Unix Trix

Zone-H has published its statistics from 2005-2007 on hacks by OS, and more. Topping the list was Linux, with two Windows variants below.

Seek for Thunderbird ups your email functionality according to LifeHacker –

Thunderbird extension Seek adds advanced search and sort functionality to the open source email client, Thunderbird, through a feature called faceted browsing […] narrows down emails by a number of conditions, introducing tons of useful ways to slice and dice your inbox to find exactly what you want. Add to that the timeline feature, which looks like a blast along with being useful, and we’ve got a pretty worthwhile Thunderbird extension here…

Ever been diagnosing a network and wanted to know how ping is getting somewhere? Adding -R (record routes) to your ping command will show you something like this –

 # ping -R 192.168.0.1
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.222 ms
RR:     192.168.0.1
testbox (192.168.5.1)

Not a bad list of “10 Linux Commands You’ve Never Used“. Obviously most of these are application to any nix variant, so are worth checking out.

My personal favourite tool –

 ldd, want to know which Linux thread library java is linked to?

# ldd /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11/bin/java
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00bd4000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00b87000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x00a5a000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00a3c000)

If your SysV (used by cache programs, and others) isn’t working inside your FreeBSD jail simply set “security.jail.sysvipc_allowed=1″ in /etc/sysctl.conf. Note that there are possible security implications with this.

pkg_add is a FreeBSD tool for installing packages, much like Linux’s apt-get and other tools. When you run it you can use the -r option to fetch a package, for example:

 pkg_add -v -r zip

When you do this, you’ll see it going off to download from one of the main FreeBSD servers, which can often be far away from you and a lot slower. If you’d like to download locally set the PACKAGEROOT environment variable to the server you’d like to use. For example:

export PACKAGEROOT=ftp://ftp.za.freebsd.org

“za” is the country code for South Africa. Most countries have local mirrors, and there are lists online. For example, “uk” or “au” would be for the UK or Australia.

Lifehacker has the link to an Ubuntu Tutorial on Installing Plugins for Gnome-Do the launcher. If you don’t know, Gnome-Do is a powerful application launcher, much like some of the apps available for Windows.

 … extend Gnome-Do’s powers to music management, Gmail, system functions, and other tasks, Ubuntu Tutorials has put together a simple guide to installing plug-ins for the launcher, a trick that’s not readily apparent for first-time users …

Want to learn or play around with Linux but don’t want to mess up your PC? A live CD is a bootable CD which will (in this case) let you run Ubuntu Linux (the current popular flavour) without installing anything! It all runs off the cd, so its perfect for the first time user — get more details here.

If your reading this you’re most likely a *nix user, and if you’re most likely a *nix user you most likely use MySQL. A big part of a speedy MySQL install is using the right queries, and going about analyzing them in the right way, so 20bits gives you: 10 tips for Optimizing MySQL Queries that don’t suck.

There was a time when few knew about Tux the Linux mascot, but nowadays people are dressing there babies to match (see picture below).

If you’re interested in the history of the pengiun that could, check out sjbaker.org’s wiki entry on its history. One of the most interesting posts, is the origin of the name –

Re: Let's name the penguin! (was: Re: Linux 2.0 really _is_ released..)
.
James Hughes (jamesh@interpath.com)
Mon, 10 Jun 1996 20:25:52 -0400
.
(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) --> TUX!

Who knew!