monkeypantz

Are there enough Linux experts to go around? Here’s an interesting article in ComputerWorld from this week: “Linux unchained.” Author Mary Pratt investigates the claim that Linux growth is outstripping the supply of actual Linux-proficient techs.

Linux is gaining ground so quickly that some companies are having a hard time finding enough people to handle Linux-related work. And those they do find charge a premium, according to The Yankee Group, a market research firm in Boston. Skilled Linux administrators in major metropolitan markets command 20% to 30% salary premiums over their Unix and Windows counterparts—a fact that could diminish the cost savings that many companies bank on when they switch to Linux.

I guess this is a good news/bad news thing. Of course some IT managers interviewed for the article don’t think there is a problem:

While some say the lack of personnel with Linux expertise affects the rate at which companies adopt the open-source system, others say IT departments are finding the skills they need without much extra effort or additional pay.

“If you have someone who has experience with other operating systems, I don’t think it’s all that difficult switching over to Linux,” Ciaraldi says. “Conceptually, the commands are the same, the structure is similar. It’s just learning what the exact commands are to accomplishing various tasks.”

One key idea expressed is the rareness of having techs whose skills embrace proficiency in both Linux and Windows. Hmmmm. This makes me think that the savviest amongst techies will dump the either/or mindset (not that we’ve seen those arguments play out here before!) and become ambiOStrous. Yeah, I just made that one up. Or maybe Bi-OS. (Okay, I’ll stop now, but feel fee to add your own).

It’s a good article with lots of food for thought. I was particularly heartened by this quote: “Another skill in Linux is you have to be willing to ask other people for help.” In my much more limited world of just trying to get familiar with the basics of Linux — which I’m very much immersed in this week — it made me feel a little less lame for having to ask so many questions about things (shout-out to Jack!).

Now, having said that and for those of you who are following my Mandriva experiment on VirtualBox, I’m finding that I really like it. I’ve managed to get myself hung up on some annoying hiccups (not being able to get one app do something I want it to), but overall, everything else just works! No problems surfing, getting sound and video playback on the Web, etc. I was able to use my production tools just as well in Mandriva as in my regular Windows environment.

Vincent Danen covers the basics of scheduling basic system and user tasks with cron, such as downloading e-mail at certain intervals and restarting services.

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Periodic schedulers come in many shapes and sizes but one constant is cron, the scheduling daemon that will run programs and scripts at arbitrary times or intervals. A number of different cron implementations exist: although vixie-cron may be the most popular, there are other similar programs such as dcron, fcron, anacron, and others. Each cron implementation typically adheres to the same standards of defining cron jobs by using a configuration file called a crontab with a certain layout:

[min] [hour] [day of month] [month] [day of week] [script or command]

For instance, most Linux systems define particular system-executed cronjobs that run hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. These are typically defined by dropping scripts or symlinks to commands in special directories: /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, and /etc/cron.monthly.

Different distributions may have slight variations on the location and may include support for yearly-executed scripts (such as in /etc/cron.yearly). The system crontab, /etc/crontab, is what defines when the scripts in these directories run and may look like this:

01 * * * * root nice -n 19 run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly 02 4 * * * root nice -n 19 run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily 22 4 * * 0 root nice -n 19 run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly 42 4 1 * * root nice -n 19 run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly

As you can see by the above, all the scripts in /etc/cron.hourly are executed one minute after each hour (12:01, 1:01, etc.), while the daily scripts are executed at 4:02 each day. The weekly scripts are run on Sunday (day 0) at 4:22 am, while the monthly scripts are executed on the first day of each month at 4:42.

Aside from system cron jobs, users may also have user-specific cron jobs, provided they are not disallowed via the /etc/cron.deny file. A user can create his own cron jobs by creating and editing his own crontab, typically by either creating a file with the cron commands inside and importing it, or using the -e switch to directly edit the crontab, such as:

$ crontab -e

This will call the defined editor (see the value of the $EDITOR environment variable) to edit a temporary file that will become the user’s crontab:

$ crontab mycrontab

Using this command will set the file mycrontab as the user’s new crontab. To view the contents of your crontab, use:

$ crontab -l */5 * * * * /bin/touch /home/joe/foo

The above shows that every five minutes, the file /home/joe/foo will be touched.

Scheduled commands are useful for periodic system tasks, such as rotating logs or restarting services. They are useful for users in that they can be used to perform various periodic tasks such as downloading e-mail at set intervals (using fetchmail, perhaps) or connecting to remote Web sites at particular times.

Get the PDF version here.

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I am going out on a limb here…really opening myself up for a flame-war. But you know - there are some defining moments that beg for such an action. That action? To question why anyone (when they KNOW the difference) would seriously choose a Windows operating system over Linux.

Let me set the stage a bit. Recently, I wrote an article for Techrepublic about the fundamental differences between Linux and Windows. As I wrote that article, I found myself constantly wondering why anyone knowing these fundamental differences would choose anything but a Linux operating system.

Recently my youngest stepdaughter brought her Windows XP machine to a screeching halt with a nasty boot sector virus. The machine was in a constant loop. Even attempting to get into Safe Mode was no help. Her machine was protected with AVG and yet the virus managed to get right on by what I have used for years to protect Windows machines. But her bout with Windows doesn’t end there. The machine, having a fresh install of XP, constantly (and randomly) restarted itself causing her to lose countless hours of Myspace tweaking and OMGSTFUing on IM with her buds. Granted she wasn’t losing databases and research or anything mission critical. But to a fourteen year old, Myspace is pretty critical. And to a stepfather who serves as IT person for the entire family (well beyond “extended” family), having a happily computing fourteen-year-old saves me plenty of nerve endings.

So I decided to run a little experiment and install Mandriva Spring 2008 on her machine. She was worried that she wouldn’t know how to use the computer or her iPod wouldn’t work. OMG! Well, after a very quick installation and next-to-no instruction, she was back to her happy place typing acronym after acronym in Pidgen. And guess what? No restarts. No crashes. No worries about viruses. In fact, I have yet to hear a peep out of her since her machine adopted Linux. This is the epitome of the average computer user I’m speaking of. A Myspace, IM, e-mail junkie who needs to write the occasional report and browse Ebay.

So after her success I was back to the question that perpetually plagues me: Why would anyone choose Windows over Linux?

• There’s far less risk for viruses and malware.
• It’s free.
• Applications are free.
• It’s far more flexible.
• It has multiple routes for support.
• It is improving at a far faster rate than Windows.
• Bugs and security holes are patched much quicker.

I realize the pat answers will appear:

• No games.
• No Linux version of application X.

But do those really satisfy the question when the average user is not a gamer or uses an application outside of the usual fare?

In my seriously biased opinion, I think this question is answered with a simple conspiracy theory: Microsoft is doing everything it can to keep the public blind to Linux. Think about it? Remember the whole Wintel conspiracy where MS and Intel played off of each other to continue their strangle-hold monopoly in the PC industry? That era played a huge part in the blinding of consumers. Top that with the business practices MS forces upon big box shops to insure their operating system is sold on nearly every PC sold and you can see that conspiracy is more of a reality than one might think.

Why would the masses choose Windows over Linux?

• 
  Ignorance
• 
  Games
• 
  Killer app
• 
  Can you say “monopoly”?
• 
  Other

View Results

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But I would like your opinion on the issue. After our wonderful Selena posed the question, What does Linux do that Windows can’t? your replies make me believe that you understand my frustration with this issue. So do tell me…why would anyone choose Windows over Linux?

Some of you may remember my account of my disastrous first try with running Ubuntu using Microsoft Virtual PC, in which pretty much nothing worked. I then tried out some virtual machines on VMware player — both Ubuntu and Fedora. Admittedly, I was kind of lazy with those and didn’t play around with either too much. So, lest you think I don’t listen to the advice I get from the blogs, I decided to try Mandriva on VirtualBox. I just downloaded both today, so I haven’t really had time to do much yet. Still, I was momentarily confused by how smoothly everything went and how quickly everything installed. I didn’t have to do anything, or even deal with any confusing configuration issues, which I found to be so confounding, that I thought I must have left out some step and done something wrong already!

I don’t know that I’ve really got a good handle on how the whole virtualization thing works either, just to clarify my ignorance. I never know exactly what I can do and what I can’t on a virtual machine, and I have the overpowering paranoia that I’m going to somehow hose my entire workstation and have to go crawling to tech support to save my rear end. Perish the thought.

Well, I’m actually going to try to learn something about both Mandriva and virtual machines in the next few weeks as I have time. If you have suggestions for fun little exercises I should try to work on or a good way to learn about certain features, please let me know. This is your chance to school a Linux newbie, as annoying as that might be.

The BackTrack LiveCD provides over 300 different tools that can be used by security professionals or system administrators. Vincent Danen tells you how to create a portable version on a USB keychain.

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There are a wide variety of security-related tools available for Linux. Many distributions come with a number of these tools, while others are not pre-packaged by distributors for various reasons. Building a security arsenal for penetration testing or vulnerability assessment can be a daunting task if you don’t know what tools are good or even what is available.

While a few LiveCD distributions exist to tackle this problem, one that is quite good is BackTrack. This LiveCD can be used as a bootable CD, or you can install it to a USB stick to make it even more portable. As well, BackTrack provides over 300 different tools that can be used by security professionals or system administrators. This includes tools to perform penetration testing on systems, wireless cracking tools, network mapping tools, information gathering tools, vulnerability identification tools, forensics tools, and reverse engineering tools.

You can run BackTrack in a few different ways. It can be installed to a hard drive, just like any other Linux distribution, or it can be run from the LiveCD, installed to a USB keychain device, or installed as a VMware image. For the most portable solution, a USB keychain device works best.

To install BackTrack to a USB keychain, ensure you have a keychain with at least 1GB of space available. Insert the USB keychain device into an existing Linux system.

Mount the bt3final_usb.iso which can be found on the Web site’s download page; the version you want to download is the USB Version (Extended). Use:

# mount -o loop -t iso9660 bt3final_usb.iso /mnt/cdrom

Next, format the USB device you plan to use. Insert the device and then umount it; it most likely will get auto-mounted. Make note first of what the device name was (i.e. /dev/sdd).

To format the partition as a FAT16 filesystem use:

# mkfs.msdos /dev/sdd1

Now mount the USB keychain:

# mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/usb

Next, copy the contents of the ISO to the USB device; if you mounted it to /mnt/usb, use:

# cp -av /mnt/cdrom/* /mnt/usb/

When this is done, move to the USB image on the command-line and execute the bootinst.sh script in the boot/ directory:

# cd /mnt/usb/boot # ./bootinst.sh

These commands must be run in the boot/ directory on the USB keychain device! If not, they can possibly overwrite the MBR on the host computer so please be sure you are executing these scripts in the boot/ directory of the USB keychain.

Once this is done, reboot the computer and use the BIOS or boot selector to boot from the USB keychain and BackTrack will load on the computer. At boot you can select from textmode or use Fluxbox or KDE.

Once the system is up and running, the interface is quite useful. With the KDE interface, a number of standard tools are provided such as Firefox and Pidgin, amongst many others. The “BackTrack” menu item then allows you to find the tool you’re looking for or explore new ones through its categorized hierarchy.

All told, BackTrack is quite nice. For those who use a laptop and the needs are minimal, BackTrack could function as not only a security toolkit but the primary OS on the laptop as well.

Get the PDF version of this tip here.

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Jack Wallen takes a break from the user-friendliness of the usual Linux distributions and gives the Debian network installation a try. Read on to find out what his general impressions of this geekier Linux distribution are.

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Lately, I have been poking at various Linux distributions to see what they have to offer. But most of the distributions I have looked at are geared toward new users, users with older (or strange) hardware, or corporate users. But what about those that do not fall into any of the above? What about those Linux users who want a challenge? Something that doesn’t hand-hold you through the entire computing experience? Well, you’re in luck. For those on the fringe of the fringe, there are a few distributions that hold, shall we say, Linux users to a somewhat higher “standard” than the average distribution.

Once such distribution is Debian. It’s not Gentoo by any stretch of the imagination, but as soon as you begin installation, you will notice that it’s not your average Linux installation.

Installation

If you take a look at the downloads section of the Debian site, you will notice you can go a few routes. One route requires that  you download a 4+ GB DVD iso. Another option is to download the multiple iso CDs (there are 21 of them). Yet another option is to download the smaller 180 MB CD iso that will do a network installation. This is the option I chose.

The network installation isn’t really all that difficult - IF you have done a text-based installation before. If not - you might be in for a treat. But over all, it’s fairly straight forward. You will have to select all of the package categories you want installed as well as the desktop and any servers you want. Once you have made your selections the installation will begin. You will have to answer some questions here and there and you should be prepared for this installation to take much longer than your average LiveCD-based installation. My installation clocked in at around two hours.

Post-install gotchas

One of the weaknesses of the text-based installation with Debian is there is no graphics test. You select the ranges you want to apply to your installation and off it goes. You hope you configured the proper ranges, otherwise X will be a no go. Such was my case. Fortunately, there is a little thing called the command line. I was able to log on a root and edit (using the nano editor) my xorg.conf file to make sure the Device section was configured properly. Once saved, I went back to the correct terminal and hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to reload X. Bingo! X was up and running and my Debian installation was complete.

Initial Usage

I was actually surprised at how utterly vanilla Debian is once it is installed. As far as I could tell it was not much different than using Ubuntu or any given distribution that uses apt-get and the GNOME desktop. The major difference is when you really start looking into the installed packages and realize that everything is geared more toward the power user. Even on a system that was mostly just a generic installation there are more programming, system, and administration tools than on most other, more popular, distributions.

But even with the pseudo-genericness of the installation, there is one thing about Debian that does make it stand out from other installations….It’s about as solid a distribution as you can get. Once installed, Debian will withstand just about anything.

But who would be the best candidate for Debian? That’s easy. Anyone who can stomach a bit of an installation hurdle who needs a server that is as rock-solid as a server can get. But I wouldn’t limit Debian to server farms just yet. Like any distribution, you can install just about any desktop you want. And you can do so with via apt-get, Synaptic, or Aptitude. So package management is simple.

Final thoughts

I can’t say that my kicking of the tires of Debian was as thorough as it deserves. But honestly, I don’t think a thorough shakedown is that necessary. First and foremost, you only need to know that the installation can be a bit challenging (when doing so from the smaller install CD). Once up and running, it’s all a matter of knowing the package management system.

What is the geekiest Linux you have tried?

• 
  Edubuntu
• 
  Debian
• 
  Gentoo
• 
  Slackware
• 
  Other

View Results

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I have started to believe that the separation between Linux distributions is getting harder and harder to find. You can turn toward package management and/or desktops to find some differences but with the Linux kernel and hardware recognition so solid now, one Linux is nearly the same as the next — so long as you can get it installed.

Linux aficionados on TechRepublic have spent some time coming up with Linux applications that can do the same thing as Windows programs, and Jack has answered the question, “What can’t Linux do?” in a previous blog, but I couldn’t remember when I’d seen someone list the things that Linux does well, which Windows can’t equal (I can hear people saying “security!” but let’s be more specific!).

Lee Matthews at downloadsquad.com has written a post called, “3 Linux Apps That Make Me Hate Windows,” in which he selects applications that have no equivalent in a Windows environment.

I’m a Windows user, and it has served me well. That being said, I play with a lot of Linux distributions and there are some applications that are just so much better than anything Windows can offer that I find myself wondering how long it’ll be until I make the switch.

Matthews cites Synaptic, APT, and Amarok in particular. What do you think of these choices?

If you want a taste of the hot topics at this week’s LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, check out some of the video highlights below.

Telecom backs mobile Linux

ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das talks with Senior Editor Sam Diaz about one of the big themes at this year’s LinuxWorld Expo–mobility. Diaz discusses how large companies like Motorola are encouraging Linux developers to write software for mobile devices. Watch the video.

Oracle CIO discusses green plans for new data center

Oracle CIO Mark Sunday explains the techniques behind Project Sequoia, the company’s new data center in Utah. By utilizing outside air, hot aisle containment, and independently controlled supercells, he says this will be its most efficient center yet. Watch the video.

Cisco defines data center 3.0

Cisco general manager, Rajiv Ramaswami talks about the history of the data center. He also discusses new technologies driving data center innovation including on-demand provisioning, the deployment of SOA, and Web 2.0 solutions.

Deploying healthcare apps on Linux

McKesson CIO Randal Spratt explains why his company deploys its health care applications on Linux. He says these applications are scalable, affordable on tight hospital budgets, and reliable–making better patient care possible. Watch the video.

Bringing cloud computing to the enterprise

Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, speaks about using cloud computing to reduce the complexities and costs of financial services. He discusses the move away from dedicated machines and why old ideas like virtualization have become useful again. Watch the video.

The Linux text editor Joe has easy-to-remember keystrokes and allows you to customize it to suit your needs. Vincent Danen tells you how to tweak the configuration file to create keybindings and map your favorite commands.

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A plethora of text editors exist that cater to a wide range of users. Editors like Emacs, Vim, Nano, and others are often installed by default on most Linux distributions for the command line, and other editors like Kate and Gedit are available on the GUI side. Another well-known editor is Joe (Joe’s Own Editor) and it is my personal favourite.

A number of people who used the old WordStar editor enjoy using Joe as the keystrokes are similar. The keystrokes are also easy enough to remember for those who don’t need all the power and added complexity of editors like Vim or Emacs.

With Joe, the primary keystroke is [Ctrl]K, after which follows the command. For instance, to get the help window to see the default keystrokes, use [Ctrl]K H. To search for text, use [Ctrl]K F. Other control commands are available, such as [Ctrl]V to move to the next screen of text, [Ctrl]A to get to the beginning of the line, and so forth.

Joe can be customized quite heavily as well. This is done by creating a personal ~/.joerc file. To begin, copy the system joerc, usually /etc/joe/joerc or /usr/local/etc/joe/joerc, to your home directory and then open it in a text editor.

$ cp /etc/joe/joerc ~/.joerc $ joe ~/.joerc

This configuration file gives the building blocks to customize all aspects of Joe. It is already quite heavily populated, both with configuration items and comments. In the configuration file, a single space at the beginning of a line turns the rest of the line into a comment. For instance, the default setting for the -force option is disabled; it shows up as a comment:

-force

To enable the option, which forces a final new line at the end of files when saved, simply remove the single space before the command:

-force

If editing the file with Joe, comments will be shown in green.

Creating customized keys is quite easy as well. The F-keys are not defined at all in the default configuration file so they can be used to execute programs. For instance, if you wished to use ispell or aspell for spell checking, you could easily assign it to an F-key, such as F1. The configuration file already contains definitions for using aspell and ispell, but they are not bound to any keys. To bind the use of ispell to the F1 key, add:

ispellfile .k1

When pushing F1 now, ispell will execute on the open document. If you wish to use aspell, use aspellfile instead of ispellfile.

To define a new macro, use the :def prefix and then the name of the macro, and its commands. For instance, to create a macro that inserts a copyright string, you might use:

:def copywrite "(c) 2008 Someone; all rights reserved." copywrite ^[ O 2 P # SHIFT+F1

This defines the macro copywrite and then assigns it to a keybinding; in the above case, it is assigned to [Shift][F1].

If you are a serious Joe user, spending some time looking at the configuration file could be well worth it as all of the commands noted there can be tweaked and changed. You may even discover little tricks or keybindings you were not aware of before, and the ability to map favourite commands to F-keys or other keybindings can be a real productivity booster.

Get the PDF version of this tip here.

Delivered each Tuesday, TechRepublic’s free Linux and Open Source newsletter provides tips, articles, and other resources to help you hone your Linux skills. Automatically sign up today!

Has Jack Wallen finally found the pinnacle of Linux distributions?The one distribution that will usurp Ubuntu as his OS of choice? You’ll have to read his take on Mandriva Spring 2008 and see just how enamored he has become of this distribution once called Mandrake Linux.

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I’ll just lay this out right from the beginning: Mandriva Spring 2008 Live CD is better than most other distributions fully installed. I am currently writing this blog on a laptop (that is generally flaky about Linux distributions) running the Live version of Mandriva Spring 2008. And even without installing the distribution, I am very impressed. Let’s see just how this is faring.

Display: Works perfectly.
Wireless: Works perfectly.
Sound: Works perfectly.
Hibernation: Works for the most part but because of the Live nature the laptop doesn’t want to fully hibernate.
Performance: Outstanding (blows away the currently installed gOS).
Installation: Quirky but simple.

So now, let’s break it down into its constituent pieces.

Installing Mandriva Spring 2008

It’s not so much the installation that was quirky but loading the Live CD that caught me off guard. Generally a Live CD is booted and places you directly on the desktop. The Mandriva Spring 2008 version of the Live CD first had you select your local and your keyboard and then you actually had to accept an EULA. I have never come across this in a Linux distribution. So I accepted the EULA and then had to select my local and keyboard yet again. Once that was done the live CD booted to the login where you select Guest as the user and no password.

Once logged in everything worked perfectly. I had to open up the network connection tool and select my wireless network. But once I clicked connect I was up and running (and writing this blog.) I really like what Mandriva has done with KDE 3.5. The look and feel is one of the nicest default KDE themes I have seen.

Now the installation on one of my desktop machines was flawless. During the installation you are asked if you want 3D desktop effects enabled and what you want to handle them (either Compiz or Matisse - I chose Compiz.)

Display

The desktop installation didn’t surprise me. The graphics chip is fairly standard. The laptop, however, did surprise me because the chip is a Via chrome chip which can be rather difficult to get working at anything above 800×600. Mandriva automatically configured the laptop to run at a beautiful 1440×900 at a 60 Hz refresh rate. This is probably the first time I have installed a distribution on this laptop and not had to monkey with the display properties to get it to work properly. The only downfall with the laptop is the 3D effects would not work. Of course this doesn’t bother me because the laptop is used almost entirely for writing purposes so 3D effects are not a big issue. And since the 3D effects worked out of the box on the desktop, I can’t hold that against Mandriva.

Wireless

Another issue that has plagued my laptop is wireless. The easiest distribution up to this point has been gOS. But even with gOS I had to install WICD to get wireless to work with encrypted wireless. Not so with Mandriva. Mandriva worked with WPA2 out of the box. Another big score for Mandriva.

Sound

Not that sound is really an issue these day, but I figured I would say that, even with the Live CD, there was no configuration needed to get sound working. Out of the box the Everex laptop had beautiful sound.

Hibernation

This has been an Achilles heel for Linux for a long time now. And I can’t say for sure that hibernation is working on this particular laptop 100% because of the nature of the Live CD, when I try to hibernate the laptop comes right back. The good news is that when it comes back up (almost instantly) everything is still working fine - no need to reconnect to the wireless network. So that, combined with all reports saying Mandriva’s hibernate works out of the box, leads me to think this might be the first distribution that has come close to actually solving the biggest issue with Linux on laptops. I will know for sure when I am ready to blow away my current installation and install Mandriva (I have to make sure I can get Enlightenment installed first ;-) ).

Performance

This is where I am truly amazed. Even running as a Live CD Mandriva is out performing the fully installed gOS on the laptop. This is certainly the best running Live CD I have ever experienced. And if that is any indication of how the system will run installed, I think we have a winner for sure. The desktop installation isn’t too shabby either. The hardware is, suffice it to say, ancient and the full installation runs like a champ (even with Compiz running).

Final thoughts

Here’s where I step up on the soap box I have carried around for over a decade and say that Microsoft, upon experiencing Mandriva 2008, should be getting close to shaking in their boots. With the Spring 2008 iteration of Mandriva the Linux community is witnessing probably the closest to a Windows killer the community has yet to see. This is, without a doubt, the finest release of any Linux distribution I have ever experienced in my 10+ years of using Linux.

Is Mandriva the future of Linux?

• 
  Yes
• 
  No
• 
  Hard to say at this point

View Results

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Mandriva Spring 2008 is amazing simple to install and use. It’s incredibly robust and stable. It is, I would have to say, the future of Linux.

Here’s your countdown of Linux hits for the week, plus one Novell-produced video, spoofing the Mac-PC ads. Do you suppose anyone will ever make one of these ads or parodies that doesn’t make the “winner” completely smarmy and annoying?

• 10 ways to make Linux boot faster
• 9 File managers for Linux
• 8 Ways VARs Can Profit From Linux and Open Source
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users
• 6 tips for Linux, open source desktop migrations
  
• 5 Common Misconceptions About Linux
• 4 Commands to Analyze Connection Usage under Linux
• 3 Linux HTML editors reviewed
• 2 Linux mobile groups merge to pool efforts
• Linux Edges One Step Closer to Total World Domination

Installing extra packages on the Asus Eee PC is possible if you want more software than the average user. Vincent Danen explains how to set up Xandros repositories to make it easier to add packages.

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While the ASUS Eee PC and the Xandros distribution it ships with come with enough software for the average person, some users will eventually want to install other software. The Eee PC does not make this particularly easy, but because it comes with a light Xandros install, it is simple to set up Xandros repositories to provide extra packages to install.

To begin with, open a terminal by pressing CTRL-ALT-t; there is no shortcut icon for the terminal. Once the terminal is open, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file by executing sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list; vim is also available if you prefer.

When the file is open, navigate to the end of the file and add the following lines to it:

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free deb http://dccamirror.xandros.com/dccri/ dccri-3.0 main deb http://www.geekconnection.org/ xandros4 main deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/ p701 main etch

Save the file and exit. Next, create the /etc/apt/preferences file and edit it. Because multiple extra repositories have been added, care must be taken that if there are any duplicate versions of the same software, the Xandros-supplied ones will always come first. This is accomplished by using “pinning”, which will indicate to apt which repositories take higher preference than others. Add the following to /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: * Pin: origin update.eeepc.asus.com Pin-Priority: 950 Package: * Pin: origin Pin-Priority: 925 Package: * Pin: origin xnv4.xandros.com Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: origin dccamirror.xandros.com Pin-Priority: 850 Package: * Pin: origin www.geekconnection.org Pin-Priority: 750 Package: * Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 700 Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 650 Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 600

Now use apt to update the repository metadata:

$ sudo apt-get update

Once this is done you can use apt to install software that does not come with the default Xandros OS. For instance, to install the text editor joe, use:

$ sudo apt-get install joe

Apt also allows you to see what dependencies may be pulled in when you attempt to install packages by performing a dry-run install transaction. This is very good idea to keep from getting a system full of dependencies you did not expect. This can be done by adding the -s argument to the apt-get command:

$ sudo apt-get -s install joe

Getting new packages installed onto the ASUS Eee PC is not difficult, and the setup is required only once. From this point forward, any application built for Xandros or third-party applications compiled specifically for the Eee PC are now available. You can also use this to upgrade packages that were previously installed on the Eee PC, by doing:

$ sudo apt-get -s dist-upgrade

This will provide a list of available packages to upgrade. Omit the -s option to perform the actual package upgrades.

Get the PDF version of this tip here.

Delivered each Tuesday, TechRepublic’s free Linux and Open Source newsletter provides tips, articles, and other resources to help you hone your Linux skills. Automatically sign up today!

Find out just what is inside the ASUS Eee in one of TechRepublic’s Cracking Open Photo Galleries.

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The TechRepublic Linux and Open Source blog has been talking about the ASUS Eee 901 ultra-portable personal computer lately because it ships with a version of Linux. The general consensus seems to be that the Eee is good for some specific tasks, but there are limitations. However, the real question is what the heck is inside one of these small devices. With that in mind, we offer “Cracking Open the ASUS Eee 901 20G ultra-portable.”

ASUS engineers have done a marvelous job of getting some powerful components organized and functioning inside a very small case. The result is a compact, yet robust, personal computer that can perform most general tasks reasonably well. The sophistication of the device’s layout and design show that great care went into its manufacture.

While power users will find the ASUS Eee’s limitations to be frustrating, they can still appreciate the engineering prowess that went into the design as revealed in the TechRepublic Cracking Open Photo Gallery

In his quest to find the simplest Linux distribution, Jack Wallen makes a stop at PCLinuxOS and may have found the holy grail of simple operating systems. Read Jack’s take on PCLinuxOS and decide for yourself if PCLinuxOS is your “go-to” Linux distribution.

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The slogan for PCLinuxOS is “Radically Simple” and, as far as I can tell, it might be one of the most fitting operating system slogans I have seen. But does it apply across the board? From start to finish? I decided it had been too long since I had tried this distribution so I went about giving it a go. I have to say I was certainly impressed.

With some distributions, along with the claim of being the easiest, comes the stigma of being overly simple, or “dumbed down.” Some of these distributions come with “helpful” widgets and graphics that look as if they were targeting an elementary school class. Not PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS retains a professional look and feel while remaining one of the easiest to use Linux distributions available. Let’s take a look at what PCLinuxOS offers.

Based upon…
PCLinuxOS is based upon Mandriva and uses the Mandriva control center and Draklive installer. Along with Mandriva technology, PCLinuxOS is bolstered by patches from OpenSuSE, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. Let’s think about this one. You have available a distribution that benefits from all of the other outstanding distributions. So from the very beginning PCLinuxOS holds much promise.

On top of a strong foundation PCLinuxOS offers KDE 3.5.6 which is one of the more stable and user-friendly of the larger desktop environments.

But it’s not what’s installed that makes PCLinuxOS so “radically simple.” No. What makes PCLinuxOS so radically simple is how it keeps the user from having to do tasks they aren’t used to doing. Let’s take a look.

Installation
I tested the PCLinuxOS installation on a number of machines (including a laptop). Each machine was comprised of varied hardware and none of the machines were similar. Everything from antiquated video to newly released wireless cards were a part of the equation, and not once did PCLinuxOS falter. The distribution found, and used, everything. Even with the laptop, where I have found some Live CDs to work fine only to have the fully-installed distribution flake out, PCLinuxOS was a hit. The only improvement I could offer would be the inclusion of WICD for wireless connectivity.

Now one possible “gotcha” was that, during the installation, PCLinuxOS allows you to have the root user without a password. I found this a little off putting because (1) Does this mean there will be no root password and “sudo” will be used or (2) Does this mean the root user uses no password? If it’s the former I can live with that (because I am a Ubuntu user and am used to sudo). If it is the latter - I can not live with that because that would make for one very unsafe system.

Usage
As I said before, KDE 3.5.6 is installed, so usage is very simple. But PCLinuxOS goes well beyond that. It seems all of their tools were selected for simplicity of use. From the Synaptic package installation system to the SuperKaramba widget system (we have to keep up with OS X after all) every package installed is not only simple to use, but an outstanding addition to any Linux installation.

Bells and whistles
The default desktop is very clean looking. Fortunately PCLinuxOS is shying away (currently) from KDE 4 and KDE 3.5.6 can be (and is, out of the box) set up so that the user is instantly familiar with every aspect of the desktop. Mostly the KDE 3.5.6 desktop isn’t terribly flashy. About the only added flash is the aforementioned SuperKaramba. SK adds widgets (of various types) to the desktop. Most of the widgets available for SK are monitor-type widgets which, to be honest, aren’t terribly useful to the end user. But there are multimedia controller widgets, dock widgets, application controller widgets (the OpenOffice bar is one of my favs), and calendar widgets. So the desktop can be changed from new-user to power-user pretty quickly.

So Who is PCLinuxOS For?
PCLinuxOS might be one of those distributions that can easily be for everyone. From the new user who has never touched Linux before to the guru, anyone would be hard-pressed to find something to seriously complain about with this distribution.

What is your “go-to” Linux distribution?

• 
  PCLinuxOS
• 
  Ubuntu
• 
  Fedora
• 
  Mandriva
• 
  OpenSuSE
• 
  Debian
• 
  Other
• 
  None

View Results

 Loading …

Final thoughts
What impressed me the most about PCLinuxOS is its lack of pretension. The creators of PCLinuxOS know their audience is a wide cross section and know how to present their wares to that audience without being insulting or coming across as “better than the rest.” PCLinuxOS is a simple-to-use operating system that makes the user forget that it’s there. And isn’t that the whole point of an operating system - to bridge the gap between the user and the hardware and make the work seamless? Well that’s exactly what PCLinuxOS does best: Seamless.

I highly recommend this distribution to pretty much anyone. If you have people you’re hoping to win over to Linux this might be your go-to OS. If you have hardware that other distributions don’t seem to like, again, this might be your OS. Give PCLinuxOS a try. It really is “radically simple.”

Jack Wallen walks you through the steps for placing a shadow box between an image and text in the open source tool Scribus.

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If you’re into desktop publishing, then you know that placing text over a busy image can be a nightmare. In many instances the image has too many colors to find a text color that won’t blend into the background or the dictated text color (for whatever reason) will simply not appear when placed over the image. To solve this problem, you need to use a translucent text (or shadow) box to make the text appear clearly on your image. I’m going to show you how to accomplish this with one of my favorite open source tools, Scribus.

I’m going to start with the original image — a picture of Geddy Lee (from the band Rush, my fav) that makes it nearly impossible to place black text anywhere in the image (Figure A).

Figure A

A modern day warrior sure takes a mean, mean picture.

As you can see, finding a place for black text would be a task to make any designer pull her hair out. But let’s do it anyway. First I’m going to just place the text over the image to illustrate how bad it will look. Then I’ll add the shadow box to help us out.

Placing the text

The first thing you must do is add a layer to the image. You could just place the text directly on the background layer (the layer that holds our image) but you wouldn’t be able to manipulate the text or place anything between layers that don’t exist.

So, the first thing to do is add a couple of layers. Click on the Window menu at the top of the screen and select the Layers entry. A new window will open, as in Figure B, that will allow you to manipulate layers.

Figure B

By default the “Background” layer is created.

Click on the Add A New Layer button (bottom left) and a new entry in the window will appear. The new entry will be called (by default) Layer 1. If you double-click that entry, you can rename it. Let’s rename this layer Shadow Box. Add yet another layer and call this layer Text. Now you are ready to start working.

Take a look at Figure C to see what the image looks like with straight-up black text.

Figure C

This would not pass inspection in ANY department.

Of course I already created the text in the Background layer to show you how it would look. I can fix that simply by moving to the Background layer (the layer switcher is at the bottom of the window as seen in Figure D).

Figure D

Just click the drop-down arrow and select the layer you want.

To move an object to another layer, you right-click on that object and then select the target layer from the Send To Layer menu (see Figure E).

Figure E

You can also move an object forward or backwards from this right-click menu.

Now that you have your text in the proper layer, it’s time to add the shadow box. First, switch to the Shadow Box layer. Now, from the tool menu near the top of the screen, select the Insert Shape button (making sure it’s set on the square image - see Figure F).

Figure F

From the drop-down you can select a number of different shapes to insert.

Now click, hold, and draw your shadow box to the precise size you want it underneath your text. When you’re done drawing, release your mouse button and you will have a solid black box on your image (see Figure G).

Figure G

Where did my text go?!

Now you need to manipulate your shadow box so the text can be seen. The first thing you want to do is change the color of the box. Open up the Properties Window (from the Window menu) and click on the Colors tab (see Figure H).

Figure H

By default the image color is black.

The first thing to do is change the box color to White. As you can see there are two colors to change: line and fill. You are going to change the Fill color first. So make sure the fill can is selected and then select White from the list. As you can see, from Figure I, we’re moving in the right direction.

Figure I

White works, but this looks unprofessional.

Now you have to edit the opacity of the image. Go back to the Properties Window. There is an Opacity percentage selector. Change that to “50″ and notice how much better it looks in Figure J.

Figure J

Now we’re getting some where!

Now to finish off the look, you can do couple of things. First, change the line color of the box to white in order to lose the black outline of the box. Next, edit the corners of the box to round them off a bit.

To change the outline color, click on the Line Color Properties button and select None from the list. Next, to round off the corners of the box, click on the Shape tab (from the Properties Window) and change the Round Corners number to 20. The shadow box is complete in Figure K.

Figure K

Modern day warrior filled with mean, mean pride.

Final thoughts

Making your publications professional looking isn’t as hard as it seems. It only takes a bit of pre-planning, and tweaking to go from substandard to professional. Of course, a dash of imagination in this recipe can take professional to amazing. So don’t forget to use that imagination in your creations.

Related: See my post on how to wrap text around an image in Scribus.

Jack Wallen reviews the latest offering from OpenSuSE. Find out why OpenSuSE won him over.

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I am on a roll here with reviewing distros, so I thought I would take the advice of my readers and add SuSE to the roll call. I went into this with little expectation simply because I have had less-than-stellar experiences with SuSE in the past. This time, however, my experience was much, much different. And if I ever doubted the power and useability of SuSE, I was very wrong.

Let me start off by saying the install was actually OpenSuSE 11.0. I inadvertently downloaded the KDE 4.x version of the iso but, surprisingly enough, I am not regretting it. But before I get into that, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with.

Software: You already know this one, OpenSuSE 11.0 with KDE 4.0.4-18
Hardware: AMD 1.1 Ghz processor, 376 MB of RAM, Radeon 7000 graphic card.

So the machine is a bit long in the tooth, but it’s good to use to know how low an OS can go. And OpenSuSE met the challenge just fine.

Installation

Funny about Linux installations these days — they are becoming almost too simple. You toss in the Live CD, wait until it boots, and click the Install icon. That’s it. In about 15 minutes, OpenSuSE was up and running on my machine. And, to my surprise, so was KDE 4!

First impressions

As you all know, I am all about the look and feel of a desktop. So when I was greeted with KDE 4, I was a bit disappointed. INITIALLY. But, believe it or not, SuSE has managed to actually pull off a pretty strong KDE 4 desktop. After using the desktop for nearly 48 hours, I have yet to have a single crash. Yeah… I can’t believe that either. After installing Kubuntu with KDE 4, I was able to get (and recreate) a crash within about 4.8 minutes of initial boot. But OpenSuSE has done the unthinkable – made KDE 4 actually useable!

My next impression was how slick OpenSuSE’s update manager is. Once you are up and running, the update manager informs you there are updates available. But then it goes one step further and asks if you want updates to be automated and transparent. In other words, the newbie Linux user can finally have updates happen automatically and without their intervention. This, in my opinion, is a boon to Linux because most >= AVERAGE computer users do not want to get their hands dirty. This rivals the Microsoft automatic updates and that is exactly what Linux needs.

So, against my better judgment (as a seasoned Linux user), I set up the automatic, transparent updates and let them run. A few minutes later I received a notice that some of the updates installed required a reboot to take effect. This was obviously a kernel update, so I went ahead and rebooted. When the desktop came up (OpenSuSE has taken it upon themselves to auto load the user instead of having to log in), everything was running perfectly.

Next impressions

One of my biggest surprises was that The GIMP was not installed. I am a BIG GIMP user, and any time I see a Linux distribution that does not automatically install this flagship graphics application I am shocked. Of course, installing the application is a few clicks away and that’s exactly what I did next.

Installing software on OpenSuSE is very straightforward. From the main menu you go to Applications|System|Configuration and then click Install Software. You will be required to give the root password and then the application installer (a module of Yast2) will be up and running. Searching for Gimp and checked off everything I needed. The installer then proceeded to download and install everything for me, just like a good package manager should.

Stability/reliability

I have to say I am completely impressed. Any distribution that can make KDE 4 run smoothly is doing something right. I have yet to come across a problem with 11.0. This is a large leap ahead for SuSE, seeing as how the last time I gave it a try (10.0), the installation wouldn’t even complete.

I realize that I have not put this installation through anything really rigorous. I have not installed any servers on the system nor am I doing any compiling or number crunching. But what I have been using it for, day-to-day desktop usage, it is very much as up to the task as any other distribution.

Who is it for?

I know that Ubuntu is THE distribution of choice for new users. But I would have to tip my old red hat to OpenSuSE and say their latest offering could easily usurp Ubuntu as the newbie distro of choice. It really is that good. But is OpenSuSE for everyone? Probably not. If you are a true Linux power user this might not be for you. But then, if you are a true Linux power user, you are probably using something like Gentoo or Slackware. But OpenSuSE might just be the one distribution I have come across that is as close to being for “everyone” as I have seen.

Will you be giving OpenSuSE a try?

• 
  Yes
• 
  No
• 
  Already have

View Results

 Loading … Picking nits

Most of my beefs with OpenSuSE have to do with KDE 4. First and foremost is, why in the name of Tux has the KDE team deemed it necessary to NOT include Firefox as the default browser? I realize they are trying to eat their own dog food but come on… Konqueror is not going to usurp Firefox as the browser of choice. That could easily be the deal breaker for many new users. You fire up Konqueror and then have to jump through hoops to get it working with everything on the Web. I went to Gmail and found I only had the minimum of functionality because I was working with an non-supported browser.

I get Kmail as the mail client (though I prefer Thunderbird). It resembles Apple’s Mail (at least enough to say “I get it”). But the Konqueror over Firefox I will never understand. I’ve already mentioned The GIMP.

Final thoughts

I am truly impressed with OpenSuSE 11.0. It has made vast progress from its last iteration. I’m so impressed that I am considering keeping this installation and using it as my Linux test-bed (first things first — must install Enlightenment).

So if you haven’t given SuSE (or OpenSuSE) a try lately, you really should. No… you must. If you are a fan of Linux, you will be doing yourself a big favor by letting OpenSuSE win you over.

Out of the many distributions that work on the Eee PC, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (or 2008.1) is one that works exceptionally well. It can be installed to the built-in SSD or onto an external SD card.

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The Xandros distribution that comes with the ASUS Eee PC 900 is very simple and a great experience for those new to Linux. For more advanced users, however, it may feel quite confining and limiting. It’s a good distribution considering the target audience of the Eee PC, but installing additional software or a different desktop environment can be quite challenging. There are many distributions that work on the Eee PC besides Xandros, and the ability to boot off of SD cards allows you to keep the default Xandros OS and also boot other distributions. This makes it quite easy to use a whole array of operating systems on the Eee PC if the idea of blowing away the default OS doesn’t sit well.

Out of the many distributions that work on the Eee PC, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (or 2008.1) is one that works exceptionally well. It can be installed to the built-in SSD or onto an external SD card. The Eee PC supports the newer SDHC cards which provide larger capacity. For example, a 4GB SDHC card is more than enough to install Mandriva 2008.1, and using the built-in SSD drive for /home, which would share it with the default Xandros install, is more than sufficient.

Because the Eee PC does not come with a built-in CD or DVD drive, you will need an external USB. To begin the install, enter the ASUS Eee PC BIOS and enable all of the hardware devices. This will allow the installer to properly detect all of the hardware. Also make sure that you don’t do the install on battery power; installing to an SDHC easily will take over four hours.

Once the changes have been saved to the BIOS, when the Eee PC boots, press the ESC key and tell it to boot from the external CD or DVD drive. Once the Mandriva installer starts, perform an install as normal. On the Eee PC 900, when you arrive at the step for formatting and partitioning drives, select the advanced options to partition yourself and select the SDHC card; it will most likely be the /dev/sdc device. There will be three devices: /dev/sda would be the first 4GB SSD while /dev/sdb would be the 16GB SSD. On a new SDHC card, you can tell the right device by it being one large FAT partition. Re-partition this to a single partition and mount it as /, or the root partition. Use a journaling filesystem like ext3 or reiserfs.

The only other thing to watch for is to make sure that you do not install GRUB to the system MBR as this would overwrite the boot sector for Xandros. Instead, make sure you install GRUB to the MBR of the media you are installing Mandriva onto, the SDHC card. This will allow you to later set up the BIOS to have the boot order look for the SDHC card first, or you can select it by pressing ESC when the system boots.

Everything else, other than wireless, will be configured correctly for hardware. Wireless will be configured on the first reboot, but you will need to have the Eee PC connected to the Internet via the wired Ethernet port in order to obtain the drivers to configure the wireless network card.

On the first reboot, you’ll note that Mandriva boots much slower than Xandros; this is normal as accessing the SDHC is much slower than the internal SSD but once the system is booted, it will run quite fast and shouldn’t be too slow.

Enter the Mandriva Control Center and be sure to be connected to the Internet to set up the software sources. Remove the original install media and set up a remote source. Next, head to the networking setup; now you can configure the wireless connection since remote sources will have been set up. This is necessary to download the appropriate madwifi packages. You may have to install the various security and bugfix updates first, which include a new kernel and new madwifi packages.

Finally, edit /etc/fstab and make a few changes to minimize the number of writes to the flash memory. Make sure that all of the mounts have the “noatime” option, and you may also use the tmpfs filesystem for things like temporary files and logs. Anything on tmpfs will not persist across reboots, but for a device like the Eee PC, it’s doubtful that you will want to keep log files anyway, so add the following to the end of /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/log tmpfs noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs noatime 0 0

One final point to note: Regardless of what distribution you install to an SD or SDHC card, you will not be able to suspend/resume, so ensure you do proper shutdowns. Due to the card reader being on the USB bus, suspend/resume does not, as of yet, work properly because of how the kernel interacts with USB devices. Other than that, everything should work as if you installed to the internal SSD.

Get the PDF version of this tip here.

Delivered each Tuesday, TechRepublic’s free Linux and Open Source newsletter provides tips, articles, and other resources to help you hone your Linux skills. Automatically sign up today!

In this tutorial, Jack Wallen will show you how to install True Type fonts on your Fedora or Ubuntu Linux machine and how to make key applications (such as OpenOffice and Scribus) aware of those fonts.

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If you are a graphic artist, writer, designer, or desktop publisher, then you are likely to need specific fonts installed on your computer. For Linux users this used to be a more difficult task. The good news is that more modern distributions make font installation much easier. Gone are the days of editing your xorg.conf font path information.

Installing fonts in Ubuntu

Once you have your handy collection of True Type fonts, you are going to want to create a directory to hold them. Installing the fonts system-wide will give all users access to them. First, create a font directory in /usr/share/fonts/truetype. Call this directory newfonts. Issue the command sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/newfonts. You will have to enter your sudo password to complete this task.

Once this directory is created, place all your *ttf or *TTF files in the newfonts directory. With the fonts in place you will then need to issue the command fc-cache -f -v to make the system aware of the new fonts. Once this is done, the system knows about the new fonts and all the system users will have access to them.

If you want to make these fonts available only to specific users, then you will follow the same directions except you will add the fonts only to the users’ ~/.fonts directory. If the ~/.fonts directory doesn’t exist, create it with mkdir ~/.fonts (while logged into the specific users’ accounts). Now move (or copy) all of the *ttf and/or *TTF files into the new directory and run fc-cache -f -v to make the users’ accounts aware of the fonts.

If you have a single-user machine, go with the latter version.

Installing fonts in Fedora 7 (or higher)

Installing fonts in Fedora is a simpler task. You really only need to dump your *ttf or *TTF files into the user’s ~/.fonts directory, log out, and log back in. The fonts will be recognized without any special tricks.

Installing MS Fonts

There are many times you will want Microsoft fonts on your system. Fortunately this is only a matter of installing the msttcorefonts package. This is done one of two ways:

on an apt-based machine:

apt-get install msttcorefonts

on a yum based machine:

wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec yum install rpm-build cabextract rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec yum localinstall –nogpgcheck /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

Both of the above instructions will complete the job for you. The former command will require you to OK the process (see Figure A below.)

Figure A

This installation will prompt you to install x-ttcidfont-conf also, which is not necessary, but will add even more fonts to your system.

Getting applications to recognize your new fonts

• OpenOffice: This one is a piece of cake. If you have installed the fonts into ~/.fonts and issued the command fc-cache -f -v, OpenOffice will be able to take advantage of them.
• Gimp: The Gimp enjoys the same ease of use as OpenOffice.
• Scribus: With Scribus you have to actually configure the new font path. To do this go to File | Preferences and you will see the Font icon (see Figure B below.)

Figure B

From here you configure all aspects of the Scribus desktop publishing application.

Click on the Fonts icon and then click on the Additional Paths tab (see Figure C below.)

Figure C

Click on Add and then navigate to your new font path to add the new path.

You will notice that when you click Add to add the new path, the .fonts directory doesn’t show up. That is because it is a hidden directory. You will have to type in .fonts in the directory text area and click OK in order to add the hidden directory.

GNOME/KDE: Both GNOME and KDE will automatically make use of the fonts that are placed in the ~/.fonts directory. You will have to go to each environment’s control panel where you can configure each to use various fonts for each element of the desktop.

Gotchas

I have, on a number of occasions, taken my collection of fonts (which is rather large) and placed them all into my ~/.fonts directory only to find out that one of those fonts was being used by Firefox as the default font. In some instances, this turned out to be not so great as the “replacement” font was not a font that should be used to view Web pages. It took me a long time to find the offending font and I now know to never add that particular font to my ~/.fonts directory. I honestly have no idea why this happened. If Firefox suddenly starts rendering pages with a rather funky font, you will have to dig through your font collection, find the offending font, and remove it from the directory.

Another gotcha: With Scribus and The Gimp, the more fonts you add, the longer it will take for the applications to start up. So if your collection is reaching into the thousands, expect those applications to take a moment to start.

All in all, adding fonts to Linux is far easier than it once was. You shouldn’t have to manually edit X configuration files. With a more Windows-like approach to adding fonts, working with Linux in areas such as graphics or desktop publishing is no longer a chore.

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The Asus Eee PC 900 is a great out-of-the-box Linux laptop for new users. With the default Xandros install, everything just works. The boot speeds are amazing, and suspend/resume works great.
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The ASUS Eee PC has become a very popular sub-notebook recently and has undergone quite a few revisions since it was first introduced. Initially it had a smaller screen size and a much smaller drive capacity, but the more recent ASUS Eee PC 900 has rectified many of the perceived shortcomings of previous models. The 900 has a larger 8.9″ screen (compared to the 7″ screen of previous models) and instead of coming with a smaller SSD (solid state drive) that previous versions provided (the 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB models), the 900 comes with 20GB across two drives (4GB and 16GB) for the Linux model.

With a comfortable keyboard that — while taking a little time to get used to — works quite well (certainly better than the Toshiba Libretto I had previously used as a sub-notebook), and the 1024×600 screen resolution, the Eee PC is a great little machine.

The Linux version comes with a tailored version of the Xandros Linux distribution. It has an innovative “home screen” that is great for those not used to Linux, as instead of calling applications by name, it calls them by function. For instance, to open Firefox you would click on the Web icon under the Internet section of the home screen. Likewise, to open Pidgin for instant messaging, the Messenger icon is available. Other examples of “applications” are the iGoogle, Wikipedia, and Internet Radio shortcuts, all of which open in Firefox.

Other tabs include Work, Learn, and Play. Under the Work tab the various OpenOffice applications can be found, simply titled Documents, Spreadsheets, and so forth. Under the Learn tab are various applications for children: Paint to load Tux Paint, Math takes you to a sub-tab that can teach fractions, geometry, and so forth. Under the Play tab are various fun programs like games, a media player, photo manager, video manager, and so forth.

With the included 1.3MB pixel Webcam, the Eee PC also bundles Skype so you can use it to do video chats.

To get started with it, ASUS has made the Eee PC extremely simple. Follow the first-time wizard, provide your user name, and you’re up and running. Setting up the wireless network is simple, and the basic Xandros distribution gives you the ability to tweak and personalize basic aspects of the interface.

All told, the Eee PC is a great out-of-the-box Linux laptop for new users. With the default Xandros install, everything just works. The boot speeds are amazing, and suspend/resume works great. Future versions of the Eee PC promise to be even more powerful while retaining the same form-factor. And the price point for these devices is great. The SRP for the Eee PC 900 is $550USD, and the initial Eee PC 2G Surf is priced at $299USD. Considering that the default install only takes a little over 300MB, even the 2G model may be sufficient for those looking for a lightweight laptop to access e-mail and the Internet.

Recovering data from a hard drive with a corrupted partition table created by Linux is not something you do every day. However, DiskInternals makes a tool, which runs under Windows, called Linux Reader that can recover your data. Jack Wallen shows you how to install, configure, and use this tool in this How do I entry in the Windows blog.

The nice thing about this tool is it does not allow you to write to the ext2 or ext3 partitions. It only allows read access. This is crucial in keeping your data from being overwritten or completely lost (without the help of high-cost, third-party solutions.) Another nice thing about this tool is it has very low system requirements:

• Windows 9x/ME/NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista
• At least 16 MB of RAM
• Free disk space for recovered files

For more details check out the How do I article in the Windows blog.