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Thursday, February 8, 2001TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Supercomputer on a CD
Random Linus Quotes
Pack up Your Bags, Folks. It's Over
Whistler Testers Shout "Linux!"3) Linux Resources
Guerilla Guide to Great Graphics with the GIMP
Free Oracle 9i for Linux Trial
Intro to RAID
Best Newbie Distro
Red Hat 7.1 beta4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
I was just reading through this week’s PERL newsletter from perl.com. To my amazement, they announced that the WinCE port of perl is complete, bringing the total number of systems supported to around 70. 70! Forget Java, PERL is the cross platform language to learn!
You don’t have to be a guru to learn PERL either. With its wide variety of command line options, you can get a surprising amount of mileage out of your command line.
If you’ve read my article on the command line, you’ll remember that I can convert a phrase within a stream with sed, the Stream EDitor. For example:
cat mgmtreport | sed ‘s/ use / utilize /’ > mgmtreport.tmp mv mgmtreport.tmp mgmtreport
–Will fix up my management report to make it a bit more friendly to my manager. PERL can do the editing in place for you though:
perl -p -i.bak -e ‘s/ use / utilize /’ mgmtreport
-p means to read a line from STDIN, do something, then run a print. -i.bak tells perl to use a temporary file to do in-place editing for the files specified on the command line -e means that we’re passing code on the command line (that would be the something referenced in the -p)
That may not mean a lot to you, but without the options it would be 14 lines of PERL code! You only end up saving about 30 characters over the sed method, but with the PERL invocation you can specify multiple files (or wildcards) instead of processing each file individually.
Another handy one is to generate repetitive lines of text. For example, if I were setting up a new Cisco switch, I’d need to type something like the following for every interface (48 on some switches!):
interface fastethernet0/N spanning-tree portfast switchport mode access vlan 10
Or, I can copy the output of this script to the switch:
perl -e ‘for($i=1;$i<H;$i++){print”interface fastethernet0/$i \spanning-tree portfast\nswitchport mode access vlan 10\n”}’
(the \ means to continue the command on to the next line. Since we’re still technically within the ”” of the print statement, the \n can be skipped)
I even use stuff like this when writing this newsletter. To save a lot of cutting and pasting for the table of contents, I just pass the newsletter through:
while(<STDIN>) { if (/^——-/){ $_=<STDIN>; print “\t$_”; $_=<STDIN>;} }
Presto, my table of contents is nearly generated. This one just looks for the headings of each resource, prints the following line, then carries on.
Lazy? You bet. It’s one of the three virtues of a programmer, the other two being impatience and hubris.
http://www.netropolis.org/hash/perl/virtue.html
PERL Homepage (great tutorials): http://www.perl.com
Linux News Board: http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2
Long live the Penguin,
Sean swalberg@brainbuzz.com
2) Linux News
Supercomputer on a CD
Clustering multiple computers isn’t exactly news, but the Open Cluster Group aims to make it so easy that anyone can do it. “We’ve actually taken it to the point where a typical high school kid who has a little bit of experience with Linux and can get their hands on a couple of extra boxes could set up a cluster at home,” says one of the people working on the project.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid/01/25/2330211
Random Linus Quotes
From the ”I’ve got too much time on my hands” department
comes a collection of quotes from Linus on the linux-kernel mailing lists. Come see what Linus thinks about things from project management to families. Well worth a read.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/2980/1/
Pack up Your Bags, Folks. It’s Over
You might have seen Microsoft’s statement last week that Linux has no future. Since Microsoft is always right snicker it looks like we may as wall pack our bags and call it quits giggle. I mean, why should we spend all this time and effort when Mickeysoft is foreseeing our demise? laugh
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0101/linux_quit.shtml
Whistler Testers Shout “Linux!”
It looks like Microsoft is going to add some serious copy protection into Whistler. As any security measure works, it’s a tradeoff between effectiveness and ease of use. Microsoft has not struck a good balance with its Whistler copy protection plan, which is leading some of the Whistler testers to threaten defection.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/16648.html
3) Linux Resources
Guerilla Guide to Great Graphics with the GIMP
Last week I showed you “GIMP Essentials”. Maybe you’re a beginner to the world of computer graphics, and are looking for a how-to type book. Well, the folks at Prima Tech have answered your call. This is a great book about the GIMP, written in an easy to follow, tutorial style manner.
http://itresources.brainbuzz.com/tutorials/tutorial.asp?t=S1TU1150
Free Oracle 9i for Linux Trial
Oracle is giving away Oracle 9i Application Server trials. Follow this link to register with Oracle and get your software. Oracle is one vendor quick to embrace Linux by making their core software available on the Linux platform. (There’s also a free draw for an EMPEG Linux MP3 Car Stereo.)
http://www.oracle.com/start/9iweekly/intro.html
Intro to RAID
RAID, a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technique for spreading data across multiple disks to allow for fault tolerance. Sure, Linux supports it in both hardware and software, but you still need to know when RAID is appropriate and what the different levels are. This article gives an excellent introduction to how RAID works.
http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/01/1/raid/
Best Newbie Distro
Every technical group has it’s own religious wars, and Linux is no exception. What is the best distribution for newbies? Which is the easiest to install and maintain? This article and discussion tries to tackle the issue.
http://www.linuxnewbie.com/articles/features/6,1/
Red Hat 7.1 beta
Want to be on the on the bleeding edge? Give Red Hat 7.1 a shot. Updated packages, kernel 2.4, and more configuration tools promise to make this beta release a good one.
http://www.redhat.com/apps/download/beta/rhl.html
4) App o’ the week
I found this one the other day when trying to resolve IPs into names in a text file. There are many programs out there to do this for Apache style logs, but I needed a general purpose filter so I could specify that the IP was, for example, in the third column of comma separated values. This week’s program does all this and more.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cocalores
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