It is true that when you start using Gentoo, you learn a lot about Linux, because it appears some problems that you have to solve, and you need to understand something before you can fix it.

If you like me use Fluxbox may be aware that when you install a new program it is not automatically added to the menu, yes you can always edit it manually and add the new program to fluxbox menu.

But you can also run:

fluxbox-generate_menu

Then from the old menu choose restart, and voila, you will have almost all your installed applications in the menu.

Well, finally I have all my hardware working with Gentoo, I have an Intel Core 2 Duo, with GeForce 7300 from Nvidia and an Intel ICH8 audio card, which is integrated in my mother board.

You may see the output of the hwinfo command in my PC here

And the output of lspci below

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82P965/G965 Memory Controller Hub (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82P965/G965 PCI Express Root Port (rev 02)

The other day a friend of mine was asking me how to stop all users' processes and then logout him.

Well maybe the first thing you need is to send a message to the user, so he can actually save his work.

to do that you may use the command wall to let your users know you are about to log them out.

Now at the given time end all of your users' applications, using pkill

sudo pkill -u username

Sometimes as the administrator of a Linux Operating System Server, y may need to send a message to all users in a multi-user system.

There are some different ways to do this, but we will now see just one of them.

We will use wall

As the main input of wall is a file, we will first create our message file.

Let's say you want to tell users that in two more ours the main SQL database is going to be unavailable because of maintenance.

So type:

There is plenty of information about Gentoo (Thanks God!), I am going to write here a very little how-to install Gentoo, then X, the Nvidia drivers, and Fluxbox, I will not go into details about Gentoo installation as there is enough in the official page.

Once you have your Gentoo Linux running, you can go to install nvidia-drivers, but first lets install sudo -Optional- (I like that sice I have used Ubuntu)

emerge sudo

I am starting with Gentoo again, this time installing using the alternative method more specific the Knoppix method, but I did from my running Debian Lenny using the chroot method, well I now have my operating system working, but when I tried to install Gnome

emerge gnome

If you want to play a youtube video on your cellular you may need to convert it to the format you cell phone can actually play, I have tested this process with a Sony Ericsson K550i and it worked great, I suppose it should work on almost all modern cellphones.

Today is Blog Action Day, and at Go2Linux we are supporting it by spreading the word, I think that Linux is a good way to fight against poverty, think about all the money that goes to software companies.

Lots of people in poor countries can not afford to pay for Microsoft of Mac software, but Linux is free, and work almost the same (do not want to start a debate about which is better), the most of time it is suitable for everybody's needs.

Hi,

I have found this good comic, hope you enjoy it.

Credits to: xkcd

The users of a Linux Operating system computer, should always take care about security and if you are the admin of a Linux box with lots of users, you are responsible for the security of it, and maybe you should "force" the other users to change their passwords from time to time, to make this use the command chage

If you like the bokeh effect in some pictures you can create it with GIMP, it may not be the same as created at the time of taking the picture (With lenses).

Check out this bokeh pictures

Well now lets see how to create kind of bokeh effect using GIMP

This is the original image:

Alias is a command that lets you create command aliases, it is very useful when you usually use commands with options.

As an example in my case I use a lot these commands

du -h

and

df -h

In both cases the "-h" option makes the output be in Kbytes or Mbytes instead of bytes, so it is more human redeable.

To create aliases for this commands just need to enter.

alias du='du -h'

and

alias df='df -h'

If you need to start a program from the command line, and want to recover the command prompt, just add the & symbol to the command.

Example.

firefox

This command will start firefox, but the command prompt will not be available for you to continue working.

firefox &

With this other you will get the prompt back to you, and you can continue using the console for other tasks, It also returns you a number that number is the PID of the application just started.

On my PC I have installed, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Sabayon and Debian (my main Linux operating system), but when I turn it on, usually I did not get the grub menu, and I am forwarded directly to Debian, sometimes I have to restart the system to start another Linux flavor.

So, the solution was to put the timeout of grub menu to 15 seconds, so I have enough time to react even when I am not paying attention to the PC startup.

The timeout parameter is stored in the file

/boot/grub/menu.lst

So, to change it edit that file with your favorite text editor. (mine is vim)

whowatch is a console application that lets you monitor what different users are doing on the Linux operating system in a given moment, it works in real time.

First install it

sudo aptitude install whowatch

I run a

sudo aptitude full-upgrade

On my Debian Lenny, but once all the packages were downloaded and started to be installed, suddenly the process stopped, then when I run

sudo aptitude reinstall

Some days ago I have updated my Lenny and VMware stop working, this time it was not a problem of a new kernel usually solved reconfiguring vmware, this time the problem was the new version of libx11-6 does not work with vmware, so the solution is to downgrade it to the Etch version.

First create a file called

/etc/apt/preferences

put this content inside:

Package: libx11-6
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 500

Then modify your /etc/apt/sources.list

One of the most uses I give to this command is to turn the PC off after some time, sure there are other ways.

I like the way you may execute batch jobs at a given time, all you need is:

1. Write your shell script

Which actually is a list of commands in a text file

2. Execute the at command

at now + 5 minutes < $HOME/listofcommands.txt

You can use times like "now", "noon", "midnight", or a date in the format of DD.MM.YY

check man at in order to have more details

Hi,

I have found this video on Youtube, take a look at it.