Last year I brought up the double bang trick. There is another with the bang and asterisk keys. This combinations takes just the parameters from the previous command.

Enjoy!

The bad news is it looks like one of my clients may have been attacked. I kept noticing problems and found that the reboot and shutdown commands were missing. When I did a hard reboot I found out init was also missing so the server was dead in the water. Those commands just don’t go missing. After spending hours that night trying to move things to a new VPS I had trouble moving the PostgreSQL databases and just got those working yesterday.

One piece of good news is the car was taken into the shop and I found out it wasn’t going to be the $1800 I thought it was going to be, it is going to be like $800-900. It would have been less if I had taken it in sooner since the rotors rusted badly.

The 2nd to last piece of good news is that I am moving to Atlanta at the end of this month for a new job and I am VERY excited.

The last piece of good news will have to wait, but soon, very very soon.

A friend was wanting to extract the mp3s from the OTH archive, but because of the non-standard naming structure it wasn’t just a regex on .mp3 files.

I wrote this bash script to properly extract the urls. Sure you could use regex to trim it down a bit, I just didn’t see the need to. It requires bash, wget, internet connection, and considering the number of mp3s a decent one at that **56k beware**.

Here are two new command aliases I added

Directory list with auto grep

Directory list with ‘more’

I mentioned a few problems with Ubuntu, well I was able to figure out the problem…. sorta. I was booting to Ubuntu via lilo which was on BackTrack, I guess grub sets it up as a scsi device because when I reinstalled Ubuntu and booted with grub my problems went away and hdparm gave a much different output. I am moving files over right now to another machine so that I can wipe the laptop, start over with a 100% linux laptop. I will be running either VMWare player on it or VirtualBox for both Windows and BackTrack. I do however wonder how my RAM is going to react to that.

I have another update I am going to post next week that will hopefully be great news but for now it is a big secret ;-D

So I have been noticing horrible transfer speed problems on my laptop. I ran hdparm in BackTrack and got 34mb/sec in Ubuntu 2.53mb/sec. I am unable to set dma on the drive which is the real performance killer in this case. I have thus far found not solution other than compiling my own kernel, which I’m kinda annoyed about. If I wanted to be compiling kernels to get the latest features I would be using a distro that I would expect to have to do so. If I cannot find a solution I may have to move away from Ubuntu.

I install Kubuntu on my laptop today so now I am penta-booting BackTrack, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Windows XP. I would really like to get a few more on there, but this laptop only has a 60gb hard drive and I am not in the mood to deal with the possible horror resizing partitions can cause if an error occurs. I might clean off the laptop next month and put on Solaris, and try to get Fedora working again.

As a follow up to my Ubuntu post, I spent a good number of hours playing with Ubuntu in Gnome and I have enjoyed Gnome more than I used to. I feel a big part of that is the new “shiny” features Ubuntu added. I did have a lot of trouble installing Rails though, took me about 8 times before the error telling me rails did not exist went away and when I installed mongrel fastthread blew up so I had to install the deb package to avoid a headache. I cannot say that the problem occurred because I was using Ubuntu, but since I did not compile my Ruby install I cannot say if something done during that install contributed to my problems.

Another interesting problem I had was that when I updated about 200mb in packages today my machine suddenly started taking a crap on me. I do not get the shiny boot screen for Ubuntu and I am not entirely sure why, but I also don’t even get text on my screen. This means if something goes wrong I cannot know what caused it. Basically it went like this, the machine was booting (known by looking at the HD light) and then stopped, I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and then it took a few seconds and booted into X. Once I have logged in I am missing my nice shortcuts to other partitions and I even had trouble mounting them. After one attempt mounting them I said screw it and reinstalled Ubuntu.

With all of that said I am at somewhat of a fork in the road. I would really like to install 7 or 8 distros on this laptop so that I can try some of the things I learn at conferences, but at the same time, I would really like to use just one operating system on the machine. I love my Slackware, and I would like to keep Backtrack on incase I ever need it, but I feel as my main laptop distro I will be using Ubuntu for the simple fact that it works right out of the box for me, if I ever need to reinstall on the road I can and know that I don’t have to download anything to get wireless working or hassle with anything to get standby working.

I can buy a 1gb memory stick for this laptop for $129 from the Dell website, which isn’t horrible, but at the same time it is $129 for 1gb of RAM. If I install another stick, I have to remove one 256 stick giving me roughly 1.2gb of RAM. That memory could then be used for VMWare server, which would allow me to run as many distros as I wanted. The one downside is that I have received information from very good sources BackTrack should always be run from a LiveCD or direct boot, and should not be used from a VM.

I’ll end this post now that I feel I am jumping into too many things, but before I do I have decided to backup the things that I need to backup and I setup my laptop right. I will be removing Kubuntu and Slackware, installing Ubuntu on the Slackware partition, deleting the old Ubuntu and Kubuntu partitions and joining them to make one ext3 shared partition. I have to have Windows XP and I have to have BackTrack to complete my labs and my exam for OSCP.

Funny I went from Penta-booting to Triple-Booting in one day and for no good reason.

So I tried the new Ubuntu 7.10 today and for a long time I have hated Ubuntu for 3 reasons….1. I think that it prevents people from learning essential linux skills, they do not have to know how to add a user to sudoers or configure hardware via config files. 2. it uses Gnome, now I think Gnome is ok, but I feel very locked in a box compared to KDE. 3. You have to download almost all the apps you want to install, and being on dialup as many of you know, makes it very very hard to do. So really I do not hate Ubuntu in the sense that it is a bad distro, I think it is a good distro, but for me to make a system that I can enjoy to the fullest it would take forever with my current connection.

Kubuntu fixes the Gnome problem, and well #1, I don’t really think I can piss on a distro for helping people use something that can get difficult. In slackware I have had problems with suspending not working as it does in Windows, but I have not bothered to work on that problem. In Ubuntu it works out of the box, as does all my hardware… with the exception of my modem. The first linux distro I ever used was Slackware, I love the name and I like how it works. A user has to really learn to use the system because it makes you learn. I once heard someone say “If you want to learn linux, use Slackware” and I feel it is a very true statement. You can of course learn Linux on any distro because it is linux, but GUIs and web interfaces don’t teach you the skills that in many cases are needed. If you have packages you are less likely to compile software. I cannot remember the exact details of the situation, but I remember sometime last year I had a horrible problem with a system, and I ended up having to mount multiple partitions and do a lot of tricky stuff in config files to fix the problem. Had I been a sole Ubuntu user, I might not have had those skills when I needed them.

Every distro has its place, and many are not for every user. I have been told, “slackware isn’t linux” or “slackware doesn’t have packages”, “slackware gives you nothing to get started with” and all of those comments came from people who havn’t really used Slackware. If you do a full install of Slackware you get a ton of packages. Linux Packages has a few thousand packages and they are all for Slackware. Sure, it isn’t the 23,000 available for Ubuntu and they don’t do dependancy checking, but dependancy checking it’s always a good thing. I have rarely ever installed a package on Slackware, I usually compile the software and very very rarely do I ever have any problems with a compile. As far as it not being linux, Slackware is the oldest existing linux distro and I seriously doubt that will be changing and it has stayed that way for a reason.

I plan to use Ubuntu, and I am going to install the new Kubuntu to see if I like KDE on Ubuntu or not. Gnome has improved since the last time I used it for more than 5 minutes, so I can probably deal with Gnome. Right now my laptop is quad booting Slackware, BackTrack, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. I have one free partition left that I will put Kubuntu on probably. So far the only OS I havn’t been able to multi-boot off the BackTrack LILO config is Fedora 7, which is a shame. What is also a shame is that my hard drive on the laptop isn’t larger, I would love to have 10 distros to boot to, just for fun….

I suggest you read this very well written article that was recently released about Slackware and Ubuntu, more slack though.

Anyone who has really spent time talking to me about computers knows that I collect data like the end of the world is coming. One of the things I collect is various operating systems and the different versions. I do it for a couple reasons, A. I am on dialup, but even when I get back on high speed I will still collect them. B. I enjoy learning as much as I can about as many things so that when a situation arises that I need to do something with that application or operating system I don’t waste time looking for a feature or setting. C. I am looking for a good linux desktop.

If you have learned that I collect a lot then you also know I am a Slackware lover so the last reason may seem a little strange to some. I love Slackware and always will, it was the first distribution I ever tried and always the one I go back to. I do have trouble deciding between Slackware and other distributions. I don’t even know why really, because package management is available in Slackware and RHEL based distributions along with Debian and so on. I used to have a lot to say about Red Hat despite knowing jack about anything they did. Most of my opinions were based on things I heard or the opinions of others. It was unfair to make judgments about Red Hat having never really used it or understanding their way of doing things, but it happened and I have at least been willing to learn more about Red Hat.

For the past few months I have had to work in Red Hat based environments (CentOS, RHEL) and I have enjoyed them very much. I am still a supporter of compiling software, but packages with dependency checking can be a huge help in a number of different scenarios. Compiling from source is fun, and you learn something every time you do it, but when you have a number of servers to update a `yum update` is a much more efficient way of keeping your environment up to date.

This last weekend I downloaded PCLinuxOS, Fedora 7, and OpenBSD. PCLinuxOS has a slogan, “The distro shopper stopper”, well I was not nearly as excited about PCLinuxOS as I was about Fedora. I installed Fedora in a virtual machine and without any involvement on my part the mouse would work between Windows and Fedora without having to escape the virtual machine. I assume Fedora ships with the tools to allow this and enables them based on the hardware it finds. There were just a number of small things that made Fedora enjoyable to work with. Other than Slackware, my use of Fedora was the best experience I have had with a Linux distro in a long time. Actually, that isn’t totally true, I really like SLAX and BackTrack, but they are Slackware based. CentOS was cool, but for a desktop environment Fedora is #2, with Slackware remaining at #1.

I installed OpenBSD this morning and spent a few minutes moving around. My goal was really to just get it installed to the point that I understand the process and feel confident doing that without a guide so that in the future I can spend a little more time with the system itself. The installation process was definitely different from anything I have ever done before. It was similar in many ways to installs involving fdisk, but I encountered processes I had never seen before. I have wanted to use OpenBSD for about 5 years, but never installed it until this morning; who know’s why I waited so long.

No I’m not excited about sudo, well I sorta am. I have run into situations where I typed a long command and forgot to type sudo. This is a huge problem when you can’t hit the home key and go to the start of the command, which happens in a lot of SSH tools.

The Fix!!!

sudo !!

Typing that will execute the last command, but it will execute it as if you had typed sudo at the beginning. This is a huge time saver.