2004 January

While new issues of Linux Fanatics have been discontinued, past issues (all the way back to its beginning,
Penguin Shell days) are now archived! Need to find a back issue of any of your favorite Lockergnome newsletters?
We’ve been working on it, as you can see. Behold!
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Dear Linux Fanatics subscribers:
This newsletter is brought to you with a heavy heart: we have decided to discontinue
publication of Linux Fanatics. This decision has been an agonizing one,
however, it is believed to be in the best interests of the family of Lockergnome newsletters as a whole.
Thank you for all of your kind words, your warm [...]

GUIs for tasks? We’ll look at them next week in more detail, but in the meantime, have a
look at
kcrontab,
gcrontab,
and vcron. A Linux user can perform fun and even useful
tasks such as having disk space usage reports e-mailed each hour or day or week to cleaning up temporary
files or just about any command a user would [...]

Jeffrey D. Sauer at Linux Journal writes:

So, here I am working on my newly configured machine. After playing around with all of the goodies
included in the
distribution, I decide to launch the browser and surf the Net for a while. To my horror, the rendered text in
Mozilla looked terrible. The rods and cones in my eyes [...]

Last week I started talking about my AVB USB key I received for Christmas and some words about getting
that installed. To start a more detailed look at it, from readying the system to plugging it in and
copying files to it, Scott A. took time out of his day to explain why the drive should be [...]

Burn CDs? Try Bashburn
and Burncenter. Remember the old DOS menus?
That’s what these are like. What’s not alike is what’s underneath: a cdrom writer, various
utilities, a fast processor,
huge hard drive, and Linux. These powerful programs use scripts and menus to tie together
lots of commands, flags, and environment settings, allowing the user to concentrate on burning
CDs. Wonderful [...]

TOP (or, uh, ‘top’) - lowercase, most likely, unless you’ve changed the name as the ‘main page’
states specifically that you are allowed to do so under the terms of the license if you so choose.
I digress. Not graphical in the way of Task Manager, but it does the job, quite well in fact. Check it [...]

Scott P. recommends that we add axyftp to our list.
If compiling a program is a bit daunting for you -
so daunting that you refuse to try - you might not be using wxftp anytime soon. However, if a quick little
compile doesn’t scare you away, grab this little prog and check it out. Does the job [...]

Welcome back, Gnomies! My word, how Linux has matured! My fiance brought home a book on
Linux she picked up - it looked brand new, but was published in 1998. Wow! The book covered
Red Hat 5.1, Caldera OpenLinux Lite 1.2 and “StarOffice.” I’ve thumbed through the book and
can’t help feeling exhausted - the book covers Apache, [...]

If your screensaver is on when you return to your desk, instead of moving the mouse or pressing enter,
try pressing the Ctrl key. Most likely it will send a signal to the computer stopping the screensaver process,
but because it’s often a ‘modifier’ key, no real input will be sent to your computer. This alleviates the
possibility [...]

That the AVB USB Mobile Drive 2.0
works in Linux should come as no surprise; it is, after all, simply a USB storage device - media available
via a USB connection. Once formatted, it is mounted as any hard drive, CD-ROM, or floppy and is accessed
in the same manner - via the file system. Most people are [...]

I spent Saturday afternoon at work,
defragging
the corporate SQL Server. 7 hours Saturday afternoon spent backing up data, then copying data to a network file system,
defragging the Windows 2000 drive, copying data back, and defragging again. Defragging a server can be a time-consuming
operation; so, too, can defragging a desktop computer. Stopping the anti-virus, closing down background [...]

Santa, my fiance, was good to me this year. (S)he gave me an
AVB USB Mobile Drive 2.0.
My Christmas wish was fulfilled down to the exact model and size wrapped in a box with 8 or so rolls of
pennies taped around the sides; in fact,
enough attention was paid to the placement of the rolls that the [...]

Last week we talked about GUI FTP clients. I suppose FTP doesn’t stir peoples’ emotions too
much - being a simple utility and such - as only one additional GUI was reported to me. But that’s
okay. The additional program was KBear, quite a
capable client. So that leaves us with 3 strong GUI FTP programs:
KBear,
gFTP,
and [...]

When a Gnomie is wrong, the best thing to do is admit it. That’s just what I was last week:
Wrong! I reported to you that Ctrl-V copies text into the buffer, quite unlike the Windows
action, which pastes it. Well, in KDE and Gnome, the action does the same as in Windows -
it pastes. Ctrl-C is [...]

Cutting and pasting is actually a function of the x window side and can take a bit of getting used to after being used to the Windows way. Remember the Windows way? Highlight some text, press Ctrl-C to copy, then Ctrl-V to paste. The “Linux” way? Highlight some text and Ctrl-V. You can most likely [...]

Printers and Linux. Ouch! Printers! This can be a sore spot for many people after spending $200 on that all-in-one fax/copier/scanner/printer that they just cannot seem get to work in Linux. In many cases it’s because part of the software necessary for making them work is embedded in Windows - this allows the manufacturer to [...]

…Installing the hardware, the aforementioned Hauppauge WinTV-dbx Model 401 video card. For less than $100 and the monthly cable bill, I have TV on my desktop! But oh boy, installing hardware in Linux. What a topic. Installing hardware varies from distro to computer to administrator due to the way the kernel is configured. Distributions tend [...]

bytesex.org/xawtv
{Television via Linux} xawtv is a program used for watching TV. As I write this I am listening to PBS and switching to the desktop it is running on when something catches my ear. I might click over and channel surf a bit (I have cable running to the card so there are quite a [...]

Now that you have a detailed hardware inventory and maybe even a computer to
use, what do you do? You must choose your distribution (often referred to as
a ‘distro’). Let’s first define what a distribution is not. A distribution is
not Linux - Linux is an operating system. A distribution is [...]