No Lack of Talent Among the Penguin Shell

Well, there’s no lack of talent among the Penguin Shell subscriber
base! When I was unable to find a quick command for looking up
file permissions by number, I received an impressive number of
solutions that were each completely different. That’s one of the
great things about Linux: so many ways to accomplish the same
thing. I’ll include the solutions this week in the EGG section,
since that’s where the original question showed up.

For those who are interested in conferences, LinuxWorld is coming
up in San Francisco in August. I’ve got a preview of it available
here: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4899/1/

Swap Space Redux

In regards to the ability to have your swap space be a file
mentioned by a number of readers: yes, you can technically
do this. No, this typically isn’t a good idea (to the point that
you’ll rarely hear it mentioned as an option). You take a
significant performance hit when you put your swap in a file
rather than on a partition. A swap partition is formatted in a way
that’s most efficient for its purpose, while a file would be in
ext3 format, or whatever filesystem you happen to be using.

Older Issues

Those who are looking for previous issues of the newsletter, take
heart. The Lockergnome team is working on an index section for all
of the newsletters, so you can go through them without having to
use the search interface.

PATH questions

An observant reader asked why I instructed someone to place
information in their personal account’s profile (~/.bash_profile)
instead of the system-wide profile (/etc/profile). The answer is
simply personal preference. I don’t add anything to my whole
system’s profile unless I have to, so I default to adding it to
the personal profile. If multiple users need access to a setting
(especially a PATH setting), then the system-wide profile is
definitely the better option.

See You at Gnomedex, 
Dee-Ann LeBlanc