Custom Distros — Every distro should be custom

I can’t remember how, but I stumble upon this nice site, it seems to be new, as its oldest post is from April 9, 2009.

I like that almost every post has a webcast in upper-right corner, it combines some good opinion posts, with how-tos, and also applications lists’ posts.

So if he keeps the pace, we have seen the birth of another great Linux blog, the user is now using Arch Linux and recently switched from Gnome to KDE.

Check it out andsubscribe to its news

You may say “hey is not there enough Linux blogs out there?”, I think not, we need them, we need to spread the word, and people like the author of Custom Distros are the needed men.

Read the coming post of this minimalistic look Linux blog, and enjoy its videos.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Fine tune your Linux command line History

Introduction

History is one of the Linux commands I use the most, maybe I am too lazy to write a command again, so I keep looking in the history log for commands even as short as:

sleep 5 && s2disk

Which hibernate my Laptop after five seconds, so, continuing with my series of posts about History, I will write this time about histcontrol variable.

This environment variable, will control how history stores the commands you enter in the shell.

Options

There are four options at which this variable could be set, and also the unset position, the four possible set positions are:

• ignorespace: Which make that any command entered in the shell starting with a space will not be stored in the history log.
• ignoredups: When set to this value, history will only save the first occurrence of a given command, and not all repetitive ones, i.e., if you enter

  free

  And the using the arrows, run it again, and again, and again, history will only save the first one, and not all others.

• ignoreboth: Is a combination of the two above
• erasedups: Will make History to erase the previous occurrence of a command when it is entered again.

How to use it

You just need to set the variable in your environment using:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

or put a line like the one below in your .bashrc file in your home directory.

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups

Examples

ignorespace

export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

Output:

ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  510  history  511  export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace  512  history | tail -6  513  clear  514  history | tail -6  515  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $  lsarchlinux-2009.02-2-ftp-i686.img.torrentggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  511  export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace  512  history | tail -6  513  clear  514  history | tail -6  515  history | tail -6  516  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $

You may see that the ls command was not logged, because it has a space preceding it.

ignoredups

export HISTCONTROL=ignordups

Output:

ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ export HISTCONTROL=ignoredupsggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  514  history | tail -6  515  history | tail -6  516  history | tail -6  517  clear  518  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups  519  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ lsLinux-101-Hacks.pdf  archlinux-2009.02-2-ftp-i686.img.torrentggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ lsLinux-101-Hacks.pdf  archlinux-2009.02-2-ftp-i686.img.torrentggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ lsarchlinux-2009.02-2-ftp-i686.img.torrentggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  516  history | tail -6  517  clear  518  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups  519  history | tail -6  520  ls  521  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $

You may see that only one occurrence of ls was logged.

erasedups

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups

Output:

ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ export HISTCONTROL=erasedupsggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  513  clear  514  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups  515  ls  516  clear  517  export HISTCONTROL=erasedups  518  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ lsarchlinux-2009.02-2-ftp-i686.img.torrentggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $ history | tail -6  471  clear  472  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups  473  clear  474  export HISTCONTROL=erasedups  475  ls  476  history | tail -6ggarron@gentoo ~/Desktop $

You may see that the ls command between clear and export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups with the number 515, was deleted, and now we have the 475, you may also note that a lot of occurrences of ls have been deleted as my log went from 518 commands recorded to 476!

Previous posts about history

[CRTL+R] Search in your last used commands
Small tip - Call a command from history
history, a command to display your last used commands
Navigate on Linux command shell history

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

I am going back to Windows

That title, makes you all fellow Linux users wanted to know why someone would like to go back to Windows, really? and it is because for all of us who has discovered the freedom, and not only the free as in beer, or the free as in freedom, but also the “living free of system halting”, the “living free of viruses”, the “living free of having to format the hard drive and reinstall from time to time”, it is hard to believe that someone may want to forget about this, and go back to Windows.

But face it, there are people who likes to live with troubles, just because those are the troubles they are used to, and they do not want to start something new because it may demand some of work from their side.

This people is usually afraid of the change, even if that change will make its life easier, or better, you may read more about The going back to windows people.

But hey! we need to look far beyond the problems and look for solutions to convert more people to Linux, why? if we can say, “We do not need those lazy guys, let them live in that Windows world”, but that is not true, we need them, Linux need them, just because there is software from the windows world that we need, and we do not have access to it, or at least not easy access to it, we may deal with wine, and yes it is improving day by day, but it would be great to have AutoCad for Linux, or Visio for Linux.

These programs does not exists for Linux (There are options, but they are not the same), just because we are less than windows users, so we need more people using Linux.

Going back to the fact that there will always exist people avoiding changes, we will have to start at schools, we need to make them start with Linux, and then they will never want to change.

My 7 year old girl, is attending to computer classes at her school, and she is using…. yes you got it!! Windows!, there are 30 children in her grade, if we offer ourselves as volunteers to install Linux at schools, and help them to teach our children Linux, then when those children became adults they will be stuck at Linux, if someone shows them Windows in the future, they will say soon after trying it for few days “I am going back to Linux”.

So, we better focus on children and forget about the old guys.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

A Wifi Christmas Coming In The Summer!

While many of the hardcore Linux users may already be aware of this, most of you are not likely. There is going to be a ton of networking additions coming in the 2.6.30 kernel. New support for a number of 802.11n wireless devices, most of them coming from the Atheros side of things, plus a lot of clean up for existing wireless chipsets such as work coming from Intel’s own wifi devices.

On the LAN front, work is being included better support for Generic Receive Offload (GRO) infrastructure for many LAN drivers out there. This will of course translate into good things for those using affected chipsets. At the end of the day, it is safe to say this is going to be a very network oriented kernel release. And overall, I see this as a very good thing.

Of course, what Linux article would be complete without a discussion on wireless packet sniffing. In the video above, Chris takes a crack at what it is, how it works and what to do about preventing it harming your network.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Encountered a section with no Package: header

Today, while updating my Debian Squeeze, after running

sudo aptitude update

I got this:

E: Encountered a section with no Package: headerE: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_squeeze_contrib_binary-i386_PackagesE: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.E: Encountered a section with no Package: headerE: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_squeeze_contrib_binary-i386_PackagesE: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

After googling a little, I found this solution.

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf

This removed all the corrupted files, and the process could start again with no problems.

After that all was working again.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]