Man

The man command is short for manual. It allows you to read the instruction manual for almost every command in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Don’t know how to use an application? The first thing to do is to run the man command and then the name of the application.

Below is an excerpt of the manual for the man command itself.

> man man

Man: find all matching manual pages (set MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT to avoid this) * man (1) man (7mp) man (1p) Man: What manual page do you want? Man: 1

I’m working on a couple of presentations and I wanted to share this nugget of joy with anyone who hasn’t actually read it.

Path: gmdzi!unido!fauern!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!zaphod.mps. ohio-state.edu!wupost!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!hydra!klaava!torvalds From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Keywords: 386, preferences Message-ID: 1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Lines: 20

Hello everybody out there using minix -

If you lurk around many Linux support forums, you are bound to see the regular post that looks something like this:

Hi, I’m new to Linux. I tried to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, now I can’t use my computer at all because it has errors. Help!!!

Troubleshooting Grub errors is difficult enough. Troubleshooting Grub errors when you know very little about how any of it works or when getting help from strangers on the internet is even more difficult to nearly impossible.

I originally wrote this as a reply to a Reddit post but as I saved it, comments were blocked.

Give yourself little tasks and projects to do. Think of it as being like model kit building. You start with the easy kits like a plane with just a few pieces and as you get better you pick up new things like painting, sanding, and eventually making bigger better kits.

So, start with small things. For example, write a small program with a for-loop and get to know what all if the commands are really doing. This is your basic kit. Add in some variables. Add in user input, and keep going trying new things. Eventually, challenge yourself by learning how to work with a GUI. Sometimes your program will break. This isn’t a bad thing. It teaches you how to debug. What’s important is to take your time and experiment.

Chris Titus recently vlogged about an article showing that KDE 5.17 is now smaller than XFCE 4.14 in memory usage. The article says that in their tests, XFCE actually uses more RAM than KDE. I was very interested in this, but I couldn’t quite believe it and so I ran my own tests.

First of all, we need to compare apples to apples. I created an OpenSUSE VM using Vagrant with KVM/libvirt. It had 4 cores and 4192MB of RAM. This VM has no graphical interface at all. As soon as I got it up, I took the first “No X” measurement. After patching using zypper dup, I took the second “No X” reading. Every reading in this blog post was using the free -m command. I then shut down the VM and cloned it 3 times so each copy should be completely the same.

Introduction

LXC (Linux Containers) are whole-system containers. They are meant to be able to do just about anything you can do with a VM with a percentage of the system resources and and a tiny startup time.

During Installation:

During installation, you can pretty much choose defaults for everything except you will need to create two additional btrfs subvolumes and if you gave your VM more than 30G of space, you will need to specify that manually because the installer will only recognize 30G by default.

Introduction: Installing Saltstack

The great thing about being able to spin up several new system containers running multiple Linux distros is that you get to experiment with software like Saltstack without the hassle of creating multiple VM’s. This can be especially daunting on a machine that is lacking resources.

The following directions are how I installed Salt on multiple containers running at the same time but using less that 2G of RAM total for testing. Saltstack easily controlled all of their very different package manager and system configurations effortlessly.

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Since my last post was so popular, here are a couple replacement WP’s that I made myself from schematics for a classic Heathkit HW101 transceiver.

First of all, the entire wallpaper is here:

On the right-hand side, there are these cool line-art cad drawing with Geeko in the middle. The problem is that these aren’t just just random lines nor are they circuits boards or anything like that. These are architectural blueprints. There are 5 full bathroom and a small piece of a 6th. There’s also a couple of conference rooms.

My proof:

10 hours of jetlag and rainy afternoon naps don’t mix. It’s 2 minutes to 2AM here in Provo, UT and I can’t sleep so I’m blogging.

I want to ssh into a machine that doesn’t have any external IP. In the case of my situation at home, I get a 192.168… IP from my ISP because of a shared connection. In other cases, I have VM’s with natted IP’s that also have no direct way in.