Well, actually, I had the newsletter almost finished by the time we had to leave for a cruise to Alaska with my family. We'd made sure we could have proper Internet access, so I planned to submit the material from our "stateroom." Instead, one of their servers crashed (at least, that's as close as I can figure it out from the odd bits and pieces their guest services people told me) and prevented me from connecting through the entire trip.

Aside from the "minor" technical difficulties, I definitely enjoyed the cruise! I didn't catch any nasty stomach flus, and while we visited some glaciers, the boat didn't get ripped open by ice (perhaps I've seen the movie Titanic one too many times). I did get to see a family of seals gliding along on an ice floe; the amazing blue, white, pink, and black of glaciers; whales puffing out air; and some just plain incredible scenery.

As always, though, it's nice to be home. This week we look at Mandrake, the find command, and more.

See You at Gnomedex,              
Dee-Ann LeBlanc       

GnomeEGGS

Choosing a Distribution, Part III - Mandrake GNU/Linux 9.1

Mandrake GNU/Linux has a strong following in the Linux community. They have paid membership clubs for both individual users and businesses, heavily active community forums, and more. This distribution also has a heavily automated installation process, taking care of many things for you right out of the box.

When you reach the initial installation screen, you can just press Enter to start your install, or press F1 to access the list of additional options. Advanced users can type expert at the boot prompt if they want more control over their installation than the average person. You also have the chance to choose a text-based install, or low resolution, if you run into problems running the normal versions. The function keys F1 through F3 offer you additional information and screens.

Once you start your installation, you'll have plenty of opportunities to click buttons labeled Advanced if you want to. The documentation has unfortunately not been updated with 9.1, but most of the coverage in the 9.0 manuals is still helpful. It's mostly that the screenshots will look different.

At the end of the main installation section you do run into something confusing. You'll get a dialog box with a list of features. Some of them are labeled "not configured," so you know to click the Configure button and set them up before proceeding (if you want to). Others will say things like "No printer," so you can decide if you want to set up your printer at this point or not. Be sure to look through the whole list and configure whatever items you're going to want to use later; though, of course, if you forget something you can use the Mandrake tools at any time to change settings.

Mandrake gives you standard GNOME and KDE interfaces (if you choose to install both of them), though - of course - with a Mandrake-customized look and feel. It's key configuration tool is the Mandrake Control Center, which is worth taking a tour through so you can become familiar with what's there. The individual components (and more) are available under the Configuration menu off the GUI main menu.

Mandrake is also an RPM-based distribution, so if you start here and go to Red Hat or start with Red Hat and then try Mandrake, what you learn about handling the package manager is a skill that will translate from one distribution to another. Where Red Hat has its Red Hat Network for updates, you can use Mandrake's tool at Configuration | Packaging | Mandrake Update to make sure that your software is kept , and your machine isn't vulnerable to unsavory elements like attacks and bugs. I have to admit, though, that I've found the Mandrake Update tool a bit frustrating to use; it fails a lot on me without any explanation of why.

Of course, you don't need Mandrake Update to grab the latest packages. You can get them through the Web site or through FTP, as per the instructions on the Mandrake site. The most important thing - regardless of which way you intend to find the latest fixes - is that you sign up to Mandrake's (or your chosen distribution's) bug and security update mailing list. Doing so will make sure you always know when you need to download new versions of your software. The longer you wait to do this, the more likely it is that someone will use a known bug to break into your system.

Once you try out the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution, you'll become part of the great big family of Mandrake's fans. Make use of the discussion groups and online documentation, and soon you'll be hanging out with the GnomeCHICKS so you can learn more advanced ways of making use of your Linux box.

Next week: SuSE Linux

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GnomeCHICKS

The find command

There are a number of commands in Linux that both confuse and delight us. One of these is find, the super-powerful utility that has so many flags, switches, and options that just reading the manual page can make you dizzy. There's lots of beginning material out there for find, so I'm going to skip that and go straight to some of its more advanced and interesting uses.

For a first example, let's find all of the files on the system that have changed in the last fifteen minutes, regardless of who owns them. You'll have to run this command as root so you have access to everything. (I'll be lecturing you folks about this constantly: never use root unless you absolutely have to. Otherwise, you can cause lots of damage to your system with a simple typo.)

To find every file that's changed in the last fifteen minutes, no matter where it is on the machine, you'll start the command with the following construct:

find /

This tells find to start at the root directory. Any time you use the root account and start from the root directory, you know the command will take a while, so prepare to be patient. From there, we'll use the -mmin option, which stands for "modified minutes." The following tells find to look for any file that was modified (changed) within the last fifteen minutes:

find / -mmin -15

You need to place the minus before the 15 to tell find that you want any file that's been changed from one second ago to fifteen minutes ago. If you didn't use the minus, it would look for files that had changed exactly fifteen minutes ago.

How about a more complex example? Let's say that the user bob left for vacation two days ago, and hasn't had access to the system since then. Perhaps we're worried that someone's broken into his account and might be using it while he's gone. So, we want to find all of the files owned by the user bob that have been accessed in the last two days. We would use the -user option to specify we're interested in bob's files, and the -atime option to specify that we're interested in files accessed in a certain number of days.

The command we'd construct for this one - and, again, run as root - is:

find / -atime -2 -user bob

We've again used the minus in front of the number because we want it within the last two days, not exactly two days ago. Also, we used -atime instead of -amin because the time version counts in days and we don't have to list exact numbers of minutes.

Let's look at one more example - something even more complex. Perhaps we want to view the contents of all text files (since we wisely end all of our text files with .txt) in the /tmp directory that haven't been accessed for three days. You should already know part of the answer to this one. We'll use -atime 3 as one of our flags, along with -name since we're specifying part of the actual filename. This command might begin with:

find /tmp -name *txt -atime 3

But that's not all. To actually view the contents of each file, we'll need to use the -exec flag to run the cat command (type man cat for more information on this one). With -exec, things can get complex since the actual format is typically:

-exec command_to_run \{\} \;

Yes, that looks weird. Each of the back slashes (\) is an "escape character," which tells Linux to read the characters {, }, and ; literally instead of trying to interpret them as something special. They're special in the context of find, but the shell might try to make use of them before even parsing the find command. The {} actually refers to the name of the file that find just found, and the ; ends the statement. So, our whole command looks like the following:

find /tmp -name *txt -exec cat \{\} \;

So it won't all scroll off the end of the screen before I can read it, I typically pipe the whole output to less so it will show just one screen at a time:

find /tmp -name *txt -exec cat \{\} \; | less

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VIA Technologies, Inc. presents: "Current Enthusiast Technology" ~ Kyle Bennett is Editor-in-Chief of one of the largest and influential desktop computer hardware sites on the Net. Kyle is known for his outspoken opinions that do not necessarily always keep a smile on the faces of the companies they address. His views on HardOCP are known for making a difference in the enthusiast tech community and keeping a grass roots approach to technology and gaming. Only at Gnomedex 3.0.

NVIDIA Corporation presents: "In-Depth How-to" ~ Scott Baker is senior product manager in the platform business group at NVIDIA, where he oversees the development and execution of the Company's industry-leading and award-winning NVIDIA nForce2 platform processors. Prior to joining the platform business group, Mr. Baker was the manager of OEM program management for NVIDIA's mobile business group. Mr. Baker has also held several influential positions at IBM, including Product Engineer, Project Manager, and Engineering Manager. Mr. Baker holds a BA in Economics from The Johns Hopkins University, a BSEE from The University of Maryland, College Park, and an MBA from Duke University. And you can meet him at Gnomedex 3.0.

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