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.
IPv6 is enabled by default on most Linux distros. However, IPv6 is not used for some situations for most of time and it may cause troubles and requires effort to protect the network and ensure the security. This post introduces how to disable IPv6 support on Linux (newer modern Kernel versions). First, add these lines…
We may drop the file system caches on Linux to free up memory for applications. Kernels 2.6.16 and newer provide a mechanism via the /proc/ to make the kernel drop the page cache and/or inode and dentry caches on command. We can use this mechanism to free up the memory. However, this is a non-destructive…
On Linux, to find the number of files (inodes) in a directory: $ find ./ | wc -l to find the number of files (not directories) in a directory: $ find ./ -type f | wc -l to find the number of directories in a directory: $ find ./ -type d | wc -l
This post introduces how to erase / blank / format a DVM+RW media on Linux in the command line. First, you need to find out the device of the DVD/CD+RW drive on your Linux box. For example, on my box with Linux 3.3.4 kernel, my DVD/CD+RW drive is /dev/sr0. You can also see what the…
As a Linux user, I must keep a copy of Windows. One reason is that I should edit MS Office files, such as .doc, .ppt, .xls and .xml (office 2003 xml format) required by, created by or for other using Windows. Wine worked for me with Office 2003 ever but has this or that problem….
Vim is my favourite text editor and I also prefer to use Vim to compose Email. I ever used Vim as Thunderbird’s External editor with the help of plugin. I started to use KMail as my email client on KDE and I find it is not hard to configure KMail to use Vim as email…
MPlayer is a universal (nearly) movie/music player on Linux and many more systems. It’s also my favourite player and MPlayer plays movie or music files in any format that I drop to it. Now, let’s take a look at how to use MPlayer play DVD. MPlayer plays “DVD” in many formats: DVD disks, ISO files,…
Setting taping the touchpad as left button click in KDE is introduced in this post. The software package needed: # yum install kcm_touchpad A picture that is worth a thousand words: (In the “Input Devices” of KDE System Settings.)
This post compiles a list of tutorials on the Internet for Linux beginners. Linux beginners usually get headache from the “seemed” complexity of the Linux operation system. But once they get into the gate and get familiar with Linux, they will love it. UNIX Tutorial for Beginners “A beginners guide to the Unix and Linux…
I write a lot latex documents and most of the documents have images in it. Latex deals EPS very well, while sometimes we need to add JPG / PNG images to it. I find converting the JPG images to EPS ones is the most convenient way to embed JPG images to latex documents. On Linux,…
This is a simple tutorial for beginners to SSH to a Linux host. This is quite easy with the easy-to-use software freely available but the beginners need a tutorials to start with. Hence, I write this tutorial about how to ssh to a Linux host. This tutorial is for users on Windows. 1. Download a…
We introduced how to create a LVM group with two hard disk partitions, which the LVM group can be used for [[setting-up-lvm-backed-xen-domu|installing LVM backed Xen DomUs]]. The LVM volume can have large capacity from several hard disks. However, we may use all the disk space after some time and we may need to extend the…
Different Linux distros have different method to set the hostname. On Fedora Linux, it is quite simple. On newer Fedora releases At least from Fedora 19 (sorry, no sure the exact earliest version): You need to edit the file /etc/hostname which just contains the hostname. On older Fedora releases Sorry, I do not know the…
Fedora’s repositories provide most of the software packages needed when using Linux. However, for various consideration, they do not provide some packages, such as MPlayer, ffmpeg. Fortunately, some community maintained repository provides these software. And they may also package propriety software, such as ATI fglrx dive, NVIDIA driver, into rpm packages. In this post, we…
We usually have video files in .wmv .mpg .rmvb or .mkv formats. The iPod, iPhone or iPad only accept a limited number of video file types, such as .mov and .mp4. To play these video files in .wmv .mpg or .rmvb format, we should first convert them to .mov or .mp4 files that can played…
The latest tools for upgrading Fedora is FedUp, please check How to upgrade Fedora 19 to Fedora 20 through the network. Please consider PreUpgrade for upgrading Fedora. This is the recommended method. This post makes a list of actions should be done to upgrade Fedora using yum. Please note that this is for experienced users…
ns is a discrete-event network simulator targeted primarily for research and educational use. There are two version of ns, ns-2 and ns-3, which are quite different with each other in the implementation and method to use them. In this post, we introduce how to install ns-2 and ns-3 on Fedora Linux 15. Install ns-2.34 on…
NFS is widely deployed and used even after more than twenty year. NFS is easy to set up and easy to use. This introduces how to set up the NFS server and clients. We use the Fedora system as the example. The tutorial here is for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and derived Linux OSes. Set up an NFS…
This post is a tutorial for new users to set up git and clone and use the first repository. This post introduces how to start using git for new users. This post does not introduce details of how to use git commands. Please refer to the git manual or other tutorials for how to commit,…
Vim is an excellent editor which I use every day. Thunderbird is a nice email application. However, Thunderbird’s integrated editor is not efficient enough to a Vim user. Why not use Vim as Thunderbird’s editor? In this tutorial, we will introduce how to integrate Vim with Thunderbird together in Linux. Install the “External Editor” Thunderbird…