Practical Technology: “… it should come as no surprise that the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Group, the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange, has joined the Linux Foundation.”
Linpus Technologies is bringing this distribution, specifically designed for Asia, to the global stage with a more simplified user interface.
The Linux and Unix Menagerie: “So I leave you with this pun, that both begs to be written and, at the same time, put out of its misery: You can’t have your Pi and eat it…”
Ken Hess’s Linux Blog: “Have you ever heard of or considered using Linux? Here are five reasons to give it a look for your desktop or server.”
O’Reilly: “To be honest we fixed effectively the entire Linux desktop space. It’s not–PowerTOP is more–it’s not just what we fixed with PowerTOP is not individual pieces. We fixed everything. For me that was a success.”
Andrew Chapman Dot Net: “With the advent of people installing a myriad of operating systems on their EEE PC’s, I recalled a fairly popular distro of Linux in my travels, Backtrack 3.”
HowtoForge: “FreeIPA has existed for some time as RHE IPA for Red Hat Linux and has been added into Fedora.”
Vincent Danen introduces two command-line programs, wall and mail, that allow you to send simple alerts and e-mail messages to users.
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The command line is a great environment for doing many things. It can be used to schedule commands, navigate directories, chain simple commands together to create complex commands, automate system monitoring, and more. The flexibility that the command line offers makes it worth investing the time into learning more about it, as its power far exceeds that of GUI operating environments.
CLI environments, especially with multi-user systems such as servers, provide a great way to communicate between users as well. Two tools in particular are of great value: wall, which will communicate messages on all active consoles, and mail, which will send e-mail via the command-line.
Wall is an interconsole “instant messenger” and is available on all Linux and UNIX systems. With it, you can broadcast alert messages, such as an impending system reboot or other maintenance process. Using wall is simple:
$ wall "just fooling around"
Broadcast message from vdanen (pts/16) (Mon Aug 4 20:47:03 2008):
just fooling around
Any user logged into the system will see the identical notice. The only exception is when a user has set their “message” flag off. For instance, to disable seeing these wall notices, use:
$ mesg n
$ mesg
is n
The mesg command takes exactly one of two arguments: y and n; if no argument is supplied, it shows the current message value.
Another useful tool is the mail command, which will send e-mail messages on the CLI. This can be used in conjunction with a command such as at to send reminder e-mails, or it can be used to send an alert when a task or command is complete. There are a few different providers of the mail command; some distributions use the mailx package, others use nail, others the original Berkely mail package. If mail doesn’t work as expected, read the mail(1) manpage. Most mail commands use the same syntax for the basics, however. To send an e-mail to an SMS relay to alert you of an upcoming meeting, use:
$ echo "20 minutes to meet with Sally." | /bin/mail -s "Meeting" sms@myhost.com
This will send an e-mail with the subject “Meeting” to sms@myhost.com; the body of the message will contain, “20 minutes to meet with Sally.” As has been illustrated, this can be used as a quick means of sending reminders, or it can be used to send the output of jobs when completed. The mail command takes standard input as the body of the message; other options can be used to specify CC and BCC recipients as well.
E-mail messages sent via mail are sent from the calling user on the system’s hostname; for instance, if the user account joe were sending this on the system foo.bar.org, then the e-mail would be seen to come from joe@foo.bar.org. Because of this, you may want to ensure proper message rules are in place that permit the relaying or reception of these addresses, or adjust the hostname of the computer accordingly.
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Lifehacker.com recently asked its readers why they chose Linux, and published some of the reasons and comments made by users. Of course, I thought this was a pretty good idea, and decided to steal it (with due credit!). I’ve included the poll below, but feel free to expand upon your answers in the comments.
I’ll start by saying that I’ve been exploring Linux (can’t say I’ve really “switched” since I use both my Windows OS and Mac on a daily basis) mostly just to have one more alternative. I’m not the geekiest person in the word, but I do like to feel like I’ve got a handle on what’s out there and learn a little more about the tools I use. And since my husband keeps up with all the newest tech stuff, I don’t want to meet his conversation with blank stares.
Take a moment to reflect on why you chose/tried Linux in the first place. Can you remember back that far? I know some of you have been bashing and forking since the cradle! It might also be fun to recount your “last straw” moment before you downloaded that first distribution.
Why did you decide to try Linux?
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Vincent Danen admires the Mac text-expanding tools like Typinator or TextExpander and has been looking for a similar tool in Linux. The best counterpart he found is a program called Snippits. Here are the basics.
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Perhaps one of my favorite features or tools with the Mac OS X operating system is the ability to use text-expanding programs such as Typinator or TextExpander. These programs allow you to type a keyword, regardless of the focused application, and have it expand into a custom string, set of text, or image. These text-expanding tools are a constantly-used time saver.
On Linux, there is nothing as comprehensive as Typinator or TextExpander on the Mac. There is one program that comes close, but is not as fluid or elegant as the Mac equivalents.
The program is called Snippits, and it also expands text based on predefined keywords. Snippits is a Ruby program and requires a little bit of effort to install, depending on the Linux distribution in use.
On Debian and Ubuntu it is easier to install because one of the prerequisite packages, xautomation, is readily available. On Mandriva Linux, the package is not available and so must be compiled from source, which is easy enough to accomplish.
With any distribution, at the very least you will need to install aspell and its development files; Ruby and its development files; and also whichever package provides Ruby’s gem support. On a Debian system, this can be accomplished by executing:
# apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev rdoc rubygems libruby-extras xautomation xsel aspell libaspell-dev aspell-en build-essential
On Mandriva Linux, because xautomation must be compiled from source, the following is required. Note the commands on a # prompt are executed as root, whereas those with a $ prompt should be executed as a regular user. As a result, the below is somewhat abbreviated; you may elect to use sudo (if you have configured it appropriately) or su to the root user when required.
# urpmi ruby-RubyGems ruby-devel aspell-devel aspell-en x11-devel png-devel
$ curl -O -L http://hoopajoo.net/static/projects/xautomation-1.02.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf xautomation-1.02.tar.gz
$ cd xautomation-1.02
$ ./configure && make
# make install
Once this is done, the Snippits gem must be installed and Ruby configured to use Rubygems by modifying the ~/.bashrc startup file:
$ echo 'export RUBYOPT="rubygems"' >>~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
# gem install raspell
# gem install snippits
This will install the RASpell gem which is required by the Snippits gem, and then compile and install the Snippits gem.
Once this is completed, you can test Snippits. Snippits are stored in the ~/.snippits/ directory; each file is its own snippit. For instance:
$ mkdir ~/.snippits
$ echo "this is a snippit test" >~/.snippits/test
$ snippit test
this is a snippit test
$ ks test
this is a snippit test
$ this is a snippit test
The snippit [name] command outputs the contents of the file named [name]; in this case ~/.snippits/test. Using the ks command, the contents are not only outputted, but are also used as input for the next command.
Snippits allows for a lot of extra modifiers to really manipulate text, such as {enter} to type an enter keystroke or {tab} to enter a tab keystroke. For instance, if a snippit were defined in ~/.snippits/pstest as:
ps aux|grep {cursor}|wc -l
Executing ks pstest would result in the above being printed on the command-line with the cursor being positioned where the {cursor} string is located, exactly where you would want the cursor to be to type what to grep for.
The above has only illustrated Snippits’ use for command-line usage. It is possible to bind the ks command to a global hotkey in KDE or GNOME which would allow for Snippits to be used in any application. The drawback here, compared to the Mac-equivalent programs, is the need for the hotkey to begin with as there doesn’t seem to be a way to make Snippit automatically transform text based on the appearance of the keyword — perhaps in a future version. The application is under active development and definitely looks to have promise.
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