I’m on Pearson’s book reviewer list so once a month or so I get sent another Linux book from them. In a lot of cases, the book hasn’t been released yet and what I get is a draft manuscipt. In other cases, the books are on the shelf. In any case, it’s been about 4 months since they’ve sent me anything and in the last month alone I’ve been sent three books. They all looks great and they all fit a different niche. Here’s the run down of what I’ve been looking at this month (note, these are NOT affiliate links. Click away): The Linux Starter Kit Link This is a ’software box’ with a full SUSE 10.1 DVD in it and a 150 page ‘quick start’ manual to get you up and running. It’s... [Read more]

I am now an official memberr of the Linux-weenie society. You don’t hear much about the Linux-weenie society, but most (if not all) Linux users are secret members. How did I get inducted? When I attempted to delete a *.bak file in my awstats directory I typed this: rm * .bak See the space? Yes. It took the entire directory. Thankfully, I had almost the exact same setup on another server so I was able to grab my awstats conf files from there and tweak ‘em, but holy…that could have just as easily been any other directory on the machine. And yes, I was root. Weenies Unite! [Read more]

I’ve put together a little video of the things you can do with CosmoPOD premium. I had to hand hold the video camera so it’s a little shaky. Take some Bonamine and you’ll be fine It’s over on The Linux Learning Station. [Read more]

This is a tricky subject and I’ve had brilliant successes and dismal failures with it. If you have a Synaptics touchpad, you can use the following steps. If you have an ALPS touchpad then I *believe* the same steps will work for you, but I can’t be sure. Synaptics, at least, also has a GUI available to control the touchpad which means you won’t have to go into the command line as I’m about to do. Sadly, many laptops’ touchpads show up as USB mice (as was the case with my old Inspiron 1000). Since the computer thinks it is a normal mouse, I don’t believe there is any way to pass parameters to it to shut off the tapping. This procudure, however, has worked on both my current Dell inspiron 9400 and Kelly’s... [Read more]

OK, I’ll admit it – I’m the reader in this case. I was reading the booting section of my fancy-dancy LPI certification book and it speaks about kernel parameters. It mentions that you can feed the kernel parameters at boot time (which will be the subject of an upcoming entry) and also states that you can feed kernel modules parameters as well. It says that kernel module parameters can be specified in either the /etc/modules.conf or the /etc/conf.modules file. I’m running Kubuntu 6.06LTS and I have neither of these files. I have an /etc/modprobe.d/ directory that contains a bunch of files that kind of look like what I want, but I’m not familiar enough with this topic to figure it out. I did some preliminary Googling... [Read more]