LINUX NEWS
RESOURCES & LINKS FROM BRAINBUZZ.COM
Thursday, August 9, 2001
Read By 7,000 Linux Enthusiasts Weekly!TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Dell takes Linux off the Desktop Menu
Observations on Mandrake and XP
Linux Financial Software
Open-source Brouhaha: Missing the point3) Linux Resources
Crash Recovery
Webifying Snort
Auto Console Login
Build Your Own Firewall Online
Do You Dream in Code?4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
If there is one place where Windows absolutely kills Linux, it is the handling of fonts. Traditionally, X11 uses a different type of font than Windows, known as a bitmap font. Bitmap fonts don’t scale well because they’re essentially pictures. They’ll end up jagged and hard to read, because the system is essentially taking out or making up information when it scales the font. Contrast this to a vector style font like True Type, where fonts are represented as a series of curves which can be scaled at will.
X, by default, will support similar fonts called Type 1 fonts, but when is the last time you saw that cool font you wanted in Type 1 format? No, it’s True Type or bust.
Luckily, X can be coerced into supporting TT fonts. Most distributions even support it out of the box, if you know what to do. The solution is through the use of the the font server (XFree86 4 supports TT fonts in the XServer itself, but your distribution is probably going to give you the font server anyway, so may as well use it.)
The font server, xfs, allows you to consolidate fonts on one server and have many clients access it at the same time. You can see the advantages to this in a large environment!
The first thing to do is to make a directory for all your fonts:
mkdir /usr/share/fonts/TrueType
If you’re on a single user system, it’ll be easier down the road if you change the ownership to yourself:
chown sean /usr/share/fonts/TrueType
Now, tell xfs where to look. On Redhat systems, /etc/X11/fs/ config is the file, Debian uses /etc/X11/xfs/config. There’s not too much to this file, look for the line starting with “catalogue=”. Add in the directory above, making sure that you add a comma in the appropriate part. This list of directories tells xfs where to find all the fonts.
Restart xfs to make it pick up that change. That’s it for the one time configurations.
Whenever you want to add fonts:
1) Copy them to the True Type directory 2) Rebuild the font maps. From the directory, # ttmkftdir -o fonts.scale # mkfontdir 3) Reload the xfs font database by restarting the daemon
There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Step 2 can be done as the logged in user, assuming that you gave appropriate permissions above. Otherwise, do it as root. To restart xfs, though, you’ll need root access.
Now that you’ve got True Type fonts installed, you can use them in most X applications. StarOffice and Applixware are special cases, unfortunately, but the Font-HOWTO explains the next steps:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/howto/Font-HOWTO
Most importantly, Netscape will pick up on your fonts. Some websites still won’t look right–the best way to fix that is to go into Edit -> Preferences, select Appearance->Fonts, and play with the “Sometimes a document will provide its own fonts” options. While you’re there, you can specify something nicer for the default fonts.
Enjoy the fonts. Not only does it let you do some cooler graphics work, but they tend to be a lot easier on the eyes.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@brainbuzz.com
Visit the Linux News Board at http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2
2) Linux News
Dell takes Linux off the Desktop Menu
Dell, once a champion of Linux, has decided that the demand isn’t there yet to keep them shipping Linux on PCs. You can still get it on servers, but the drop of the desktop line is quite a blow.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6757216.html?
Observations on Mandrake and XP
While a lot of people like to point out the differences between Microsoft operating systems and Linux, there are still a lot of similarities. This review of XP and Mandrake draws some parallels between the two, showing that the GUIs in Linux are really starting to take shape.
http://www.systemlogic.net/agurusworld/19/
Linux Financial Software
One of the uses of my computer is keeping track of my expenses, paying bills, and watching my portfolio nosedive. There is a lot of software out there written to do this, even for Linux. Both commercial and free software are included in this article, and it’s broken down by functionality to help you find what you want.
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/269/
Open-source Brouhaha: Missing the point
This is a well written (and interesting) opinion piece that takes the middle ground of the whole “Open vs Closed source”. Some real world examples, such as HP, are even cited as people who have already seen the benefits.
http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2798014,00.htm l
3) Linux Resources
Crash Recovery
A hard disk failure doesn’t always have to mean the whole unit dies at once. Instead, you’ll probably start to see errors in places that were working fine before, and maybe hear some funny noises. The author of this article noticed these, and decided it was time to get the data off before it was lost for good. Depending on what’s broken, it may not be as easy as you’d think. This article outlines some innovative data restoration ideas.
http://www.linux.com/enhance/newsitem.phtml?sid=1&aid488
Webifying Snort
Snort is an open source Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that offers a load of features. Unfortunately, you’re on your own to choose a package to do the reporting. Though quite Solaris- specific, this article details the procedure to get Snort logging to a database, and use some of the web-based utilities to do monitoring.
http://www.elementkjournals.com/sun/0109/sun0191.htm
Auto Console Login
If you’re the only user on your Linux box, it might be handy to be logged in automatically on some of the virtual consoles. Through the use of “qlogin”, you can do this. Even if this idea doesn’t appeal, read the article anyway, it’s got a great explanation of terminals, gettys, and the init process, not to mention some great uses of this technique.
http://linuxgazette.com/issue69/henderson.html
Build Your Own Firewall Online
If you’re looking for an easy way to write firewall rules, this page may be for you. By following the prompts in the web pages, you’ll get a complete list of rules. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated for iptables, but ipchains, ipfwadm, and ipfw (BSD) rules are supported.
http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/linux/firewall/index.html
Do You Dream in Code?
While not strictly a Linux thing, I thought this web development site would be appreciated by the readers of this newsletter. Dream In Code has some great news and tutorials for web developers and programmers.
http://www.dreamincode.net/
4) App o’ the week
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Code Red viruses that are running around the net, infecting Microsoft IIS servers. If you’ve looked in your Apache log files (and are connected to the Internet of course), you might see some attempts on your machine. This script analyzes your Apache logs, and gives a very detailed report on who has attacked, and what version of CodeRed they are infected with.
http://www.kryptolus.com/red8.txt
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