Linux

Linux Counter #32532

I started using Unix professionally in 1993 and discovered Linux in 1994. My first distribution was CD-based and came with an X11 desktop. It came with plenty of documentation from the Linux Documentation Project. It was exactly the right information at the right time in my career to help me really learn Unix.

Over the years I've had the fortune of installing and using many great distributions. Of special note are these distributions:

Yggdrasil_Linux - plug-and-play, first live CD distro, being sold at shareware shops
Slackware - widely-available through book publishers
SuSE - fantastic installer, YaST management tool, CD/DVD-based distribution model[^1]
Debian - apt-get and dpkg tools, online repository, support of many architectures
Mepis - big advances in desktop usability, based on debian
Knoppix - great for troubleshooting and debugging, based on debian
Gentoo - build-from-source mindset, ebuild tools, online source code repository
RedHat - RPM package manager, efforts to 'go corporate' with Linux
Ubuntu - installer, usability, desktop maturity, based on debian

Notes and Shell Scripts

Here are some notes and shell scripts that I've written.

mp3_organizer rewrites a flat directory of long mp3 filenames into a meaningful directory structure
smart sends email updates about the health status of hard drives
visitors creates a visual graph of web traffic
fail2ban stops bots and script kiddies in their tracks.
cpuspeed shows CPU speed every second
recursivecopy small script to do a selective recursive copy
Runlevel tools
Logfile tricks
Why RPM bugs me
Dealing with open files
How long has a process has been alive
wma2mp3 - a small script to convert Windows WMA files to MP3 format
Testing UDP availability to a remote host
Finding the targets in a Makefile
XML file validation

How-Tos

LVM
SSH Tunneling
Screen - a text-mode window manager
How to Create a 4-Disk RAID Array using mdadm
How To Use rsync

[^1] this was before the popularization of high-speed internet access