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This note from today's inbox:

Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 17:48:04 -0500
From: Red Hat Network
To: tony@lockergnome.com
Subject: RHN Demo Account Survey Notice

Dear Red Hat Network User,

We hope that you are enjoying your complimentary demo account with Red Hat Network. This email is being sent to you to because you have only 7 days left in your Red Hat Network demo account. Attached below is a link for filling out a survey in order to extend your demo account for 60 days, as well as a link to purchase a Red Hat Network subscription and receive a year of uninterrupted service.

Please note that your completion of the survey is how Red Hat verifies the activity of your account. It is Red Hat's policy to disable inactive demo accounts to ensure the best possible level of service to active demo users.

Thanks for your support of Red Hat and the Linux community. --the Red Hat Network Team

* * *

Why buy Red Hat Network Basic Services?

- INSTANT ACCESS to Red Hat ISOs as soon as they become available. This means no more long downloads from ftp sites, driving to the store, or waiting for your friends to finish with their copy.

- Priority bandwidth during heavy traffic periods. As a Basic Subscriber, your access to errata and ISOs will be put first, ensuring that your systems are kept up to date and always secure.

- 24 Hour Access. Demo Accounts are subject to blackouts during periods of high usage. Paid subscribers receive uninterrupted service all year.

- Manage multiple systems from a single user login and password, and a single email account.

- Be the first to get new Red Hat Network functionality as Red Hat expands the Red Hat Network platform.

- Receive optional promotions, surveys and discounts for other Red Hat products and services.

I'm truly disillusioned. It looks like this means that every 60 days or so, Red Hat is going to send me a survey in order to keep my Red Hat Network Demo account open. In other words, I'll be coerced into completing a survey in order to keep my systems up to date. Not to mention being spammed to purchase full update accounts.

It's a good thing I've already started moving my machines to Debian.

What do you think about Red Hat's ever-quickening move to full commercialism? I'll post your responses in Thursday's Penguin Shell.

Have a great Tuesday.

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

GnomeTWEAK

Newsreaders, Part 2

Link Chris, I've become a real news feed junkie. It's incredibly convenient to aggregate my daily news and blog reads into a single view, and knowing that it's updating at regular intervals. XML and RSS have made it all possible and with a good newsreader, you, too, can enjoy your news, your way.

Last week, we talked a bit about AmphetaDesk, a fine newsreader offering from Morbus at disobey.com. Today, I'll pass along some thoughts on NewsMonster, another great newsreader ready for your Linux box.

NewsMonster is the new kid on the block. Ben Hammersley's site is the first I'd heard of it, just a few weeks back. Ben's site also has a long discussion via reader comments of the pros and cons of NewsMonster's caching features. In any case, NewsMonster is about as rich in features and flexibility as you'll find in any newsreader. It's fully configurable, easy to use, and presents your news in a rich and nicely formatted fashion. As much as I like AmphetaDesk, NewsMonster has grabbed my news aggregation tasks full time in the past few weeks.

There are several things to bear in mind with NewsMonster - sort of the price of doing business, as it were. First is the installation. The current version of NM requires that Java and Java Web Start are installed on your machine. However, NM has a difficult time recognizing Java on Linux boxes. Your install of NM may or may not see the Java installation on your system. This can be resolved fairly painlessly by assuring that the java binary is in your system's PATH:

export PATH:$PATH:/path/to/your/java/bin/dir

Better yet, add your java bin directory to the PATH variable in the .bash_profile file in your home directory. Simply append it to the existing line, prepended with a colon.

NewsMonster offers an offline cache feature that works recursively through the directories on a site to save links and images for later viewing. If you're on a full-time connection, this really is unnecessary. It also holds the potential to dramatically increase the bandwidth use of those sites you're reading via NM. If you don't need the online caching feature, do the bandwidth-friendly thing and leave it off.

NewsMonster integrates very tightly into your Mozilla browser. In fact, the free version can be installed via xpi extensions available to Mozilla. In other words, NewsMonster will create an extension of Mozilla that places all its configuration and Wizards directly into the Mozilla menus. NM will also become your default home page once installed, opening the sidebar to display your chosen news feeds.

With Java and Java Web Start properly installed and referenced in the PATH, you can update your feeds via a nice graphical window from the Tools menu of Mozilla. If you'd rather let this process happen in the background, you'll need to download the standalone NewsMonster aggregator. It includes two command-line versions that work quite well. I've configured NM on my machine to use the newsmonster-console version. With a quick line in cron referencing the newsmonster-console app, my system updates my news feeds every four hours, without even so much as getting my hands dirty.

Finally, NewsMonster creates an .rdf file to track your subscriptions. This is particularly useful for copying the subscription list from one machine to another. Just this afternoon, I scp'ed the subscriptions.rdf file from my machine at home to the machine at work, effectively replicating the setup.

I like what I've seen with NewsMonster, though I'm sure I've only just begun to touch the features it contains. Bear the above in mind and it's possible you'll come to rely on NewsMonster as much as I have.

Recommend It!
Send us a GnomeTWEAK

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!

It's one of those fundamental things with computers: never just hit the power button. Hard shutdowns are hard on systems. Data may not get written, filesystems may be corrupted - it's all bad when you press the power button without shutting down cleanly. And, given that our focus in Penguin Shell is primarily aimed at new users, today seems like as good a day as any to talk about properly shutting down your Linux system.

There are several safe ways to shutdown your system, but today we're going to talk about only one - shutdown and all it's options.

shutdown in Linux is a root command. It actually hands control over to /etc/init. /etc/init sends a SIGTERM signal to each running process and places the system in runlevel 1. Buffers are written to drives, filesystems are properly unmounted, and the system shuts down with the grace of a high-wire walker. In fact, the system will notify all other logged in users of the impending shutdown.

The syntax for shutdown is:

shutdown [options] when [message]

We'll talk about the time and messages in a minute. The options to shutdown are:

• -c: cancel an in-progress shutdown
• -f: bypass fsck when rebooting, resulting in a [f]ast reboot
• -h: halt the system when the shutdown is complete
• -k: print the warning message but don't actually shutdown
• -n: perform the shutdown without a call to init
• -r: reboot the system when the shutdown is complete
• -t sec: create a sec second delay between killing the processes and changing to runlevel 1

The message can be anything you'd like, quite literally. The default message will vary depending on the options you've given shutdown, but will be along the lines of:

The system is going DOWN for reboot NOW!

To add a shutdown message of your own, enclose it in quotes at the end of the shutdown command:

shutdown -h +5 "Save those files, boys and girls ..."

This results in a broadcast message of:

Save those files, boys and girls ...
The system is going DOWN for system halt in 5 minutes!

Shutting down gracefully and alerting logged in users is a core function of Linux - basic, but critical to remember.

Recommend It!
Send us a GnomeCORE tip

GnomeFILE

Seahorse 0.7.1

http://seahorse.sourceforge.net/

"Seahorse is a Gnome front end for GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard program. It is a tool for secure communications and data storage. Data encryption and digital signature creation can easily be performed through a GUI and Key Management operations can easily be carried out through an intuitive interface."

Recommend It!
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GnomeVOICE

Help Randolph Potter
Scribbled by Chris Melancon

"I did have satellite offices doing the same thing as Randolph - connecting through expensive ISDN connections to my main office. While I don't have what he requested-an open source software solution to dial up the ISDN line-I solved my problem by redefining it.

"ISDN service was costing several hundred dollars a month. The basic "business" cable modem service here is $79 per month. I already have T1 service downtown, so I eliminated the ISDN lines altogether and got a cable modem for the office instead.

"Then I got a Linksys BEFVP41 VPN router for each office. At the time they were the only ones making an inexpensive VPN router (i.e. below the price level and per-user licensing requirements of SonicWall et al). Now Netgear makes the FV318 which I have yet to try, from the reviews it appears to have a few more features but it is a little more restrictive (only supports 20 users and 5 VPN connections, etc). At any rate, both of these are in the $100-150 price range, and are basically your common broadband router with VPN tunneling support built in to hardware. Which to choose is left as an exercise to the reader.

"Additionally, if you had a spare box lying around, I'm sure that it would not be hard to set up a Linux-based router with VPN support. For $120 I will take the unit that does it out of the box, as I have other things to take care of. The corporate version of SmoothWall appears to support this with some of its upgrade packs - but again, I am only using the basic functionality and $120 is cheap.

"You need a static IP at at least one end (and it's a little easier with one at both ends) to support a VPN tunnel. Static IPs were outrageously expensive from my cable company-an additional $69 a month for them to perform a one-time allocation, so I opted to leave the remote offices on dynamic IPs. I ended up having to install a matching BEFVP41 at my main office alongside my big expensive firewall, because the main big-name firewall could not support VPN tunnels to dynamic IPs without something proprietary in its own software client (it did not fully support the IPSEC standard). Once I did that, I have each office on a separate subnet and everyone can talk to each other over inexpensive, fast connections to the Internet. Granted it's no speed demon but it is faster than 64K ISDN, and the VPN routers allow for multiple computers on each end to connect and do not bog the computers down like a software VPN client.

"So now I have replaced hundreds of dollars in ISDN charges with a connection that is faster and cheaper. On 512K cable lines on a good day, I have tested throughput to the office at over 400K through the Linksys boxes. Even when it's not blazing fast, it still is much faster than the 64K ISDN lines were. I consider the fast Internet access they have as an additional benefit - before they were getting Internet access over the ISDN line from our T1 downtown. This solution will work with whatever Internet access is available - DSL would be fine, and I now have other offices on their own T1 lines as well.

"Maybe this solution can work for you too."

Recommend It!
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GnomeCLICK

Free Linux Training and Tutorials

http://www.intelinfo.com/newly_researched_free_training/Linux.html

The Free Linux Training and Tutorials site is a full listing of resources available on the web. The tutorials include helpful guides from IBM, LinuxWorld, and O'Reilly. There are also useful links from transitioning from Windows to Linux and guides to some of the most popular Linux software. Not all the links are active on the Free Linux Training and Tutorials site, but there's more than enough information to fill your training time to the brim.

Recommend It!
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