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Mark's Linux Notes

Renewable Energy Open Source Software Internet Reference Tools Mac Notes

References to Linux Utilities and Applications

Requisite disclaimer: Use any of these tools at your own risk—You have been warned.

Kernel Developer Quits—future of Linux for the Desktop; but …
… what about Fedora 9?

Adventures with Fedora 7

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Punctuation/Numeric | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

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3D Planetarium3DPlanetarium is a program that shows you, in animated real time, the solar system with (actually) 22 bodies. It shows the planets of solar sytem and some of they satellites, all textured and in a "right" position. There is also a Planetarium, in which you can see all the bright stars (over 3000), and planets. You can zoom on a planet and look it as you are using a telescope.

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Applications and Utilities for review and download Categorized by Administration, System, Networking, Entertainment, Multimedia, Graphics, Office, Communication, Development tools, Dæmons, Scientific, GUI, Environments; and there's a place where you can submit other programs for inclusion in the list.

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BinutilsThe GNU Binutils are a collection of binary tools.

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cdda2wavcdda2wav is a sampling utility for CD-ROM drives that are capable of sending audio CD data in digital form to your computer (CDDA). Data can be dumped into wav, sun or cdr format files. Options control the recording format (stereo/mono, 8,12,16 bits, different rates), as well as sound pitch. SCSI cdrom drives and burners, as well as many IDE cdrom drives are supported.

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dmidecodeDmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB). Further info here.

Dstat: Versatile resource statistics toolrDstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.

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EnscriptGNU enscript is a free replacement for the Adobe's enscript program. Enscript converts ASCII files to PostScript and spools generated PostScript output to the specified printer or leaves it to file. Enscript can be easily extended to handle different output media and it has many options that can be used to customize printouts. GNU Enscript is free software and it is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

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Finance-QuoteHistThe Finance-QuoteHist bundle is several modules designed to fetch historical stock quotes from the web.

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grepcidr - Filter IP addresses matching IPv4 CIDR/network specificationgrepcidr can be used to filter a list of IP addresses against one or more Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) specifications, or arbitrary networks specified by an address range. As with grep, there are options to invert matching and load patterns from a file. grepcidr is capable of comparing thousands or even millions of IPs to networks with little memory usage and in reasonable computation time. -- grepcidr has endless uses in network software, including: mail filtering and processing, network security, log analysis, and many custom applications.

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htdigHtdig retrieves HTML documents using the HTTP protocol and gathers information from these documents which can later be used to search these documents. This program can be referred to as the search robot.

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ImageMagickImageMagick^® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including DPX, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

IP Physical Address Lookup (Melissa Data) This lookup displays the location of an Internet Protocol (IP) address. Enter an IP address in the form of [x.x.x.x] (your IP is shown) and click on submit. The IP address used to display the form is your own Internet IP, same as from What-is-my-IP et al.

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jwhoisGNU JWHOIS is an Internet Whois client that contains an extensible configuration file which defines its operation. The client supports queries to foreign hosts either through the RFC 954 - NICNAME/WHOIS protocol, the RFC 2167 - Referral Whois 1.5 protocol, or HTTP using an external browser.

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KdissertKdissert is a mindmapping-like tool to help students to produce complicated documents very quickly and efficiently : presentations, dissertations, thesis, reports. While targetted mostly at students, Kdissert can also help teachers, decision maker, engineers and businessmen.

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lftpLFTP is sophisticated ftp/http client, file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols. Like BASH, it has job control and uses readline library for input. It has bookmarks, built-in mirror, can transfer several files in parallel. It was designed with reliability in mind. LFTP is free software, distributed under GNU GPL license.

Loads of Linux LinksA linux geek's treasure trove!

Lsof - A utility which lists open files on a Linux/UNIX systemLsof stands for LiSt Open Files, and it does just that: it lists information about files that are open by the processes running on a UNIX system.

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MAKEDEV - create devicesMAKEDEV is a program that will create the devices in /dev used to interface with drivers in the kernel.

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NoIndent 1.0 - Removes leading space (not tab) indents from filesNoIndent fixes formatting in plain text files by removing the leading space indents (not tab indents) from each line.

O – Top

Opera web browserSee the key features here. Opera holds its own against Firefox and Netscape with superb performance. Worthy of preference for any web environment not specifically programmed to use only Internet Explorer.

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ParaloggerParalogger is a Bourne shell script to "tail" your system logs in pseudo transparent borderless Eterm(s). Paralogger's purpose is to make setting up a "root tail" an easy set and forget. (had been abandoned by the original author, but is GPL)

Q – Top

Quanta PlusA highly stable and feature rich web development environment.

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RSSOwlA good reader for RSS/RDF/Atom newsfeeds.

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Samba—Windows sharing on Unix flavorsOne of the most popular ways to connect to a remote file server or mount a volume on another client is through the Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet File System (CIFS) that is made much easier with the Samba suite of utilities. Unlike the Unix oriented Network File System (NFS), Samba is built to provide cross-platform file sharing. The GPL license requirements for Samba developers emphasizes its open source nature.

SpamTestBuddySpamTestBuddy is a simple, light-weight, multiple-input spam scoring tool. It is standalone and can be used with simple procmail rules without root access or daemons.

T – Top

Trim - Removes a number of lines from the beginning of a fileUtility used to monitor and control the sizes of (log) files. Examines a text file to see if its length has exceeded a certain limit; if it has, Trim removes a certain number of lines from the beginning of the file. Ideal for use in crontab.

U – Top

unix2dos - UNIX to DOS text file format converterProgram that converts text files in UNIX format to DOS format.

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VorbisOgg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.

W – Top

Webmin SysstatsWebminstats is a basic system static logging application that graphs the results. It's first use is system analysis.

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XwritsXwrits reminds you to take wrist breaks, which will hopefully help you prevent repetitive stress injury.

Y – Top

YaBB - Yet another Bulletin BoardYaBB is a leading FREE, Open Source community forum system (bulletin board, message board) written in Perl.

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ZopeZope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications. The Zope community consists of hundreds of companies and thousands of developers all over the world, working on building the platform and Zope applications. Zope is written in Python, a highly-productive, object-oriented scripting language.

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Quick links to Fedora 9:

Fedora 7 Installation and Use

Adventures in upgrading from Fedora Core 6, without a DVD.
(there are no CD images available to download, so if you have no DVD burner and/or blank DVD media, your options are reduced somewhat)

This is about installing Fedora 7 from the Internet using a boot CD. Let's start by listing the download sites and paths upfront for easy reference, and instant use if you're so inclined.

Select a mirror near you from this list:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/7

Important: The list of mirror sites in the link just above changes, as do also the paths on those sites. If you have not installed from these mirrors lately, it could save you time and frustration to check the list to ensure that your favored mirror is still there. Also, and just as important, it's best to check the path to the iso file you want, and in the case of running the CD from boot.iso, the image files that the install program will use to install your selected options. One way to do this is to anonymous FTP to your selected mirror site, and drill down to the directory with installs for the architecture (e.g. i386) of the machine to which you are installing Fedora. The directory you are looking for is the /os/ directory underneath the architecture directory. The boot.iso process will find the image file it wants from there, so going deeper into the directory in the mirror site and path screen of the install program will only cause an error and stop the process. Once you've determined the path to the os directory on the mirror you intend to use, note it exactly and then use that path for that mirror when installing.

To just run Fedora 7 from CD, download your preference between the following two full CD images off the download root level from your selected mirror site (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-KDE-Live-i686.iso
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso

Get the Internet installation boot CD image from this directory off the download root level from your selected mirror site (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso

After you boot your target install machine with the Internet boot CD, when it asks you for the path from your selected mirror where the installation files are, enter (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/

If all goes well, the screen should display a message advising that stage2.img or minstg2.img or something similar is being downloaded. After that, installation will launch and you are into the selection menus.

Once the installation process checks all the transactions, it will start installing hundreds of files. As with previous Red Hat installation utilities, this one displays the filenames and a one line description of what each file does.

Always double check for changes.

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Fedora release 7 installed without a hitch on my old Dell 933MHz Pentium III tower. Easiest Fedora upgrade I'd ever done.

Running sudo yum -y upgrade downloaded several hundred updates/upgrades, but there was enough extra disk space on the 20GB /dev/hda drive on the machine to cache and install them.

An issue yet to be resolved is the system now does not even see the second, former /dev/hdd1, partition on the 250GB drive that is in there. Fedora 7 install had complained about designating the drive in fstab as /dev/hdd1 instead of a label name. My favorite partion editor, parted, refused to label the msdos partition on the drive, so I had just commented out the /dev/hdd1 line in /etc/fstab to let the install proceed. After Fedora 7 installation, there was no hint of that drive in fstab, so it appears that the Fedora 7 install process re-writes fstab to its liking. I have options on this, and will be exploring them.

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There appear to be no more /dev/hd(x) devices in Fedora 7. The main hard drive, what used to be hda, is now sda; and the second hard drive is /dev/sdb. Having forgotten that I some time ago had reformatted the sdb drive to ext3, I thought there was a problem when I tried to mount it as vfat and got a bad superblock error (well, duh).

So I took the sdb drive off the IDE/ATA chain and put it on an external USB hub connected to the computer. It showed up as /dev/sdb1, just as when it was inside the box. Finally remembering what file system I had on it, I mounted the drive just fine through the USB hub (probably could have done the same from the ATA chain). Even without mounting the drive, and using the system mount when it appears, I found that I could edit a file and write it back to the drive (had not been able to write back in that mode in earlier versions of Fedora). Just to be sure the "write" took, I released the sdb1 drive via the KDE removal option and reconnected it. This time I mounted it in the traditional way to its old mount point in the /mnt/ directory. A cat of the edited file showed the changes (woohoo!).

Now to see what Fedora 7 will name a CD. I popped in a CD and it came up as /dev/scd0; yes the letter order is stated correctly: scd (just think "CD" perhaps as a means of remembering that).

Sound system's in good shape, and I played one of the ogg files I had to prove it.

Nice look and feel for the login screen after bootup. The hot-air baloon theme seems a little 1990s-ish to me, but mainly because I remember that theme from a commercial application package from that time.) For login, instead of the blank field default from Fedora Core 6, the Fedora 7 default login screen provides a list of accounts on the machine by person name versus account name (nice touch, but I'm sure there's a way to have it not list the accounts if needed for security reasons). In any case, leave it alone for a short time and you have to re-enter your user password to re-open the screen; as I've been having to do when I switch my KVM to my Macbook and stay there for a while.

PDFs display crisp and clear.

KDE on Fedora 7 has a nice feature with file properties being displayed upon mouseover of an icon. The temporary pop-up window shows device, permissions, owner, mount point if it's a storage device or type and name if it's an application, and other no-nonsense information.

So far no serious unhappyness on my part with Fedora 7.

More as the adventure continues … .

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Linux Kernel Developer Quits

July 2007
Except perhaps for those within the Linux kernel development listservs, the name Con Kolivas might not have been a household word. But it's bound to be now. In a nutshell, after having contributed patches and other code for the Linux kernel for several years, Con Kolivas is stepping away from the project in a very public way. The apparent reason: Linux kernel development is concentrated on server and enterprise functions at the expense of desktop users.

Kolivas' interview in Austrailian online magazine APC is worth reading through to the end. Don't stop there—read the posted comments following the interview too.

That there is a problem, well at least an issue, for Linux on the desktop is fairly well recognized. The reasons described by Kolivas in his interview would remove any hope of Linux becoming commonplace as a desktop environment under the current situation. That situation is that mainline linux kernel development is dominated by full time professionals solving corporate enterprise needs, such as support to backend databases, etc.—it's likely thought by this group, perhaps correctly, that there's not enough profit to be made for them by supporting a Linux desktop for the general public. Kolivas' take on the state of PC architecture, the economic reasons for its stagnation, and the effect of that on kernel development for any operating system is thought provoking to say the least.

Many of the discussion posts after the interview address what to do about this problem and where do we go from here. The impression I get from reading the post-interview posts is that it might be time for a forked Linux kernel project dedicated to optimizing desktop performance versus server performance. For example, how may people need a web server on their laptop?

Ubuntu gets kudos for aiming toward making the Linux desktop attractive to people other than computer geeks. As one post put it, having fun tweaking a system is no substitute for something that works without any fuss. But even Ubuntu is a distribution versus a completeley desktop-optimized kernel.

I think the aggregate of the posts points the way—it's time to fork a Linux kernel made for the desktop. Done creatively it might be very profitable. Takers, anyone?

Kernel patch homepage of Con Kolivas

Home Page of Con Kolivas

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