Linux handles drivers more efficiently than any other system.

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GnomeFILE

PixiePlus

http://www.mosfet.org/pixie/

"A free, fast, and feature packed image browser, viewer, and image/photo editor for Unix/Linux/X11 systems. Pixie's browser supports a very fast demand-loaded persistent thumbnail engine. With Pixie you can enter a folder with literally thousands of images and start browsing existing previews immediately - no wait at all! It doesn't matter if you want to view the first thumbnail or the last, all are immediately available. In addition PixiePlus is very flexible in creating thumbnails. While it uses it's own engine for creating image previews it can utilize the KDE I/O subsystem to handle a ton of other formats! This means it can also thumbnail things such as web pages, office documents, video clips, and PS/PDF files. PixiePlus can also utilize the embedded JPEG and TIFF thumbnails that many digital cameras use."

Recommend It!
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GnomeVOICE

Comments On Comments
Scribbled by Chris Pike

"I have some comments concerning the comments scribbled by James Ronholm (in Tuesday's issue of Penguin Shell)...

"James said: 'The argument that Linux should be more secure because it has more people looking at the source code is a good argument, however it isn't provable.'

"A better argument is that 'Microsoft software should be less secure because people looking at the source code lacked knowledge of secure coding'.

"One proven fact is that Microsoft programmers didn't program with security in mind - admitted by Microsoft themselves, who also stated that they recently (among other things) spent millions teaching their programmers how to program securely.

"Another fact is that, due to the proprietary nature of Microsoft's code, only Microsoft programmers (with their lacking knowledge in secure programming) have looked at the code. We can safely say that if you don't know what to look for you're not going to see it; so unless a security related bug was revealed, Microsoft were unlikely to be aware of a problem.

"As Open Source code is viewable by all, you can have people with diverse programming skills working on a single app, some of which could be highly skilled in security aspects of programming. Also, when programming for Unix/Linux, security has always been more of an issue to be considered, as the operating system itself is designed and focused around a networking environment.

"Wouldn't it therefore be logical to assume that there was more chance that insecure coding would be noticed by Open Source programmers? Not all Open Source code was guaranteed to be more secure than Microsoft's code, but it was far more likely.

"One argument against Open Source being more secure was that, 'Although anybody can look at Open Source code, they're unlikely to look with detail at all of the code'. The same can be said for Microsoft. Although Microsoft programmers are now apparently clued up on secure programming, Microsoft's apps are still based on insecure code, this much they've admitted to. Having developed millions of lines of insecure code, how long will it take them to go over all of those lines and make sure everything's secure? How can they guarantee that everything is looked over?

"Microsoft's 'shared source' initiative seems a great way of getting other people to debug their software for free, it would appear that the "more people looking at the source code" argument is considered valid by Microsoft."

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GnomeCLICK

Open Source Digest

http://www.opensourcedigest.com/index.php

You've got to love a brand-spanking new online open source magazine. Open Source Digest went live in January and is, in fact, a consolidation of PerlMonth and LinuxMonth. The reasons for the consolidation are available in the site FAQ. Overall, the mag looks to be meeting its stated mission:

Open Source Digest is a monthly online magazine devoted to bringing quality articles about open source to the open source community.

The magazine will bring articles on many different fronts:

• Technical - (perl, python, linux, apache, MySQL)
• Reviews - (books, projects, distributions)
• Monthly News Recap
• Upcoming Events
• and more . . .

Each month we will publish the magazine in a PDF format. (idea shamelessly stolen from theperlreview.com)

Who knows? This could easily become one of your regular monthly Linux reads.

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