Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution. Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland, and a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE Plasma. Distributions intended for servers may omit graphics altogether, or include a solution stack such as LAMP. Because Linux is freely redistributable, anyone may create a distribution for any purpose.
How to create a Fedora live USB media is introduced in this post. We can boot to Fedora operating system environment through a live USB system in the USB flash media on a USB-bootable computer without writing the computer’s hard disk. We can also install Fedora operating system from the live system environment. Remember to…
Here is a list of problem that may occur during installing and configuring Xen Dom0 in Fedora. It is found originally in Fedora systems, but the tips in this post should also be helpful for installing Xen Dom0 on other platforms. BIOS configuration If xen stops at: “I/O virtualization disabled.” We may need to enable…
The Xen solutions including installing and configuring Dom0 and DomU are summarized here. LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. LVM backed DomU is recommended….
We may need to install some old packages such as the kernel in our Linux box. Let’s use installing a older version of Linux kernel in Fedora as the example to introduce how to install old packages from the repository using yum. By now, suppose we have install kernel-2.6.32.16-143 in the Linux box and we…
There is various network configuration information in Linux and lots tools can be used to find out those configuration information. Finding out these network information in Fedora Linux as the example will be introduced. IP address, MAC address and netmask ifconfig will print out all the network interfaces and their information including the IP address…
Creating file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for Xen virtual machines and installing Fedora 12 in Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. Note that this tutorial is based on a pretty old OS (Fedora 12). But the method here is still valid while some minor details may need to be changed for latest Xen and…
Update on Jan. 7, 2012: The package for the gtk application style setting on KDE 4.7 is kcm-gtk. The command to install this package is: “# yum install kcm-gtk”. One annoying thing when using KDE desktop is that the theme and style of GTK applications differ from KDE’s. The gtk-qt-engine can let us select the…
How to jailbreak Apple iPod touch in Linux will be introduced in this article. We use Spirit to jailbreak iPod touch. Spirit[1] is an untethered jailbreak for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch on certain firmware versions. Please read [1] for requirement when using Spirit. Currently, the version of iTunes used should be iTune 9 earlier…
The NVIDIA video card driver in Linux will display the NVIDIA logo by default during booting the X server after we successfully installed the driver. If we don’t like to see the logo every time we start X server, we can disable it. We need to edit the Xorg configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with root permission….
I don’t use xdm, gdm or kdm… I prefer my Linux booting to init 3. I like logging in to the command-prompt and starting X manually with startx. In my Fedora Linux box, I always get to gnome even both gnome and KDE are installed. Actually the startx script is already written for most of…
How to set date, time and timezone on Linux/Unix box will be introduced in this post. Unix time, or POSIX time which is a system for describing points in time is the number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on the morning of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. The number of seconds elapsed…
MAC stands for Media Access Control which is a six byte number, usually expressed as a twelve digit hexadecimal number. IPs in LAN are translated to MAC address by the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) protocol. For some reasons such as keeping the true MAC address from being logged, accessing to the network which bounds IPs…
mplayer/mencoder are powerful tools. This is a list of useful mplayer/mencoder commands. Extract the audio, convert it to PCM and write the resulting wave file to audio.wav: mplayer -vo null -hardframedrop -ao pcm:file=audio.wav video.avi Convert .wav file to .mp3 file: lame -h out.wav out.mp3 Preview a video composed of all jpeg files from the current…
We may not want to update some packages such the kernel on a stable server while updating the system. If we run “dnf update” or “yum update”, we may get suggested by dnf/yum to install all the packages with updates. In this post, how to make dnf/yum not update certain packages such the kernel when…
Linux port forwarding is simple to do with iptables which may probably already being used as the firewall or part of the setting up a Linux gateway. In the Linux kernel, port forwarding is achieved by packet filter rules in iptables. Port forwarding Port forwarding also called “port mapping” commonly refers to the network address…
Compiling a latex documents may take several steps when bibtex is used with latex. However, this latex compilation process is the same for most documents. We can make it a template with Makefile so that simply running make will generate the dvi/ps/pdf files for us. A simple Makefile for using latex with bibtex enabled is…
tmpfs has blazing speed. Why not set up a high speed NFS server on top of tmpfs? A little trick is required for setting NFS server on top of /dev/shm. If we add a normal entry in /etc/export and them run # exportfs -a exportfs will give us a warning like this: exportfs: Warning: /dev/shm…
How to set up eCryptFS in Linux will be introduced in this post. We can store encrypted files in one eCryptFS directory, the manual way. The content can be seen only after it is mounted as eCryptFS file system. Otherwise, the users can only see garbled characters in the files. Note that this tutorial will…
I believe many users are using pidgin and google apps. Google apps support Google Talk. Can we use it in Pidgin? The answer is yes. How to use Google apps account for Google Talk in Pidgin will be introduced in this post. Let’s use one email address as the example: eric @ example.com First add…
The Linux Gnome style that I like is Shiki-color + Gnome colors icon theme. It looks pretty and professional and it is fast. How to install them: Gtk engine: # yum install gtk-murrine-engine Icon theme: # yum install gnome-colors-icon-theme Theme: Dowload from here: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Shiki-Colors?content=86717 Install it by Appearance Preference -> Install. Configuration: Appearance Preference ->…