[aclug-L] Fw: [Lockergnome Penguin Shell] Snowbound Serpico

[Anthony A Bogardus <abogardus@xxxxxxxx>]

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From: Lockergnome Penguin Shell<subscriptions@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: abogardus@xxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 18:05:56 -0600
Subject: [Lockergnome Penguin Shell]  Snowbound Serpico
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<LISTMANAGERSQL-2219370-1332781-2002.01.30-18.08.22--abogardus#juno.com@s
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  01.30.2002 PenguinREPORT

Suddenly, it's winter in Iowa.
By morning, it's likely that as much as eight inches of snow will cover
the ground. Outside, in the whipcrack winter wind that pushes the snow
into every crevice and cranny, neighbors will talk across driveways,
shovels in hand. It may be the first time they've spoken face to face
since summer, when aromatic grass-filled garbage bags brought them to the
curb at the same time. They'll linger, catching their breath; breath that
will rise and drift away like the memory of days when sunlight shone
fourteen hours or more. Small talk between scoops will start with the
cold and the snow, of course, and drift to children and relatives living
in warmer climes. They'll chuckle and poke fun at themselves for spending
the bulk of their lives in the Midwest, or they'll curse their misfortune
at not being able to leave. The condition of the roads, speculation on
whether schools will be open, grumbling about the local politicians, and
the rumble of a passing snowplow will, with enough snow and time, move to
the war, Enron, and the state of the union. A hundred small conversations
will greet the lone walker covering the length of the block from the
middle of the street, drifting and fading from each garage and driveway
like an AM radio scanning frequencies on a hot summer evening. They're
activities and sounds and communication that will once again, if only for
a moment, make neighbors neighbors.
And when, their clothes feeling heavier for the exertion, they tuck the
shovels into the garage or the storage shed, they'll step into a warm
house with little further thought of the contact. They're not callous.
They're certainly not unfriendly or uncaring. The memory of that
neighborly conversation will fade simply because it is, after all, just
one of many threads in the fabric of life in Iowa.
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

 GnomeTWEAK

Quick Copy and Paste
Sometimes the best tweaks in Linux are the ones that don't require any
additional effort. Uncovering and discovering useful little options that
are built in to the system can feel like the coolest tweak going. Today's
GnomeTWEAK might strike you exactly that way if you've spent any time
trying to copy text in console windows.
Let's say you want to install an rpm named thisistherpm-1.0-6.i386.rpm.
The command, as root, might be:
    rpm -Uvh thisistherpm-1.0-6.i386.rpm
It's a pain to type out, indeed. One little letter off in the file name
and you get an error message. If you're inclined to cutting and pasting
text for the sake of accuracy, you can use this tweak. First, "ls" the
directory the rpm is in for a short listing of the contents of the
directory. Next, highlight only the rpm by holding down the left mouse
button and dragging across the name. Next, start your rpm command,
completing it up to the point of the file name. Now, if you have a
3-button mouse, leave the cursor where the file name will go and press
the center mouse button. If it's a 2-button mouse, click both buttons at
the same time. Voila! Instant copy and paste.
Even more useful, this tweak can be used to copy and paste text between
console windows, from console windows into a text editor and vice versa.
In Linux, the act of highlighting text copies it to the clipboard without
the additional step of explicitly selecting "copy."
See ... no table of options, no additional brain strain - just a useful
little tweak that's already built in. How cool is that?
Send This to a Friend
Send us a GnomeTWEAK 

 GnomeCORE

The House Is On Fire!
Crisis Management in Linux
We're halfway through the week and well into the series on Crisis
Management in Linux. Changelogs, scheduled backups; both are useful
extinguishers for the "fire" that will eventually strike your Linux
system. However, sometimes the solution to a show-stopping problem
doesn't require reversion. Linux has a built-in program for checking and
correcting filesystem errors that may put out the fire before you need to
rebuild your kitchen.
One of the most common crises in Linux is file or filesystem corruption,
especially when using the ext2 filesystem. This system doesn't handle
"dirty" shutdowns too well. We've talked about the reasons why in earlier
Penguin Shell issues. In short, disk writes are cached in Linux. If a
system crash occurs in the middle of a disk write, you're likely to lose
a file or, worse yet, a filesystem. The latter happens most often when
the system is in the process of writing the meta-data - the data about
the data. The ext3 and ReiserFS filesystems overcome this potential
hazard by journalling all file actions and checking at boot for the
existence of a "completed" flag for each "pending" action. That's really
an over simplification, but you understand the process.
So, what's the crisis remedy when a filesystem is corrupted in ext2? fsck
will find and fix the corruption - sort of a Linux Serpico. And, fsck is
not terribly hard to use, though it may take a while to check a large
filesystem. fsck is, in many ways, the Linux equivalent to Windows'
scandisk. It serves a similar purpose, anyway. If your filesystems are
corrupted by a power failure, for example, fsck is the tool to use to
check and correct the corruption.
    fsck -t ext2 /dev/hda5
This command executes fsck, indicating that it needs to check a
filesystem of [-t]ype ext2 on /dev/hda5. This is most commonly run as the
result of a prompt at boot indicating that it's necessary. What you're
likely to see as the output of the command will look something like this:

/dev/hda5 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 3: Checking reference counts
Pass 4: Checking group summary information
Free blocks count wrong for group 4 (4488, counted 4516).   FIXED
Free blocks count wrong for group 5 (2866, counted 3154),   :FIXED
Inode bitmap differences: -4145.   FIXED
Free inodes count wrong for group #3 (2166, counted-2168).    FIXED
Free inodes count wrong (21685, counted=21688)   FIXED
/dev/hda5 ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
/dev/hda5 16921/51486 files, 120154/191216 blocks 
fsck, in other words, shows you the corrections its made and lets you
know when the process is complete.
There are some advanced options for fsck and more condition-specific ways
to use it. For a list of these options and circumstances, the fsck Man
Page is a great reference. Its scope is far too broad to cover in Penguin
Shell.
Remember, filesystem corruption may be correctable using fsck. It should
be the first weapon in your boot-time arsenal for managing a crisis in
Linux.
Send This to a Friend
Send us a GnomeCORE tip 

 GnomeFILE

VNC [978 K]
ftp://ftp.uk.research.att.com/pub/vnc/dist/vnc-3.3.3r9_x86_win32.zip
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
"VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote
display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment
not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the
Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. Many of us,
for example, use a VNC viewer running on a PC on our desks to display our
Unix environments which are running on a large server in the machine room
downstairs."
Send This to a Friend
Send us a GnomeFILE suggestion 

 GnomeVOICE

IBM Linux Mainframes
Scribbled by Kim Goldenberg
"The version I heard from an IBMer was that it was a telecom co (he did
not specify Telia), but that they would take some information over the
phone and use it to fill in a script and when you got off the phone, your
machine was booting up! Their cost per "machine"? $130. BTW, zVM can run
up to 99,999 guests at one time, although some of that is used by
internal processes. As a test for another large customer, they got over
97,000 Linux machines booted on one multiprocessor box."
Send This to a Friend
Speak your GnomeVOICE 

 GnomeCLICK

DOS/Windows to Linux HowTo
Unearthed by Bill Jacqmein
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html
This is a fairly short but comprehensive HowTo on converting your machine
and your thinking from the Dos/Windows environment to Linux. Throughout,
it makes interesting and useful comparisons between the two. That serves
to ease the transition from one operating system to the other. The HowTo
also provides "Tips You Can't Do Without" and instructions on where to
find and how to install applications. If you've lived long in the Windows
world, the DOS/Windows to Linux HowTo will help to reshape your thinking
and reconfigure your computer.
Send This to a Friend
Suggest a GnomeCLICK 

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