Get It Now! mp3 file Contact Details: Email: questions@rootsmart.com Voicemail: (206) 734-4825 Skype: rootsmart Content: Today we talked about the eff Click here for the full show notes

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Get It Now! mp3 File Contact Details: Email: questions@rootsmart.com Voicemail: (206) 734-4825 Skype: rootsmart Content: Today we talked about getting help on the internet we used google, Forums, Mailing lists and IRC Click Here for full show notes

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Get it Now! mp3 file Contact Details: Email: questions@rootsmart.com Voicemail: (206) 734-4825 Skype: rootsmart Vote for us at Podcast Alley Email: Hi Joe :) nice to hear you again ! It seems like you got nice hollydays, you seem to talk more freely, good ! (my holyday will be in october.... I had no summer vacation this year). As I told you in the forum, I started last july a linux podcast.. finally.. after long weeks of reflexion listening to your podcast, and other. I call it "Les Minutes Linux".. that of course is in French :) So am I, isn't it ? So thanks for having indirectly me pushed to make this podcast :p (http://minuteslinux.podmiel.info) I think you got a little too fast in the istallation of a programm, from source. I don't know exactly the audience you have (average level of knowledge, etc..) All linux distros have one think in common : the all have repositories where users can pick and install programs easily. Using yum , yast, adept, synaptic. So did I on my introduction podcast.... Users don't need to crawled aroud the web to find anything, it's 90% sure in the repositorie of their distros. Here.. I make a little intro also for your nexwt episode :) Enjoy Olivier Content: Computer were supposed to make us more productive most of the time they do in the web 2.0 world there are plenty of online planning and organizational tools one of the most popular are todo list managers We have different online sites such as tada list and Remember The Milk Also there are many different offline tools, such as iCal and Outlook These are all good except they save files as a sort of portable format you can export them to iCal format, but still some things don't import and export iCal usually you are eith completely locked into a product, or you have to go through a kludge to get the file into another application there is one universal format, that anyone can read, text text is so simple that no matter what, you can read a text file also reading a text file will be something that even in 10 or more years, you still we be able to read text so we have to format down, now what is the best way to edit plain text for me it involves the command line Thankfully, I read a blog called LifeHacker On that blog, Gina Tripathi had a similar love for the command line Initially she just came up with the idea of keeping your taks in a plain text file since Gina is a command line junkie like me, she came up with some little ways of editing the file effiecently using linux tools mostly it was a lot of grepping and using cat to list the text file in the shell then in another article, Gina posted a small script that would do many of these commands for you and you wouldn't have to remember much this concept of a todo shell script was liked by a lot of people, and it spawned its own website Now there are many different parts of the script The most important is the todo.sh shell script it is a shell script which means it will run in Linux and OS X natively for windows you need a bash emulator such as cygwin to run the scriptt there are other tools on the website such as a AIM and Jabber Bot those allow you to access your todo list from AIM or Jabber There are also many different additions and little hacks for it First though, we are going to go over how to use and install the todo shell script Installing the script on Linux and OS X is very easy All you need to do is download the .zip file and extract it to make it executable just run chmod 755 todo.sh go edit the .todo file and put the location of where you want your todos and everything to be held that is all, you are done installing the script the main problem with this is that you need to put the entire path to the todo.sh to run it what I do is I want to be able to simply type t to get to the todo.sh to do this I simply created a symlink in my /bin directory that points at todo.sh to do this change directory into your /bin directory then we are going to create a link to do this type ln -s /path/to/todo.sh t make sure you do that in the /bin directory also make sure you use the -s flag so now you are ready to use todo.sh type t list to test it all as for windows you will need a bash emulator such as cygwin cygwin is easy to install simply download the installer and then run it then it will create all the files you need and place a shortcut on the desktop now simply download the .zip again we are going to do the same thing you did for OS X and Linux so now that it is installed, I use t as the way to get to the todo.sh the most common thing you want to do with a todo list is to list them so simply type t list this will list all of your entries if you want to search for a entry type t list <search term> this will search your list for what you say now lets add an entry to do this simply type t add <todo item> now let me tell you about how todos can be categorized there are three different ways, priority, project, context the priority is a simple A,B,C,D and so on to do that you will want to type (A) or whatever priority and then the todo then we have project, which is a certain project that you want to add a todo to for this we use p:Project name last is context we do this through the @ symbol so you type @phone to say this is something to deal with the phone no that you can add and list todos lets show how to mark todos as done to do that we type t do <number of todo> that will put an x and the date in front of the todo also you want to delete todos we do that with a t del <number of todo> to remove those done entries, we type t archive this will put all of the done entries into a done.txt file those are the basics of todo.sh you can do most things with these commands I find that this is a very cool way to have your todo's listed in a very platform agnostic format Now that we have the todo.sh done and natural for us there are other little tools that you might want to deal with I find the best way to get to your todos outside of the command line is to simply use the aim bot to use the aim bot you need perl with the OSCAR cpan module generally perl and cpan are installed on Linux and OS X as for windows, installing perl is outside of the scope of this podcast once you have it all installed, just type perl todobot.pl with the correct aim user information this will allow you to access your todo list from your phone if you can get to aim via your phone also I programmed a php script that allows you to access your todo list via the web these and much more is listed on the main site that is all

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Get It Now! Contact Details: Email: questions@rootsmart.com Voicemail: (206) 734-4825 Skype: rootsmart Vote for us at Podcast Alley We are Back! Content: This will be the last podcast in our linux series installing software on linux can be quite hard it is generally the hardest part for windows users to get used to over the years it has gotten much easier we are going to go from hard to easy to start we are going to compile this is the way software has been installed on linux for quite a while first we are going to need to download the source code the source code is generally in what is called a "tarball" these tarballs usually have a .tar.gz ending the .tar section stands for Tape ARchive it was from back in the days of tape backup tar will bring a folder structure together into one file the .gz part is GunZipped tar might bring everything to together, but it doesn't compress anything so the .gz part compresses the .tar part to make a compressed file this made a ton of sense when on dial-up but it has now just become common practice so we need to find the source code tarball you can do this one of two ways you can either go the projects main site or you can do it how I do it and go to freshmeat.net freshmeat is a search engine for linux projects and on the project pages they have links to the source code as well as any other distribution methods today we are going to use gaim as our example application so head over to the gaim project page Now we are going to download it through a command line utility the command line utitlity is called wget wget is a command line internet tool used to download files. so you are going to need to get the url location of the tarball this is pretty easy to do, you just have to go through one of sourceforge's mirrors now the syntax for wget is wget url so just type in wget and then the url of the tarball now this will download the file to your current working directory I usually try to download source code and other temporary things in my /tmp directory that way it is all in one place so now it will take a little time to download and you have this tarball we need to extract the contents of this initially you needed to use two different processes to extract tarball gunzip would decompress the file, and then tar would actually extract it since tarballs are so popular tar has the gunzip part built in to extract an archive you are going to type tar xvzf tarball replace tarball with the name of the .tar.gz file you will see a long list of things these are the files being extracted from the tarball now you should have a folder in the directory called what the tarball was called without the .tar.gz now you have the source code extracted this is where it gets fun so lets cd into that directory most source code comes with a configure script this does a lot of work for you so lets assume that the configure script is there if it isn't you will have to read through a lot of documentation to configure the make so to run this configure script type ./configure now a lot of things will happen it checks many different things the most important is it checks for gcc gcc is the c compiler that is very popular almost all of the distributions either have gcc already installed or a gcc package make sure that you have gcc installed when you do this configure script it might come up with an error most of the time the errors from the configure script is a missing library libraries are little pre done code samples that programmers use to get those libraries you want to look through your package manager if the library isn't in there, then you might have to download them and compile them google will tell you your answers so once you get a successful configure it will say that it is making some files now you will notice that you have a new makefile in the directory so now we need to do a make command this make command will do the actual compiling this will probably take the longest time to do simply just type make all kinds of these will go across your screen when that is done everything is compiled now that everything is compiled, you need to put it in the correct place you don't need to do this manually to move all of the correct files just type make install this will move everything now everything is installed look through the documentation for the location of the executable now you can remove the tarball and that source code folder you know have that program installed from source one of the biggest downfalls of compiling is trying to uninstall there is no real good way to uninstall compiled applications the only way to do it is to do a search for the application and then remove all of the files you find the next way to install software is through a package manager these days there are two main package managers there is the Red Hat Package Manager and the Debian package manager Red Hat Package Mangers are rpms and Debian packages are deb files first we are going to look at rpms, then debs operating systems such as fedora and suse use rpms for package management they use there own tools they still generally use the rpm program for command line tools that install a single package there are two different ways to use the package mangers one is to use a software such as yum for fedora this will go out and look at a repository that someone maintains and then resolve any dependencies then there is just single file install which is just using the rpm command first download the rpm file then you can install the file with a rpm -i file command this will install, you can use the -u command if it is updating now that will look for all of the dependencies it needs if you don't have one it will alert you and it won't install now the better way to do this is to use a tool like yum yum is for fedora, yast is for suse they generally have the same syntax yum doesn't require you to download anything up front you can use it by typing yum install app it will then look at a repository that is managed by someone it looks for the file and then if there are any dependencies that you don't have installed on your system, it will download those also the deb system also has both a package manager and then a command line tool to use the download command line tool download the .deb then install it with dpkg -i package that will install the file but not any dependencies now I find they have the best repository manager called apt-get apt-get works the same as yum just type apt-get install package this is the basics of installing

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Get It Now mp3 file Contact Details: Email: questions@rootsmart.com Voicemail: (206) 734-4825 Skype: rootsmart Donate Vote for us at Podcast Alley Email Hi Joe, I have one podcast (Sean Hannity) out of seven that won't download/update since 4/19/06 in itunes. Any advice on how make it download? Many Thanks, Scott Joe; Maybe you can help me out with this. I need a decent bootloader program. I want to have three or four operating systems on the same computer. I have one entire drive dedicated to windows. I would like to have another drive with two or three partitions for Linux distros. Partitioning is no problem but getting the operating systems from stomping all over the bootloader is another problem. For example, when I install Ubuntu, it wipes out SuSE and vice verse. They are both on the hard drive but each one kicks the other out of the boot process. I don't know how to resolve this in the install process. While listening to another podcast I discovered a couple of things. There are bootloader programs so that I can choose which OS to load. I knew this but it never occurred to me till I heard it on the other podcast. Second, Ubuntu 6.06 does not give an option to put the boot loader on the partition it is on. As a result it generates its own MBR, therefore making the separate boot loader program problematic. I suppose I could only put the boot loader program CD in only when I wanted to boot to other systems than Ubuntu. I think there must be a way to edit the boot.ini file in Windows but I am not to sure how it is done. So here is the questions, can you recommend a third party boot loader program, I know System Commander is good but I have to pay for that, free would be better but not essential. I don't want to use a floppy so I have to be able to do it from CD? Next, any suggestions on the Ubuntu 6.06 conundrum? Are there other choices to accomplish this that I don't know about. By the way the podcast I was listening to was Linux Reality, it is very good. I am sure you have heard it. Looking forward to your next podcast. Thanks; Charlie Content Today we are talking about partitions and disks in Linux Disks are not handled in the same way that Windows handles disks In linux disks are handled as mount points So in windows you have drives C:, D: whatever in linux you have mount points So lets say you have two partitions, A and B You want your home folder to be on a seperate partition, A so you set the mount point of partition A to be /home so you can be using your home folder without ever realizing it is a seperate drive this makes the use of other drives very transparent so to see what drives you have plugged in, we need to check a file the file is located in the /etc directory called fstab this will have lines that look like /dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults, errors=remount-ro 0 1 ok so you don't need to worry about the stuff after ext 2 the first thing says the device in this case it is the first partition on the first channel of the master IDE channel hd means it is a IDE drive a means it is the Master channel on the 1st IDE channel the 1 is the partition if you want the drive on the slave on the first IDE channel you can go to hdb as for sata drives, you get sd drives sd stood for SCSI now sata runs on the same devices as SCSI this uses the same scheme the next entry in the fstab is the / that is the mount point, this is loaded at the root and the next is ext2 that is the filesystem ext2 and ext3 are very common so now we are going to go over partitioning a lot of the times, I recommend this to be done graphically you don't want to make a mistake, and a typo could be a massive mistake but we are focusing on command line, so let me show you how to do this I am going to assume that we are working on the HDA drive so to see what is on the HDA drive type fdisk /dev/hda this will print out the amount of cylinders and all kinds of other info the cylinders are used mainly for size, but don't worry too much about it so first lets go over deleting partitions type fdisk /dev/hda then at the prompt type p this gets you a reference now type d and choose a partition to delete now we want to create a new partition type n choose extended or primary you probably want primary the reason for this is that standard PCs only allow four partitions these are primary partitions if you want/need more you need to create extended partitionso so now at the number field type in that same number that you deleted now at the cylinder, choose how large, so you can do +5000M to create something that is 5 gigs now type t this will ask what is the Hex code and if this is a linux partition choose 83 if it is a swamp file choose 82 now type p you should see everything all right now this is the big step no changes have been written yet so, make sure you know what you are doing now type w and you are done since we are on drives, let me go over filesystems filesystems are the way that a OS will find files, and information on those files on the drive Linux supports hundreds of file systems but here are the most common ext2 is a ver fast filesystem, that defragments itself its newer cousin is ext3 which is fast and defragments and also is journaled journaled means that if your system crahses, or has an abrupt stop, such as when you pull the cord it probably wont' lose any data ISO9660 is what is used on all CDs FAT is a very common filesystem that can be read by OS X, Windows, and Linux ResiserFs is a new filesystem optimized for smaller files it is used by SuSe heavily so you can't mount the partition you just created yet it needs a filesystem to do this we say mke2fs -j /dev/hda1 you then put it what partition you want the j option makes it ext3 ok so if you want to mount this drive in the /home directory you would type mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /home/ the -t ext3 chooses what filesystem to unmount this type unmount /home/ That is drives in Linux for you one more of these and then we are done for the linux for a while

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