Linux

I find myself pronouncing a lot of English words differently from what my friends do. One of the reasons for this is the fact that English just happens to be one of the 5 languages that I speak.

A couple of these word pronunciations also lead to a healthy debate with neither party accepting defeat and the only way to conclude such a debate is to validate the pronunciation.

Not to boast, but most of these debates are won by me and there is no denying that I have lost a couple too ! Surprisingly there have been debates where both parties have lost :)

When you are also in a similar situation below are some of the tools

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A service is a long running executable which does require any user intervention and is configured to start when the operating system is booted.

On Windows, the services are managed via services.msc and you can also communicate with a NT service using the SC tool.

On Linux the services can be controlled via the chkconfig command line tool.

Usage details of chkconfig  is shown below:

chkconfig --list [name] chkconfig --add <name> chkconfig --del <name> chkconfig [--level <levels>] <name> <on|off|reset>

Add and Del options are used to create or delete services for management. A service can be activated

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Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people. There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible ...

PixelBeat has nice compilation of some of the commonly used Linux terminal commands. The commands are also categorized and should help in finding the right command/command usage for the task at had.

Link: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html

Also note the comment in the above page:

Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, soyou may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.

Don't forget to Bookmark it for future reference !

I was a die hard fan of Suse Linux and was hesitant to try other Linux distributions.

Suse 10.1 worked flawlessly on my laptop and I was able to even get the Xgl working on my ATI Radeon X700 graphics card.

Post on SuseSuse 10.1Xgl Working on SuseXGL on Suse - Photoset

The other Linux distribution that is very popular among geeks is Ubuntu. My friend Harish recently shifted to Ubuntu and this further motivated me to try out Ubuntu.

Unlike Suse distribution which is around 4GB, Ubuntu 7.04 codenamed Fiesty Fawn

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Every time I try to edit a file in Unix using vi, I end up corrupting the file rather than "editing" it.

To get out of the mess I resort to q! command which helps me to exit from editor without saving the modifications. Incidentally this command (q!) happens to be one of the most used commands by me :(

An alternative to avoid this mess is to start the XServer and use gedit/kate to edit the file. However this is not suitable if you want to quickly make few changes in the file.

So I have decided to master vi in one week (hopefully it should be enough).

If you are also in a similar soup and want

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If I wanted to created a directory tree say /first/second/third this is how I used to do it, till now.

$ cd /$ mkdir first$ cd first$ mkdir second$ cd second$ mkdir third$ cd third

Today I learnt that you could do this in a single swipe using the -p option!

mkdir -p first/second/third

And its not just restricted to simple hierarchies, you could even create a complex tree structure like this

$ mkdir -p project/{lib/ext,bin,src,doc/{html,info,pdf},demo/stat/a}

You can find 9 more such interesting tips on the IBM post titled "Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits"

The default shell on most Linux operating systems is Bash. And as with every other application (which I use extensively) the first thing I do is to search/use Keyboard shortcuts. First I checked the Bash Reference Manual, however there was no mention of any keyboard shortcut in that manual. A search in Google lead me to this post (via Digg). For those who are lazy to click on that link, here is the list :) Ctrl + A Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on Ctrl + E Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on Ctrl + L ...

Sorry if you are mislead by the title. Check this image. (Click for the enlarged image)

Also this happens to be my new wallpaper on SuSE. I found this image in one of the Novell's CoolSolution Article.

I just couldn't stop laughing for some time :) Notice that stare given by the Penguin :)

Now for the important question ! Will the Penguin "catch" the Butterfly or will it "fail" ?

I finally got Xgl working on SuSE. I struggled for 2 days to set this up and finally a comment left by a reader(Mahesh) on my earlier post helped me to resolve the problem !

So what was the problem ?

Compiz was not installed properly ! Gnome Control Center showed the Desktop Effects tool (confirming that Compiz is installed), however when I opened the Gnome configuration editor (gnome-editor) I couldn't find Compiz under the apps.

So I removed Compiz which was installed from software.opensuse.org and installed the one which was available on the SuSE 10.1 DVD.

There were a couple of other configuration I did as per the instructions in this post:

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17174.html

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