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Featured GNU/Free Software Projects

IceCat Web Browser

Image:icecat.png

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GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the source code from the Mozilla project is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins. In addition, GNU IceCat includes some privacy protection features:

  • Some sites refer to zero-size images on other hosts to keep track of cookies. When IceCat detects this mechanism it blocks cookies from the site hosting the zero-length image file. (It is possible to re-enable such a site by removing it from the blocked hosts list.)
  • Other sites rewrite the host name in links redirecting the user to another site, mainly to "spy" on clicks. When this behavior is detected, IceCat shows a message alerting the user.

Linuxgym

Linuxgym is an online learning system, developed at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia where it has consistently improved student pass rates by up to 40% compared with standard classroom delivery.

Linuxgym's interactive exercise books provide users with real-world problems to solve, give them well-focussed hints, and analyse their code to provide helpful feedback. The "Playground" is freely available to registered users who want to try out the system.

To use Linuxgym, simply install Linuxgym Live - a modification of the Ubuntu Linux distribution - which runs within 'VMware Player' a quarantined environment that leaves the host operating system safe and untouched. Once launched, it provides users with a desktop, terminal sessions and a Firefox web-browser pointing at the instructions, hints and feedback on the exercises. VMware Player is available for free and needs to be installed to run the Linuxgym Live Virtual Appliance.

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Image:logo_linuxgym.jpg

Featured Tutorials

Bash prompt basics

When managing a linux/unix operating system with command line, users and interacting with the system via shell. This article will explore some of the basic features of the bash shell prompt.

Default bash command line prompt in many linux systems does not have a color and display information about user's username, hostname and current working directory. As you well see in the following sections of this document this default settings can be easily changed by exporting a bash prompt PS{n} variables. Bash prompt can be modified to suit users needs and can display time, load, number of users using the system, uptime and more.

Image:bash_prompt.jpg
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Basic Linux commands Explained

alias, apropos, at, bc, cal, cat, cd, cfdisk, chgrp, chmod, chown, cksum, cp, csplit, date, dd, du, egrep, export, fgrep, find, fold, grep, head, join, logrotate, ls, mkdir, mv, mount, nl, od, pwd, rgrep, rm, scp, ssh, tail, tar, tee, time, touch, uname, uniq, useradd, usermod, vi /vim , watch, wc, whoami, whois, yes

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Step By Step guide on how to create custom Debian Amazon Machine Image

This guide will provide a necessary steps on how to create, bundle, upload, run and connect debian AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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Vim text editor tutorial

This tutorial has been written for both vi and vim. It starts with really basics, such as cursor navigation and ends with more advanced techniques like merging files. For every section of this tutorial there is a short video with hints to help you understand how vim / vi works. Even that I have divided this tutorial into parts from novice to the expert user, there is plenty more what vim can do to make your work with vim editor easier and more efficient. However completing this tutorial you will give sufficient knowledge about vim / vi and its features for your daily tasks.

Moving cursor around

In vim you can move cursor around with following keys h, l, k, j which is left, right, up and down respectively. You can move cursor around also with arrow keys, however this is possible only if they are available. Vim was designed for all kinds of terminals where arrow keys may not be available for you. Moreover, once you get used to using vim with h, l, k, j you will move more quickly than using arrow keys. Open some text file and try using those keys now:

vim yourfile.txt

move vim text editor cursor left with h, move vim text editor cursor right with l, move vim text editor cursor up with k ,move vim text editor  cursor down with j

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Linux Filesystem basics

This article explains basic commands for navigation within Linux file system. The diagram below represents (part of) a Linux file system know as Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. A line from one node to a node on its right indicates containment. For example, the student directory is contained within the home directory.

Linux file system Hierarchy Standard

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Featured Configs

Recover / Reset forgotten linux root password

This method of reseting/recovering of Linux root password should work on most of the linux distributions. I have tested this method for couple years already, starting with debian woody via redhat and suse to ubuntu hardy. If you run lilo boot loader instead of grub you can use the same method but with some modifications on how to edit lilo boot prompt.

reset / recover forgotten linux root password
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Quick Guide to cron scheduler

Every user as well as administrator of the linux system very often needs to execute some programs on regular basis. For example administrator needs to monitor a disk usage of a system. In this case cron scheduler is very handy tool to achieve this. For example if root needs to execute /usr/local/sbin/backup.sh script every Sunday at 2:36AM he would edit his crontab file as shown on the figure below:

# crontab -e

Image:cron.png

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Minimal Debian "etch" net-installation

Installation prerequisites

It is said that the installation of Debian Linux is know as one of the hardest among all Linux Distributions. In this article we will see that this is just a myth, in fact it is very easy, even for beginners. All you need is basic understanding of disk partitioning techniques and a downloaded/burned GNU/Linux 4.0 netinstall image which suits the hardware architecture you intend to install onto Debian Linux, and a internet connection. Of course there are other requirements, such as a working PC with a CD-ROM drive and free/unpartitioned space on your hard disk.

NOTE: Do not download all Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 installation disks! You only need the first CD or netinstall CD.
Debian Etch Introductory Screen
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Remote ssh login without entering a password

To be able to remotely login to ssh without a password you need to generate public keys and copy them to a remote box. Try creating a passwordless connection from linuxconfig.local to linuxconfig.org. In this example you will create keys for the root user, also note that the exact same principles apply to any user created in the system.


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Setup Bootsplash on Debian

Verbose default Debian bootsplash with GRUB
Verbose default Debian bootsplash with GRUB
Silent default Debian bootsplash with GRUB
Silent default Debian bootsplash with GRUB

This article describes how to install and boot using bootsplash on Debian etch with grub loader. This step by step tutorial includes patching Linux kernel with bootsplash modules, recompiling and installing new kernel with make-kpkg and dpkg tools and as the last step setting up the GRUB Linux loader.

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Linux Software Raid 1 Setup

Image:raid.png

This article describes step by step setup of Linux software RAID 1 on Linux Platform. Although this software RAID 1 configuration has been accomplished on Debian ( Ubuntu ) it also can guide you if you are running some other Linux distributions such as RedHat, Fedora , Suse, PCLinux0S, Sabayon etc. RAID-1 can be setup on two or more disks. This mode of RAID creates exact mirror of all data on one disk to the other disk.

System Info: OS: Debian Etch ( basic installation on /dev/sda)

Kernel: Linux raid 2.6.18-5-686 #1 SMP Fri Jun 1 00:47:00 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

Hard Drives: /dev/sda -> 4GB , /dev/sdb -> 5GB

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Easy way to encrypt your home directory

In this Linux config we are going to create encrypted partition for user "linuxconfig" and use pam_mount to mount it under /home/linuxconfig directory. For this config we have used Debian Linux, however the very same principle for creating encrypted partitions can be applied also for any other Linux distributions such as SuSe, RedHat, Gentoo or Ubuntu.

Image:luks.png


Prerequisites

First and the most important one is to make sure that on partition on which you are going to encrypt, is empty. If you have some important data there move them NOW to some save place. When creating encrypted partition all data will be removed.

Secondly we need to satisfied software prerequisite so you need to install packages for:

- cryptsetup ( Ubuntu, Debian package: cryptsetup )
- pam_mount ( Ubuntu, Debian package: libpam-mount )
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