LINUX NEWS
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May 2, 2002TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Yay, Yay, Sanjay!
Don't think it couldn't happen!
Free Software For Proprietary Operating Systems
More Legal Stupidity3) Linux Resources
A First Look at Kylix 2 Open Edition
PostgreSQL College
The Internet is for Everyone!
TCPDump Pocket Guide
Linux Configuration Notes4) App o’ the Week
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1) Sean’s Notes
With respect to my computer hardware, I’ve never been on the leading edge. It was only after my K6/233 died on me that I upgraded to a Duron 800. I lived with a 2 meg video card until last September, until I finally bought a 3D card (and my productivity has dropped accordingly). So, after years of complaining that I didn’t have a CD burner, I finally bought one.
Getting a CD burner to run under Linux is quite easy. One little thing to note is that most software is set to burn to a SCSI device. However, most CD-RW drives are IDE, which is where the ide-scsi module fits in. ide-scsi’s job is to make your IDE ATAPI devices look like SCSI devices.
Setting it up is quite easy:
modprobe ide-scsi
Once that’s done, you can check the kernel log to see if it picked it up:
dmesg
… SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00 scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices Vendor: HL-DT-ST Model: CD-RW GCE-8320B Rev: 1.02 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02 …
Or, use /proc to figure it out
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices: Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: HL-DT-ST Model: CD-RW GCE-8320B Rev: 1.02 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
(If you can access the drive as an IDE device, the SCSI will be fine)
We’re going to use the latter example to figure out the SCSI device name. In this case, it is 0,0,0 (Channel, Id, Lun), chances are its the same for you too.
Pop in a data CD, we’ll make sure we can access your new “SCSI” device.
mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom
ls /mnt/cdrom
(if /mnt/cdrom doesn’t exist, either create the directory, or use another suitably empty directory). Drive mounted? Great, your CD works in SCSI mode. Let’s unmount that:
umount /mnt/cdrom
Now that you’re accessing the CD as a SCSI device, you may want to repoint your /dev/cdrom symlink:
rm /dev/cdrom
ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom
And you’ll probably want this to be a permanent thing. Add:
alias scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
to /etc/modules.conf. This will cause the ide-scsi driver to be loaded when any SCSI devices are accessed.
In general, CD burners under UNIX operate on ISO9660 filesystems. One doesn’t copy files to a writable CD, one creates a filesystem on the hard drive, and then burns the filesystem to the CD (yes, it can be done on the fly, I’m just simplifying).
The simplest case of making an image is to copy one of an existing CD. Since the CD does have an ISO9660 filesystem on it, and you can read from the raw block device (CD ROM), you can image a CD with:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=output.iso
“dd” copies data from the in file (if) to the out file (of). In this case, from the cd device to a file.
To burn this ISO image to CD, cdrecord is used.
cdrecord dev=0,0,0 output.iso
That was easy, wasn’t it?
A more difficult task is when you have to make the ISO filesystem out of an existing directory. This is where you’ll want a GUI for day-to-day use, but knowing how to do it on the command line is something you should keep in your back pocket.
Assuming you want to make an iso image of /spool, and call it /tmp/image.iso, you can run
mkisofs -o /tmp/image.iso -R /spool
The only option I’ve put in there is -R, to generate the Rock Ridge extensions. If you plan on using this CD on a Windows box, you can also toss in -J to generate the Joliet extensions. The mkisofs man page lists the many options available.
There are many GUI tools for creating images and burning CDs, such as “gcombust” and “xcdroast”. Most of these are wrappers for cdrecord and mkisofs, meaning that you set the options in a GUI, and the back end runs the commands.
http://www.xcdroast.org/ http://www.abo.fi/~jmunsin/gcombust/
I like the look of gcombust a bit more, though xcdroast is not without its features. It’s also bundled with Red Hat. Give them both a try and decide for yourself.
Don’t forget the HOWTO, either:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/howto/CD-Writing-HOWTO
CD burning is quick and easy under Linux. There are many options you can tweak, either to make your CD image readable on more platforms, or to optimize your burn. The raw access to block devices also lets you easily make images for later burning.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@cramsession.com
2) Linux News
Yay, Yay, Sanjay!
A frequent poster, contributer, and all around good egg, Sanjay has taken the plunge and ditched Windows. Come on by and congratulate him! While you’re at it, let us know if you have plans to free yourself of the Microsoft Tax.
http://boards.cramsession.com/boards/vbm.asp?mT3970
Don’t think it couldn’t happen!
“SILLYCON VALLEY – Nearly 130 former system administrators have filed suit against Linus Torvalds in which they claim Linux cost them their jobs. Recently, several companies migrated from Windows to Linux, increasing their productivity but decreasing the need for a large staff of tech workers, prompting a wave of layoffs.”
http://humorix.org/articles/jun01/linux-lawsuit.shtml
Free Software For Proprietary Operating Systems
The greatest thing about Linux isn’t the kernel, it’s all the software that you can run on it. What you might not realize is that a lot of Open Source projects also target Windows. The Open CD project is dedicated to bringing high-quality, free software to Windows.
http://www.theopencd.org/
More Legal Stupidity
While I’m doing my best to stay off the soapbox in this newsletter, I just couldn’t let this one slide. Apparently True Type fonts have a couple of bits in them saying whether or not they can be embedded in a document. True Type is a published standard, with many utilities out there that can twiddle the bits. Many TT fonts are free, and all are copyable. Still, someone who wrote a quick program that resets the bits gets sued!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid/05/01/2026234&mode=thread&tid3
3) Linux Resources
A First Look at Kylix 2 Open Edition
Borland has updated Kylix, a Delphi-type Rapid Application Development environment for Linux. Though the licence is apparently something crazy, it’s still open and a good tool.
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1127.kylix2.html
PostgreSQL College
The fine folks from the PostgreSQL database group have put together some flash tutorials on concepts like referential integrity and sequences. They’re well done, and even if your database experience is very limited, you should get something out of it.
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/college/
The Internet is for Everyone!
We can safely credit Vint Cerf (and not Al Gore) as being one of the fathers of the Internet. He’s recently released RFC 3271, which outlines the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force. As Linux users, many of the goals apply directly to us, namely freedom and privacy.
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3271.txt
TCPDump Pocket Guide
Though it’s got TCPDump in the title, this two page foldable guide lists off all the TCP/UDP/IP headers, along with DNS and ICMP. Very handy to have around if you have to use tcpdump or otherwise have to sniff your LAN.
http://www.sans.org/newlook/resources/tcpip.pdf
Linux Configuration Notes
Although it’s made for Red Hat 7.1, the last two sections of this web page are worth bookmarking. The first deals with handy commands, and the second lists many of the important files in /etc and /var.
http://oceanpark.com/notes/linux_configuration.html
4) App o’ the Week
A coworker passed this to me today, it’s crazy! ngrep stands for “network grep”. Yes, you can grep your ethernet for packets! I can think of several uses already, such as monitoring print requests, looking for people getting a certain error in the application layer, and many more!
http://ngrep.sourceforge.net/
(C) 2002 BrainBuzz.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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