It’s been a month since my last post. For all my regular readers, I’m very sorry for the absense.
There’s a lot of intersting stuff going on right now. Fortunately, with so much going on, I shouldn’t have a lack of topics to talk about.
To get the old post ball rolling again, how could I not start back up with Ubuntu 9.04?
Linux has many great tools built in that help maintain the system without user intervention. One such tool is Cron.
On my Ubuntu 8.10 system, there are many things that are set to run each day: locate database updates, misc cleanup utilities, automatic package updates, log rotations, etc. All of these are managed by the Cron system.
For a while, I needed to manually run the updatedb command to update the locate database, and I never thought about why. The problem is that my daily, weekly, and monthly Cron jobs never run. The reason for this is that these Cron jobs are scheduled to run very early in the morning, when my system is off. Thus, these job schedules never run.
The solution for this is easy. I simply need to change the times these run at to times when my system is on.
As I mentioned before, I want to switch from using Subversion for project code collaboration and versioning to Git.
I’m switching not because I have some idealogical dread of Subversion or its methods. In fact, I quite like how much easier Subversion has made handling code collaboration. The problem I ran into is that Subversion has become doggedly slow and bloated.
For example, a simple project with a current working size of 2.9MB has a Subversion repository that is a massive 98MB in size. Furthermore, it takes a full four minutes to commit a change, even a simple one-line change to a text file. During this commit process, my server’s dual quad-core processors are essentially maxed. Why the repository has become so amazingly large and why the commits take so long, I’ll never know. The maxing out of my server for four minutes per commit is also unacceptable since there are times where minor changes will need to be made to more than a dozen repositories at a time. Multiply the number of commits by 4 minutes a piece, and not only is a terminal on my system tied up for more than an hour, but my server’s CPU is maxed for just as long.
Beginning last week, I dug into Git and learned what I needed to know. The initial impressions are great; however, Git is not without its problems either. The primary problem with Git is that its syntax is extremely-obscure, IMHO.
These days, I really want to dabble around more with virtual machines. They have a lot to offer for benchmarking and failover protection. However, I always thought that you needed a host OS to run the virtual machines in. In my experience, this was clunky at best and riddled with problems such as automatted startup of virtual machines, stability of the host OS, and degraded performance.
I’ve used virtual machines lately with Sun’s VirtualBox, a free virtualization platform that can run virtual machines. This has been valuable for testing different distros, but wouldn’t suffice for running virtual servers. At least, it wouldn’t based on my experiences.
I have a friend that has worked professionally with virtualization technology for a few years, and he pointed me to a VMware product called ESXi. Not only is ESXi free, it runs as the native OS in which other OSes can run virtually.
I have yet to test it out, but it shows great potential. If you have any experience with ESXi, I’d love to hear it.
There’s a very good chance that you have already heard of the game World of Goo. If not, check out this video to get a taste.
This game has a number of great things going for it:
These days, I find great favor in things that 1) have Linux support and 2) are DRM free. Since World of Goo looked like a ton of fun and had both of those, the $20 price tag was nothing. Frankly, the price is very small when you consider the many hours of fun that you can have with all the goo balls.
I ran World of Goo both on one of my Windows Vista machines and on my Ubuntu machine at home. It worked very well on both platforms. Even the Linux version was very smooth even though I’m running Compiz.
FYI: If you want to run this on Linux, you can get the software as a DEB or RPM package or as a tar.gz archive with all the application files. I recommend usingone of the package files. Since the packages are built for 32-bit, you will need to use these instructions if you have a 64-bit distro.
I highly recommend World of Goo, but you don’t have to have blind trust in my opinion. You can download the demo and try it out for yourself.
You might be interested in their post about the release of the Linux version. The day of the Linux release, sales were 40% higher than their previous highest-selling day. “There is a market for Linux games after all :),” said one of the developers after updating the post.
I just started using the Press This feature of WordPress, and I quickly ran into a problem. Each time I’d try to use it, I’d get a 404 error page.
I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, but there is an easy fix that you can find here.
I recently watched the entirety of the Revolution OS documentary. While it definitely is not a video that can be enjoyed by most people, nor even most computer users, it is a very intersting watch for a number of reasons.
Visiting the documentary’s site, you quickly gain a sense of what this documentary is aimed to be: “… the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.” However, that’s not what this video is about.
When I first started watching the documentary, I thought I would get this intimate insight into how people made calculated movements against the growing monopoly of Microsoft’s operating systems. In fact, this isn’t anything near what actually happened.
A few days ago, I blogged about changing the timezone on a Linux server. In the post, I mentioned how the zoneinfo files needed to be updated in 2007 due to congress expanding the number of days that Daylight Saving Time covers. However, I did not go in depth about how to update the zoneinfo files.
Since then, I’ve received many search queries from people looking for information about why their server did not properly update when the Daylight Saving Time change hit. For instance, I got queries of “is daylight savings default in centos”, “daylight savings time didn’t change centos”, “dst timezone change centos”, and many more. It’s clear that there are server administrators out there that are very confused about the Daylight Saving Time situation on their server.
Today, I hope to remedy that problem and give server administrators the information they need to update these zoneinfo files. I typically focus in on specific platforms, but today, I’ll try to cover as many distros as I can as well as provide a universal solution.
I’ve had a lot of fun recently posting about how to do stuff on the command line in Linux. My focus is specifically for Ubuntu users, but the information and techniques can be used for any Linux distro.
Since I’m probably going to end up with a lot of content under this topic, I’ve decided to create a dedicated tag: Mastering the Command Line. I’ve gone through my older posts on this topic and tagged them as well. So, make sure to check out Mastering the Command Line if you want to know how to become a command line power user.
Back to today’s topic. You’re starting to learn how to use the command line, but it’s annoying to always have to type in similar commands over and over. If only there were a way to pull up commands that you’ve already run to run again as is or to quickly modify. Today, I’m going to teach you how to do exactly this.
Have you ever seen a bunch of ^M characters in a text file? This odd character at the end of a line can also be represented as a Ctrl+M or <CTRL>M. You don’t know what it is, and you want it to go away.
Today, I’ll help you understand what that odd ^M character is, why it is in some of your documents, and how to get rid of them.
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