**For the uninitiated ** Did you stumble upon this article unawares? Part of what I do is manage internet connected servers. All the web sites and internet services that I manage are running on a physical machine I have. In many ways this machine is similar to the desktop, or even laptop, machines you are familia ... Read Full Article

So I was getting permission denied errors when attempting to establish an outgoing network connection to an smtp server from a PHP script running under the Apache webserver on a Fedora Core 13 box.  To get familiar with it, I've left SELinux enabled and, as they occur, I track down the issues it raises. One SELinux ... Read Full Article

You would think that an editing tool would be included by default but it is not. So after some searching I discovered the tool needed is "alacarte". To install, as root in a terminal window: yum install alacarte After installation there will be a new menu item called System->Preference->Main Menu which will let you e ... Read Full Article

I'm repeating my experiment with the Lenovo Thinkpad X100E. I picked one up directly from Lenovo. The product page is [here][1]. (not an affiliate link) I got the "Elite" version with the AMD Turion Neo X2 Dual-Core L625 (1.6GHz, 800MHz, 1MB L2) processor, 4 gigs of ram and a 320 gig drive. It's got a realtek wire ... Read Full Article

One of the problems I face these days is that I do too many disparate things. As a result, some uncommon tasks take a little while to get figured out.  In this particular case I had a directory of photos spanning a few days. I wanted to use the dates of the photos to copy them into separate directories spanning the fo ... Read Full Article

Every once in a while, under Fedora Core 12, keyboard auto-repeat will be turned off for some strange reason. To restore keyboard auto-repeat without having to restart Xwindows use the commant: > **xset r**  See the man page for more information on the xset command. ... Read Full Article

I have finally given up on Ubuntu 9.10. I should have done that some time ago. I've switched to Fedora Core 12, which I was loathe to do because of some very bad experiences with previous versions. I'm happy to report that FC 12 suffers from none of the problems I saw in Ubuntu.  Networking works. Sound works. It' ... Read Full Article

One of the most frustrating things about Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10 (and 9.04) is the random but frequent 20 sec DNS lookup delay that happens when IPV6 is enabled. Apparently, the resolver first attempts an IPV6 lookup, even if no interfaces are defined. It will sit and time out, at random, for 20 seconds before attempting t ... Read Full Article

There's alot of talk about 2012 and the end of the world. This is all clearly false. The end of the world will be on Mon Jan 18, 2038 at 22:14:07. Mark your calendars. > #include > #include > #include > > int main(void) >         { >         time_t end_of_ ... Read Full Article

Getting Trixbox 2.8.0.1 up and running has proven to be problematic. Here's a link to the [developers blog][1]. Doing a yum update without doing a [yum clean all][2] followed by removing the kmod-dahdi-linux and dahdi-linux packages (see linked article) will produce dependency conflicts and prevent the update from fin ... Read Full Article

I came across this article which outlines the few steps necessary to upgrade the stock OpenOffice installation that comes with Kubuntu 8.10 to OpenOffice 3. In order for it to run you must remove the package openof ... Read Full Article

I just upgraded my Kubuntu 8.0.4 desktop to the latest 8.10 Intrepid release. FireFox 3.0.5 and all other GTK based apps are having serious rendering issues and leaving artifacts. After alot of searching, I've found a bug report for it: ... Read Full Article

I'm running the Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon linux distribution. Randomly, the SHIFT key will stop functioning. It seems to somehow be related to running VMWare Workstation and switching screens. It's a known bug listed here: Getting your SHIFT key workin ... Read Full Article

There is an issue with recent 2.6 kernels and some ATA/SATA controllers which I have run into while trying to install both CentOS 5 and Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Initially, even the boot CD would not work from the builtin DVD reader. To boot the first time I used an external USB DVD. The relevant error was " ... Read Full Article

The machine this site is running on is an old dual PIII 600. The unfortunate thing is that some of the software running on it uses binary-only components that won't run under later versions of linux. So while I work on a replacement for those components, we're stuck running dns1 for the foreseeable future. The ma ... Read Full Article

Cool article covering a bit of increasingly ancient linux history: [**Linux: The 0.01 Release**][1]The first Linux distribution I used was SLS and included the .99pl12 kernel if I remember correctly. I had been working under SCO Unix for quite a while at that point and encountering Linux freed me from that hell. It's ... Read Full Article

Sometimes finding answers to the dirt simple questions is the most challenging. **The question:** You want to boot Knoppix. You have an old machine on which the ATAPI CDROM has died. You have a USB CDROM lying around you could use, but oh wait, the BIOS on your old machine does not support booting from a USB ... Read Full Article

We're getting hit by ssh dictionary attacks much more frequently now. I just installed a daemon called "SShutOut" available from [http://www.techfinesse.com/sshutout/sshutout.html.][1] It's very quick to install and runs in the background to monitor the /var/log/messages file for excessive failed logi ... Read Full Article

Designed for single click auto-install auto-uninstall customer support applications where you need to see a customers desktop to help them with something but they can't run a normal VNC server (due to lack of knowledge, NAT firewalls, etc) you can use this solution: ... Read Full Article

As reported on the "Russian Slashdot" [(http://www.linux.org.ru),][1] there is a very small, chinese-made linux computer available for $150 - http://yellowsheepriver.org/products.html The tiny computer is just 180 X 145 X 37mm, comes with a 400-800MHz Chinese Godson 2C processor, 256-512MB RAM, 4 USB ports, A ... Read Full Article

Took me forever to find. The current status of Linux to Treo 700W connectivity is severely lacking but here are some links on the subject I found: The latter one may be useful as a way of synchronizing [MOBIE][1] contacts: ... Read Full Article

Since this is a frequent question I get, here's a good article on memory usage under Linux ... Read Full Article

To avoid the mio.c compile error under RedHat 6.2 when compiling Jabberd 2.0s9: *mio.c: In function `mio_listen': mio.c:360: structure has no member named `ss_family' mio.c:361: structure has no member named `ss_family' mio.c:364: structure has no member named `ss_family' mio.c: In function `mio_connect': ... Read Full Article

When attempting to compile Jabberd 2.0s9 under RedHat 9 with Mysql installed under /usr/local/mysql, the configure script will error out with: *checking for mysql.h in /usr/local/include/mysql... no configure: error: MySQL client libraries not found* Contrary to the Jabber documentation, the configure scri ... Read Full Article

I picked up an old IBM ThinkPad T20 to use as a beater laptop and tried to install Fedora Core 4. The first problem I encountered was any CD I tried to boot from, whether FC4 or Knoppix 3.8, would produce endless I/O errors. Knoppix 3.4 booted fine. (Had I been paying attention I would have realized the CD was fi ... Read Full Article