Linux Devices reports on the world’s smallest linux-running computer. Smaller than a shuttle, smaller than a pda, smaller even than an iPod mini - this computer fits entirely into an RJ-45 network jack.
Linux system squishes into Ethernet connector

German electronics company Kleinhenz is shipping a network-enabled Linux system barely larger than a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. “Picotux” is based on the DigiConnect ME module from NetSilicon, along with a 2.4.27 uClinux port that was probably developed by German embedded system specialist FS Forth Systeme.

While “Picotux” is not exactly Linux in the way desktop users are used to it, this is a great idea. This means that (if the jack were replaced by a wireless antenna) this could be used in minuature robots that could be controlled from across the internet.
Secure? No.
Fun? Oh yeah.

I probably installed Linux ten or more times over the years before I ended up with an installation that was worth keeping. It was partly that the software had a long way to go but mostly that I didn’t know how to use it.

It looks like now there’s another guy at the party (Ben from Shewbox.org)

I have a linux setup that does all the essentials I want it to: internet browsing, im, sound playback and editing, windows disk mounting, image editing, good looking fonts, bittorrent, flash, and video support with quicktime/real browser plugins. Any experienced linux user would quickly point out that all of these things have been possible for quite some time, but my point is that I finally figured out how to get it working for me, which of course makes all the difference.

He’s using Fedora Core 3 and has it running smoothly. To hear it in his own words, check out ShewBox.

My friend Sam uses Fedora Core as his primary operating system and has become something of an expert at using and configuring it.

He’s written a short explanation of something really neat to do with Gnome-terminal to launch console programs.

I think the prevalence of console-only (CLI) programs in Linux was one of the things that nearly scared me off at first, but now I’ve come to very much appreciate them. Using Lynx I sometimes don’t even start my X server and just stay in Gentoo’s console mode after boot. Of course, it helps that Gentoo provides you with four virtual desktops of consoles even when you’re not running X.

I’ve written a lot and I figure it’s time to open up the mic to all of y’all who read this site. I use Linux because I love where Open Source Software is headed in terms of societal freedom and high-quality coding. I also love that I don’t have to either pay for or steal my software. Why do you use Linux? For those of you who are considering it but don’t use it yet, why might you use Linux?

The comment boxes are yours, go ahead and share with everybody.

If you’ve ever done tech support you’ll enjoy this piece of nerd history. In the old days of hacking (before Outlook Express became a worm-factory thanks to non-secured VB script commands) new hackers were given one piece of advice over and over - read as much as you can. It is only the knowledge gained through reading documents about protocols and software that allows you to exploit them.

Since those times there has been a great increase in the number of dumb questions by people who didn’t take the time to do any reading. This has spawned the phrase “RTFM“.

Read The F***ing Manual - that’s the advice given to newbs from the inner circles of programming. AOL tech support will hold hands, heck even other Linux users are often willing to help, but if we ever want to be competent in any field we choose, we’ll have to RTFM.

Case in point: if you don’t read the Gentoo documentation, you’ll probably never have even a stage3 (the non-murderous kind) installed. I barely made it through on the first try and I read the docs several times.

Secunia - Multiple Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities

Some unspecified errors have been reported in the ISO9660 filesystem handler including Rock Ridge and Juliet extensions. These can be exploited via a specially crafted filesystem to cause a DoS or potentially corrupt memory leading to execution of arbitrary code

Apparently there are three notable vulnerabilities with the Linux kernel of version lower than 2.6.12-rc1. The vulerabilities are related to the following conditions:

• ROSE with ndigis
• SCSI tape users
• handler for ISO9660 filesystem

Read the full report

I just came across something that cracked me up. Celestial Weasel writes:

Weasel Tech Blog: The good thing about Windows
… is that you are allowed not to like it. If you use Macs or Linux you are expected to like it, and to fail to solve problems is a sign of weakness and/or disloyalty. Not so with Windows, which is a relief to the non-believers (in anything, very much) amongst us.

Yet another reason why Linux is Hard.

I just stumbled on an older article about Linux. Well, to be honest it’s pretty outdated at this point - it’s from 1999. However, it’s interesting to hear this person talk about the difficulties of Linux. The author, Andrew Leonard, speaks of the need for Linux developers to prepare the OS for ’stupid users’. He suggests there’s a trend for Linux development to reflect the needs of the dedicated and the far-far-left-brained rather than any moderate population or new users.

“Help isn’t cool.” And in the free software/open-source world, hackers like to do things that are cool. A whiz-bang graphical user interface that allows you to configure your desktop to look absolutely any way you please is cool. But plodding through the grunt work of writing documentation that will hold even the stupidest user’s hand is not.

Read the full article here

I was trying to track down a keylogger that would work on Linux and I was having a tough time. Finally I discovered lkl which records all input from port 0×60 (which is apparently the keyboard port number). It’s pretty simple to run but now I have to decide how I want to make this thing run at boot time. I was going to use the SysV-Init editor that comes with KDE but apparently that’s not what I’m looking for. Off to dig some more…

Right, I made a script and put it into /etc/init.d Hope that solves my problems. We’ll see if this actually works.

[later that day]

Well, the keylogger is working more or less. There were some problems where it told me that lkl was looking for a keymap file that didn’t exist. I had to manually copy the maps from the source package to /usr/local and then point lkl in that direction. Even then it appears the us_kmUP is malfunctioning. us_kmALT and us_km seem to be doing fine, but the uppercase map is spewing garbage into my log file.

I’ve decided not to worry about the garbage. It’s too much effort to investigate this problem for such a low priority thing. However, now I’ll have to decode everything I want to read by educated guessing and doing more keylogging to see what letters turn into what junk.

If anyone finds a better keylogger for Linux (maybe one with a more functional keymap), drop me a line in the comments. I’d totally appreciate the help - and so would all the other people who come here looking for answers.

For those who have a Windows box and a Linux box on the same network (especially if it’s a home network), it’s absolutely essential that you give yourself the convenience of mounting your Windows drive in Linux.

It’s possible to make a folder on your Linux machine (I use /mnt/[computername]/[sharename] but you can use whatever folder you want) work like a folder on your Windows machine. When you navigate to it you read your Windows files, and you can save files to your Windows machine by saving them to this folder.

For a complete instruction on how to do this, check out Mounting Samba Shares Permanently. All you need is to have file sharing enabled on your Windows computer and share the folder (it could be a whole drive) that you want to access.

note: to share a folder right-click on it and click “sharing”, then give it a name.

As a follow-up to the post about the current problems with Linux, it’d be negligent of me not to plug my very favorite Linux distribution. I hardly ever use it, but I have the greatest respect for it.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a complete version of Linux with many useful utilities that comes to a grand total of 50 Megabytes. It’s small enough to fit on a credit card-sized cd. As I type this there is a Damn Small Linux cd in my wallet. I can go to any computer anywhere, pull it out, restart the computer and have full control.

Damn Small Linux is a ‘live CD’ (see the Linux Live CDs post) which means that I don’t have to go through the installation process - it just runs. It’s not the full and weighty kind of Linux that I’m used to but it runs a window manager, networking stuff, a browser, an email client, various other utilities, and because each one is designed to take up only a little space they run very quickly.

Even if you have no use for it now, I highly recommend buying a copy for $5.50 (you could download it but you’d have to buy a special credit card-size blank cd) of Damn Small Linux and carrying it with you. The power to take over any computer you get near is good. The fact that you carry Linux in your wallet is great.

Linux is hard, it’s the truth. There are many aspects of it’s difficulty that are discussed on this site ranging from the command-line learning curve to hardware compatability. One that isn’t addressed however, is simply trying to understand what Linux is, and what to think of the different components that make up Linux.

An excerpt from CoolTechZone’s article Current Problems with Linux

…what in tarnation is a kernel? We can understand it if you tell us that Windows 95 is different from Windows 98, but what do you mean by saying that Fedora Core 3 is similar to Debian testing, but is better than Core 2. And of course, Mandrake 10.1 is better than 10.0, but SuSE is only on 9.2. All this gets very confusing after a while.

For those who are unfamiliar with different distributions (like Suse, Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo, Mepis, Connectiva, Debian, Ubuntu, Linspire, Knoppix, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, etc.) check out DistroWatch.com

I try to provide a fair view of the conveniences and difficulties of Linux, but today it’s time to simply dispel some myths. The Linux of five years ago is not the Linux of today, and it’s time to address some of the following myths:

• Myth #1
  “Linux is hard to install. Especially if I am not sure I want to keep it, but just try it out.”
• Myth #2
  Linux is free and therefore unsupported.”
• Myth #3
  “Linux is for techies and does not have an interface like Windows.”
• Myth #4
  “There is not much software developed for Linux available.”
• Myth #5
  “To use Linux I have to give up my Windows software and buy new software.”

Full Article

A common way to start using Linux is to have a working Windows XP installation taking up a full drive and wanting to give just a little room to Linux. This is how I started long ago and it’s not too unlike how I do it now.

There are some hitches to installing Linux and Windows together, some of which involve the MBR (Master Boot Record). Those who have attempted to dual-boot systems will surely have one or two stories of unexpectedly-overwritten MBRs.

Here is an article about using NTLDR (the Windows software for the MBR) and keeping Windows intact, while installing Linux into a second hard drive.

The computer in question was a standard white-box PC with Windows XP installed on its one hard drive. One option was to shrink the exiting Windows partition with NTFSresize and install Linux in the resulting free space. However, this was too intrusive. I did not have a backup of the data on the Windows machine, and didn’t want to take the time to make one, so I was loath to do anything that could wipe it out.

Note: The instructions given in this article could just as easily be applied to installing Linux into a partition on the primary drive. The only change required would be to install GRUB or LILO into hda2 (or whatever number) instead of hdb.

The guy at torncurtain.com is dealing with losing ~20GB of music while swapping hard drives. It sounds like he lost it for good because he didn’t post anything about the recovery process, but the moral of his story is that upgrading to a 200GB drive is still worthwhile.

Does anyone run more than three hard drives under linux? If so, could you post the details in a comment so we can all check it out?

Here’s a web page that is absolutely no help to me. Still, I recommend checking it out just to see how a detailed help page looks. This guy has what he calls the Linux Hardware Problem and Solution Page which does precisely one thing: It lists the voltage and some other setting requirements of a specific motherboard so you’ll know how to compile your linux kernel to work with that motherboard. This guy’s brilliant, but this page is useless to all but four people.

I give this example as a way to illustrate how difficult it is to collect really useful data into a Linux help page. You can either be too broad and help no one, or too specific and help just one or two people. I think this is why forums like the one at LinuxQuestions.org are important because it collects the sum of all the knowledge of it’s visitors, whether newbs or pros and selects just parts of that knowlege to answer specific questions. In my opinion this is a much better way to run a help site. Not to knock the guy at the first link - he wasn’t going for a comprehensive page.