9
VirtualBox is a great application for running other OS’s inside your current OS without having to do a physical install of the OS. Moving them or backing them up can be a bit tricky though. Hopefully this will help you out a bit.
First things first: be sure that your virtual machine is shut down and powered off. Next, make sure you get rid of any snapshots you have. There isn’t a fool-proof and safe way to do this without getting rid of them, unfortunately. Select your virtual machine and click on the “Snapshots” tab.
Select your snapshot and click the delete button. Be prepared to wait a while as VirtualBox merges differences with your machine’s current state. The machine’s state won’t actually change, though, so don’t worry. Now that the prep stuff is out of the way, we can start the moving process.
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9
Box.net (box.com actually now) is a service that enables you to have a place to put files that you want to access from anywhere. Some people use it to back up their workstations. Did your box.net mount start failing recently? They’ve changed a couple things.. use this guide to set it up again. First thing we need to do is to install davfs. You can do that with one of the following commands, depending on what package manager you use on your Linux distro: RedHat based systems:
yum install davfs2
Debian based systems:
apt-get install davfs2
Now, add the mount point:
mkdir /box
Add this line to your /etc/fstab:
https://www.box.com/dav /box davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0
Add this line to the bottom of the /etc/davfs2/secrets file (replace with your email address and password)
https://www.box.com/dav user@email.
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9
Colored Man Pages And How They Work
Colored man pages can make it a bit easier to read them instead of the old boring monochrome we get by default. I’ll show you how to set them up and also give you the details for each color and what they mean in the image above.
The Code
For this tutorial we’ll be editing the ~/.bashrc file, which is a hidden file located in your home directory which gets read each time a new Bash instance starts up. Bash reads all the commands found in this file and executes them (hence the rc part, which stands for run commands).
We will edit this file and add some lines which specify certain colors for the $LESS_TERMCAP variables.
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$(printf '\e[01;31m') # enter blinking mode - red
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$(printf '\e[01;35m') # enter double-bright
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24
I’ve been a Linux user now for 11+ years. Most of it has been spent using the command line(CLI) for many various things. Because of that, I like to use the same commands a lot. I also keep a long running history stored for my command line environment so that I can search my history for commands I might have used only once or twice. This comes in very handy for many different things.
However, there is a neat little trick that you can have your command line environment pull up commands in your history without searching for them or without hitting the up arrow a bunch of times. This is called auto complete of bash commands from history. It’s actually very simple and very easy to set up your command line environment to do this for you.
For example, I use the ‘cat’ command quite often. But
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8
Apologies About The Down Time…
Posted in Announcements, Linux by Admin
I just wanted to write a quick note to let everyone know that LFD should be back to normal now. Might be a few images missing here and there, especially within posts. Unfortunately those have been lost for the time being!
It seems the site experienced a malware injection due to running WordPress it seems. We all know how easily WordPress is injected with that kind of stuff sometimes. Fortunately this is my first time in about 6 years experiencing any issues like this with the site.
I do apologize about the down time and such and hopefully all of the people that seem to be viewing the site on a regular basis will find it’s back up and running the way it should be once again.
If you see any further issues with the site, please bring it to my attention so I can straighten things out and hopefully
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18
For system and network administrators or other users who frequently deal with sessions on multiple machines, SSH ends up being one of the most oft-used Unix tools. It usually works so well that until you use it for something slightly more complex than starting a terminal session on a remote machine, you tend to use it fairly automatically. However, the ~/.ssh/config file bears mentioning for a few ways it can make using the ssh a client a little easier.
Abbreviating hostnames
If you often have to SSH into a machine with a long host and/or network name, it can get irritating to type it every time. For example, consider the following command:
$ ssh server42371.some.long.hostname.for.a.server.com
If you interact with the server42371 machine a lot, you could include a stanza like this in your ~/.ssh/config:
Host server42371
HostName server43271.some.long.
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25
Here is the full size version: VIM Cheat Sheet Full Size
This is for the all the VIM users out there!
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25
Just a simple little post of an image that I have found very handy over the years. Taught me all about how to use VI when I first started using Linux.
Here is the full size version: VI Cheat Sheet Full Size
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25
It has come to my attention that there is a great wave of people out there that think using kill -9 on everything is a great idea. Who are these people and how did they acquire such an insidious habit? I wish I knew.
There exists in Unix a thing called a signal. There are many types of signals that are sent to processes for a great variety of reasons. When a process receives a signal, it may ignore it or catch the signal and execute a signal handler. This is called trapping a signal. Untrapped signals have a default action, which are basicly do nothing or exit. There are two signals that are untrappable, SIGKILL and SIGSTOP.
There is a command line utility called kill that simply sends a signal to a process. kill -signal pid will send signal to pid. kill -l will list all of the available
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25
First, a little background. In Unix, compressing (making something smaller) and archiving (combining many things into one) are two different functions. Also, a .tgz file is the same as a .tar.gz file, and a .tbz is the same as a .tar.bz2 file.
The most commonly asked question about compression type programs
Why 4 different compression programs?
Compress is the standard legacy Unix compression program. gzip has been around for 2 generations of Unix users, it compresses better thancompress, and everyone loves it. Then someone has to do better and create bzip2, which has significantly better compression ratios. However, bzip2 takes longer to work, and can be really slow on large files. And of course, zip is just for compatibility with windows users.
Decompressing Files
How do I decompress a .tar type file?
tar xf file.tar
How do I decompress a .gz type file?
gunzip file.gz
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