> I'm curious to what?
iptables: stateful inspection of packets across an interface. This system is
internal to the kernel instead of some "add-on" AFAIK it is in windows. Feel
like having your box be the gateway to a couple thousand nodes on the inside, no
prob. DHCP too. ethernet bridgeing, etc.
SAMBA: windows networks interoperability. Supposedly is faster than the "native"
windows counterpart.
FTP: client (numerous programs), server: proftpd, etc. Allowing anonymous export
of directories.
X windows: separates the display from the content. I am able to "forward" an
interactive gui to anywhere in the world and it doesn't make much difference
client or server side so long as you have enough bandwidth. Excepting perhaps 3D
stuffs, which I don't deal too much with. This functionality is only now
becoming integrated into the great (or poor) integrator: windows.
SSH: encrypted commuication from anywhere to my computer and from my computer to
anywhere. This is perhaps one of the best reasons to become familiar with the
terminal. If for any reason you can't gain physical access to your box, you can
always ssh into it and the computer doesn't really care. This is really cool
when you combine it with the above and have X windows forwarding (tunnelling)
through an encrypted pipe using 128-bit keys (etc).
Full acces to the source code of your entire operating system. Want to see how
something is done? No prob, look it up in the source code. Don't like how
something is done? No prob, edit the source code and recompile.
Speaking of recompiling. If you want to you can recompile linux and have it
tuned to your architecture. Not only the base operating system, but also any
other programs that provide source code you can apply custom compiler flags to
at compile time and take advantage of Hyperthreading and the like. Depending of
course on your compiler version. Even then you can recompile your compiler, so
it doesn't really matter. It gets a little sticky with libraries when you
start doing that, but you can.
Alsa and it's accompanying (sp?) libraries (jack, etc). Feel like having two or
more sound cards in your system and having the computer see them as one?
Entirely possible. This is useful if you want to build a juke-box for your
entire house.
But how would you control this juke-box? Web interface? perhaps. Considering
apache runs native on linux. So does php, perl... you can also stick in SSL.
Want a webmail client running out of your computer? Look up the qmail Courier
Squirrelmail install doc and you're well on your way. (there's another program
in that list.)
I can change my whole interface. I don't have to accept a stupid startmenu that
anysuch program can munge up for me. Anything from KDE to GNOME to Enlightenment
to Blackbox to Waimea to ICEWM to whatever... you can change the interface
everytime you re-start X too. (look into your .xinitrc and .xsession files for
that)
I can tell the system which drivers I want loaded and when (modprobe, insmod,
rmmod, depmod, etc). I don't have to worry about whether or not this particular
driver is "signed" or has been tested in the Microsoft HTL. I don't freaking
care if Microsoft hasn't looked at it, I want to use it! (I had to deal with
that just today, sorry...) If you really want to and have skill enough, you can
write your own drivers!
Free top quality text editors with syntax highlighting: vim and emacs. Both
terminal and GUI versions of both.
Feel like making some good looking PDFs (with graphics) fire up the old editor
and punch the output through LaTeX (pdflatex). PDF is a published standard as
compared to the proprietary windo$e word. Have a postscript file you want to
save as a PDF? ps2pdf14 will output adobe acrobat version 1.4 PDFs for you.
Feel like making your own miniature icons for your webpages? Look into the
netpbm. That package allows for an amazing amount of image type conversions.
Spreadsheets? Gnumeric, imports and exports to MS stuffs. Native format is in
XML.
Full office suite? OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice (GNOME has something?). The
default, again, for OO and SO are compressed XML. No longer do files magically
double in size in your word documents. If you look at Excel's file format it's
just ASCII with tons of whitespace (for pure text).
Video? mplayer, need I say more. You can also export to mpeg with mplayer.
Multiple simultaneous users? sure, no prob. There is a limit, but you can change
it and it is well over 200 by default and can be over 2000. They intend to
increase it even more in 2.6.
Want to talk to old macs? Appletalk over Ethernet (or otherwise) can be built
into the kernel. My "great claim to fame" is that I had Windows 2000 clients
printing to a Appletalk 360 laser printer through a linux machine.
Windows --> SAMBA -> linux printing system -> NETATALK -> printer
it worked and worked well. The system had to be rebooted once in the 10-11? months
it was in service. Oh and do you feel like setting up a company wide printing
server with more than one printer so you can do load balancing? Look into LPRng.
There are no "hidden" things in linux. If you have root access to the machine
you can see every directory every file, etc. There is no such thing as a
registry to get corrupted. Configuration is maintained at a system level (/etc)
as well as a user level (.* directories and .*rc files). One the funny things
was that programs that took advantage of the registry for enforcing shareware
trial runs ("try this for 30 days," etc) could be convinced they were on a new
install if you deleted their . directories in the current users /home. It worked
with Photodex's Compupic (is that right?) software way back in the day.
Feel like having a transparent terminal? Eterm supports it with double
buffering, aterm with some sweet tinting and konsole has trans also. Feel like
loading ant-aliased fonts into your terms? xterm can be loaded with support for
the Xft. (look into freetype)
Feel like having sub-pixel rendering of text for your LCD monitor. Look up the
many help pages on the internet, especially under truetype and anti-aliasing.
GIMP: short for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. One of the primary reasons
for using Linux (maybe). I don't know what the file format list is but it is
numerous including PPDs from photoshop. It supports layers, transparency,
filters, renders, plugins. You can write your own plugins (they're in Scheme I
think...)
You can write CDs with cdrecord (xcdrecord). You can digitally rip data from
audio cds with cdparanoia.
Feel like using arguably the best MP3 encoder on the planet? Look no further
than lame.
Feel like encoding in the new OGG audio format? There are rpms and source code
for you to download.
If it's databases you want, you can use SQL. (or write your own)
Do you want to read most any file system invented? XFS, Reiserfs, JFS, ext3,
ext2... FAT, FAT32, NTFS and many others.
There are utilities to dynamically encrypt data as its written to disk. Just
in case you lose the hard drive.
Do you want to setup an array of thin clients (computers without hard drives
that pull their OS and programs from a master server), there is a school system
(elementary through high) that has effectively done that. I'm blanking on which
and where right now.
I don't even know the beginning about Linux's multi-CPU and multi-node
capabilities. It features SMP and NUMA upto an amazing amount of CPUs, but
that's as much as I know right now. You can build your own supercomputer with
the Beowolf (sp? seen in many a post on Slashdot regarding some new hardware)
project. I seem to remember that a government contracted company was going to
build a massive supercomputer from a bunch of AMD chips noded together...
Where in the windows world can you tell the system at what bus speed you want
your IDE devices to run at? look at your dmesg output to find out more... Plus
all the capabilities hdparm gives you.
Where in the windows world can you send flags to individual programs beyond KILL
and or TERM. HUP? USER1? etc. do a man kill for the full list
You can program your own assembly, C, C++, java, fortran, and other languages
and compile them on your own machine. You can technically include postscript in
that list, but... There are doubtless a few other languages I've missed... Make
your own, if you care to.
If you have a scroll wheel (setup correctly of course): move the cursor to the
trough of the scroll bar of a horziontally big window (spreadsheet or what have
you) and scroll wheel up or down. You will move the contents sideways... I have
never seen that done in windows. To set it correctly you have to make sure you
have the right procol in your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Mine (the mouse part)
looks like this:
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Speaking of devices: devices are considered as files on linux. Your modem is
often "linked" to /dev/modem. You open /dev/modem to talk to your modem. If you
use parallel port printing devices they're under /dev/lp0 through lpxx. You can
literally send a file to the printer by concatentating it (cat is the utility)
to the printer device file. This is useful for text files primarily. Though if
you have a true postscript printer, postscript files should work also. Tell me
you can do that in windows.
Most programs will allow you to print directly to postscript files (instead of
the useless "prn" files in windows), and using the pdf generator above (actually
apart of the ghostscript package) you and save anything to PDF. This is useful
to save shots of webpages.
Screen shots are achieved primarily through gimp, but X windows has a utility.
Then you can again convert that into PDF.
Want to remap your keyboard? Want to program your system to respond in funny
ways to the stupid windows keys? You can load most any mapping, from Dvorak to
the french. (You can do this in windows, I know.)
As far as I know ILM is now using Linux machines for their 3D rendering
software. Pixar, to my knowledge, has also, but they look like they're moving
over to the new dual G5 systems and Mac OSX.
The NSA looked at the system thought it sufficed in many areas and those they
didn't like they released paches for. If your're really worried about security
look into OpenBSD. Note anyone who considers windows a "trustworthy" interface
ought to have their head examined (read Bill Gates). Windows has not even made
it to the minors (baseball ref), while linux and its BSD conterparts have been
playing in the majors for a long while. Though that's pure banter on my part.
In any case, I'd look at the TrinityOS documents for hardening techniques.
Don't like what daemons are started at boot time? Go into the run control files
and comment out all that you don't want. Especially those who are running
Redhat.
Don't like what shell you start with be it BASH or what ever (ZSH, tcsh, sh,
csh) you can change that with chsh.
Want to run windows software? Look into wine at winehq.com
Into games? There are alot of new titles coming with full linux support. id
software has been nice to us as of late too. But this, honestly, is where we're
hurting. Game devels don't often code for linux, `cause everyone runs windows so
why waste the time. Though we do have many of the game servers out on the
internet.
Good website to help out for a lot of this is www.tldp.org
I think it would have been very difficult if I had to jump right into the linux
world if it had not been for KDE. That first install I made way back 4 or 5
years ago, I thought that the KDE (2 something) interface was linux. Not so much
now, but it certainly helped to get me started. Then I realized that it was just
an interface to a deeper world...
For email I use mutt. It supports PGP, threaded discussions etc. As well as
remote IMAP folder browsing. It is terminal based and therefore I can check my
email anywhere in the world (with an ssh install).
Look to squid if you want transparent web caching and proxying.
Piping and redirection of data streams.
Just the sheer fact that you can program anything you want to on this system and
the tools are free for you to do it. Plus it is encouraged.
> One of my hardest things to do was achieve in linux
> the 'email attachments in a separate folder', like I had in windows ..
huh? saved in a separate folder? loaded from a separate folder? what email
client?
> took me a couple of days :P ... and I've yet got unsolved problems (like
> a perfectly tuned file manager, being able to treat .mp3/.avi/./jpg from
> a windows partition as what they are not as binaries) ...
That depends on how the windows partition is loaded or mounted as it's termed in
the unix world. Look at your /etc/fstab file.
> I've been flirting with movign to linux for a long time ... had a long
> collection of linuxes ... but always wound up back using windows .. this
What caused the switch, the above?
> >a comp store and look at the full fledged windows prices. Who would want
> >to pay
> >that when the alternative is $0 upfront.
> >
> yep .. that's nice .. gettting up-to-date hardware is hard enough as it
> is :P
Huh?
> windows users generally complain about linux speed, or what?
No, windows users moving in slow motion. Linux generally has better control over
hardware than windows does, resulting in overall speed improvements.
>
> >>.. btw .. I just rebooted to windows and
> >>there on my same old junk 550Mhz Athlon apps started instantaneously
> >>here, in linux, there's like a 5 sec delay when I'm not even sure if say
> >>
> >>
> >Netscape is slow. Opera is fast.
> >
> >
> but Opera is not free, right? :P
It is, but you get to see all the wonderful advertisements.
> Geforce (1), I don't know the version of X .. prolly 4. soemthign .. got
> it with Mandrake 9.1 .. which is relativelly fresh, afaik.
Get ahold of some of the binary drivers from nvidia.com. They work well.
> no .. i just treated it like: time to re-install :P ...
Good, you're better than some. ;-)
> >>I'm using XNC for file management .. and sometimes when I enter a foler
> >>it takes a couple of seconds before it shows me the new folder .. way
> >>too much
XNC is pretty nice. Got it working last night. Seems pretty instantaneous on my
P2-266 sys with 160 MB of RAM.
> mc is smart enough .. but I don't want to get back to the text only age
> .. I'd like my linux to look sharp & smart too :P (therefore: blackbox)
> I've tried a lot of file managers ... did my homework really hard in the
> desperate hope of getting a file manager I could tune to be as
> productive as I was in windows .. XNC has pretty much impressed me with
> it's configurability (and it also had the handy dandy quick dir jumps I
> was using alot) .. but it does have a couple of annoying stuff (most of
> which I've been able to side-step somehow via it's custom commands menus
> ... but it's still problematic .. and the author's email seems to be out
> of order ... and I'm sorry not to have a cool multi-tool in linux ..
> well, I have on right now ... but with some flaws ... and not much hope
> of change )-:
konqueror is very much like Internet Explorer in that it can browse and launch
local stuff as well as remote things like webpages.
> one thing wierd for me: if I just start my computer .. & just start
> nothing but blackbox I may pretty well find 200 of 256 mb already
> occupied :P
That's what the ps output will show. top too.
> I udnerstant nothing of the proteins stuff.
Proteins interact because of chemistry. There is an ongoing project to model
their behavior and use this data to develop new drugs.
> There isn't any command by which I could start a program as root via a single
> command line? something like: 'run_as_root root_password kwrite' ?
/bin/su will allow you to become any user. With no arguments it allows you to
become the root, after you give the right password of course.
> is scheduler another program?
The scheduler is built into the kernel. It's one of the kernel's primary
functions. This determines what data the CPU sees and works on at any one
time.
> thanks a lot for the willingness to help. Many many thanks .. I don't
> know how I will ever repay the linux community for the friendliness ..
> hopefully with games & 3d graphics for linux, that's what I'm into
> (given up DirectX, MFC & stuff just to try linux seriously... ). ...
Mesa GL, www.libsdl.org and others are out there
ok the ps output...
PID TTY TIME CMD
1 ? 00:00:04 init system initiation daemon, good
to keep
2 ? 00:00:00 keventd monitors "events", primarily for
USB device plugins and plugouts
3 ? 00:00:00 kapmd power management daemon, kernel
side
4 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0 soft irq for the primary CPU,
good to have, look it up
5 ? 00:00:08 kswapd runs your swap partitions
6 ? 00:00:01 bdflush buffer control, good
7 ? 00:00:00 kupdated used with the journal daemon
below
8 ? 00:00:00 mdrecoveryd I forget
12 ? 00:00:01 kjournald runs your journalling file
systems, which enables you to recover from crashes (however rare) and power
outages quicker than otherwise. Look into journaled file systems in general.
115 ? 00:00:00 devfsd device file system daemon,
looks like Mandrake uses the devfs system
210 ? 00:00:00 khubd USB hub daemon
825 ? 00:00:00 eth0 huh? eth0 is the first ethernet
interface, but I haven't seen a process by that name yet.
901 ? 00:00:00 portmap I would say don't use this,
unless you know you have to. This is a security hole. It has to do with the rpc
stuffs which are like taking shotguns to your box.
917 ? 00:00:00 syslogd logs messags to
/var/log/messages and other places
925 ? 00:00:00 klogd same idea, for kernel stuffs
972 ? 00:00:00 rpc.statd mentioned with the portmap
daemon. Don't run this if you don't have to.
1235 ? 00:00:02 xfs X Font Server
1589 ? 00:00:00 apmd userland power managment daemon,
allows you to force your system into sleep mode
1638 ? 00:00:00 mdkkdm mandrake something, not really
sure, I think it's the login for your system. I am assuming you have X running
when you first boot, right?
1640 ? 00:00:00 atd runs programs "at" a certain
time
1660 ? 00:45:09 X X windows
1663 ? 00:00:00 mdkkdm again?
1668 ? 00:00:00 saslauthd I have no idea
1680 ? 00:00:00 saslauthd wait just looked up
1681 ? 00:00:00 saslauthd has to do with OpenLDAP,
1682 ? 00:00:00 saslauthd directory stuff.
1687 ? 00:00:00 saslauthd you probably don't need it
1705 ? 00:00:00 ntpd network time protocol daemon,
keeps your system time syncronized to a standardized time server somewhere on
the intranet or internet. These servers are usually divided up into various
strata. Somehow they're connected to either the atomic clock in colorado(?)
greenwich. AFAIK
1724 ? 00:00:00 tmdns apart of the zeroconf project, I
think. zeroconf's goal is to enable PNP, but have it be internet devices and
interfaces. It has it's place along with Rendezvous from Apple, but I don't
think I would like it. You could probably kill it and not have to worry.
1757 ? 00:00:00 xinetd Redhat and clones switched to
xinetd from inetd a while ago. This daemon controls what ports go to what
services/deamons. For instance: if someone sends connection requests to your
port 21, xinetd recognizes that as FTP and links a ftp daemon to that request.
(then it bumps that connection up to the unlisted port range, but that's beyond
scope here). It is configurable and holds it files in /etc/xinetd.d ? I think.
1911 ? 00:00:00 master "yes master" Young Frankenstein
ref for all of you... I have no idea what this does.
1922 ? 00:00:01 nqmgr email server queue manager,
probably a good thing
1958 ? 00:00:00 crond allows you to schedule programs.
Often updatedb is scheduled to run at 4 in the morning with this capability.
1996 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-bridge VMware bridge? this is like
having a toll bridge instead of a barge (if you get the analogy as the river is
what separates you from the outside world) The bridge allows for more than one
IP address on the internal network.
2022 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-natd VMware Network Address
Translation? NAT boxes take private classes of IP addrsss (ie. 192.168.0.1 etc)
and maps it to a single outside visible IP address. The internal boxes "hide"
behind a NAT box.
2286 ? 00:00:00 miniserv.pl why would anyone want a perl
script running continuously? I have no idea what this does.
2302 ? 00:03:07 fetchmail pulls email from remote servers
and delivers it to the local server as if it were originally intended for the
local server.
2328 ? 00:00:00 lisa allows you to browse
SAMBA/windows shares through konqueror
2470 vc/1 00:00:00 mingetty controls your console devices
2471 vc/2 00:00:00 mingetty if you're in X, do a Ctrl+F1
2472 vc/3 00:00:00 mingetty through F6 (usually) and you
2473 vc/4 00:00:00 mingetty will see another login console
2474 vc/5 00:00:00 mingetty this is how linux was before X
2480 vc/6 00:00:00 mingetty login:
2489 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-netifup VMware network device up?
2497 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-netifup
2521 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-dhcpd dhcp server for VMware?
2522 ? 00:00:00 vmnet-dhcpd
2526 ? 00:00:00 vmware-nmbd Windows shares for VMware?
2528 ? 00:00:00 vmware-smbd Windows shares for VMware?
2617 ? 00:00:05 blackbox Yay!
2676 ? 00:00:02 bbkeys nice
2689 ? 00:00:17 xnc good deal
2692 pts/0 00:00:00 bash <homer>mmmm, bash</homer>
18273 ? 00:07:23 mozilla-bin memory hog
18280 ? 00:00:00 mozilla-bin memory pig
18282 ? 00:00:00 mozilla-bin memory swine
18284 ? 00:00:01 mozilla-bin memory porcine
18318 ? 00:00:00 mozilla-bin memory chauvanist ;-)
18320 ? 00:00:00 esd Esound Daemon, allows more than
one program to send waveforms to the sound card, resulting mixed sound events
18344 ? 00:00:00 mozilla-bin might as well roll around in the
mud
18353 ? 00:00:00 Eterm schveett!
18356 pts/1 00:00:00 bash I'm assuming the bash
associated with the above
18417 ? 00:00:00 ives I don't know what this is
18422 ? 00:00:00 Eterm two eterms
18425 pts/2 00:00:00 bash
18518 ? 00:00:00 Eterm three eterms
18521 pts/3 00:00:00 bash
18646 ? 00:00:00 pickup don't know what this is
18658 ? 00:00:00 smtpd simple mail transfer procol
daemon
18659 ? 00:00:00 proxymap are you running squid
18660 ? 00:00:00 cleanup cleanliness is next to... don't
know why there's a daemon for that though
18661 ? 00:00:00 trivial-rewrite huh? I thought that the journal
daemons took care of this
18682 pts/2 00:00:00 ps linux is so thorough that it
lists the process that is listing all the processes.
> seems to me like there's a lot of doubles there. the apps I know of as
> running are:
> xnc, kwrite, 3 eterms, mozilla-mail + email just writing ... blackbox,
> with slit & bbkeys ... umm what else .. and fetchmail ...
> my hardware is K7 athlon, 550mhz, 256 SD ram, Geforce.
I would say that your memory hogs are mozilla and the vmware stuff. At least I
think it's vmware. VMware allows you to run a virtual computer inside your
current running OS. Most people run a version of Windows inside it.
> >Also take a look at "dmesg" and make sure that your ip address is not in the
> >output.
> >
> >
> ... wow .. there's a lot of output ... it's there in lines like:
>
> "0 SRC=81.196.89.16 DST=81.196.89.209 LEN=90 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=128
> ID=32331 PROTO=UDP SPT=137 DPT=32785 LEN=70 " the DST thing.
Looks like you've got some packet logging going on. What did you chose when you
were installing Mandrake? Multicasting Router with full logging?
SRC (source) ip address
DST (destination) ip address
LEN packet length
TOS umm, time of service?
PREC ?
TTL time to live, determines when the packet dies on the internet. It is the
solution to the fact that packets might never die and just get bounced around
the world if they hadn't developed this concept.
ID packet id?
PROTO protocol
UDP user datagram protocol
SPT ? source something?
DPT ? destination something?
LEN again?
dmesg gets alot, if not all of your kernel message output
> >There is also a file called /var/log/XFree86.0.log which might be of some use
> >eventually.
> >
> ummm ... that's a long file .. din't know what to look for .. I meant to
> attach it .. but don't want to be causing trouble on the list :P
Probably, but this email is plenty long as it is.
Take a look at the file and note any errors you see.
> >following will work: ps -A > psout.txt. If you want to see what process is
> >taking so much CPU time run top.
> >
> >
> coool .. very nice info. thanks.
Yeah, redirecting output of programs is one of the many powerful featurs of a
contemporary shell. Especially like bash. It's something I only toy with, while
other can do amazing things. Just as a note, STDIN is often a keyboard and
STDOUT is often the console or terminal. If you take the output destined for the
STDOUT of one program and direct it to the STDIN of another program you can do
some cool things.
ls -alh|less redirects the output of the list files program through
the less program so you can smoothly look at the entire listing with either the
arrow keys or the h-j-k-l (of vim fame) keys.
> thanks a lot!!! I hope so tooo .. with hope renewed .. that linux may be THE
> system for me :P
Like any tool, it has it's place. Linux, in it's current state would not work
for an absolute computer newbie. Though it may work better than one thinks,
because they haven't been jaded by windows. My Grandma would fail at any
computer system. (I don't think she would get past the mouse... ;-)).
hth,
tw
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