How to start learning Linux

If you want to start learning Linux the best advice I can give you is:

Start out as a user first

The simplest way is to download some live CD from the Internet,
for a sample this one:
Centos live CD
or: 
Fedora liveCD
Either of which will boot into a full working Linux distro,
without installing anything on your windows box.
when your done playing with the Linux server, just remove the CD from your computer, and reboot – your windows will come right back.
both the distros I’ve linked to here are very similar – they use the same redhat code, but the fedora is more cutting edge development version of everything and the centos is a stable server environment.
The fedora LiveCD will also allow you to install it to the machine your using from the LiveCD itself – after the boot you will see an install Icon on the Linux desktop.
Start playing with the servers, while reading some linux tutorials,
start as a Linux user and then work your way up to power user and to admin in the end.

Hands On Training Tasks for Linux Sysadmin

After your feel you know your way around as a user:

• reading and writing files
• working your way around the file system
• installing some rpm packages

You can start working your way through some serious hands on training – try to do either of these:

• Setup A stand alone DNS server
• Setup Apache server with php and SSL
• Install MySQL server from sources
• Setup sendmail
• Install WordPress or Joomla on your Apache/MySQL and happily see it all working together

Each of these tasks will take a long time to figure out for the first time, and on the way learning to do the task, you will learn a lot more things that you wouldn’t have just by playing with the server.

Technorati Tags: apache, Command line, desktop, DNS, Linux, php, sendmail, wordpress

Free Photo Editor – Top 4

There are many great photo and graphic software for a nice amount of dollars out there, but finding the few good applications that are also free is harder.

Here are a few good ones – both the online version and those you install on your desktop:

Online Photo Editor

The first one I like is from aviary.com :

They have a flash interface for editing the image, which allows the app to work well in Linux as well as on windows, and its a decent enough image editor, but the most impressive application on their site is not the image editor but the color editor tool Toucan:

What is so good about this tool? well, part of my job is to make graphs,
some of them are dynamic, some of them are RRD based or excel based, or just a static graph to show some stats to the management, but they should be nice to look at, and here is my problem as i have no sense for color picking, i usually get some ugly graphs.

but this is where this tools steps in – it allows you to pick a group of colors that go well together.

you choose how many colors you need and it will help you group them from these options:

• equidistant
• Circular
• Alternate

etc…

and you can save your color groups for later use:

So this tool helps in creating good looking graphs…

Colorjack

now this is another nice color picking tool, it loads faster then Toucan,
and does the same work.

Another Online image editor

Pixlr

Pixlr gives an easy feel of photoshop application, while it is also a flash application which loads into your browser – no install needed.

The best part about this app is the tools it lets you use on the image you load into it:

• Red eye reduction tool
• Bloat
• Pinch
• Dodge
• Smudge (my favorite as you can see in the image above)
• gradient
• crop

And many more, if you need to quickly edit an image, without buying a software to do that, pixlr can be a very handy tool.

Offline Free Image Editors

paint.net

This is a great easy to use image editor, its quickly installed and its very simple interface is smooth to work with, the great plus about this app is it will allow you to easily drop a print screen image on it and start editing and cropping it as needs be.

The only drawback for paint.net is that its using the .net framework, which is not Linux native (ha!),
which brings us to the finalist:

Free Linux Photo editor

Gimp !!!

Gimp is the all time champion when it comes to Linux free image editors,
It is a very strong software with many options and features, and filters and brushes,
and people keep creating more free filters and brushes all the time.

It comes with a lot of default brushes, but you can easily download some beautiful brushes some other happy user created.

Creative Commons

Now – combine all or any of these tools together with free images downloaded which you can search for at the CC search web page and you are ready to create some fine images which you can use anywhere.

Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, windows

nagios love – vote on SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards have opened up for voting,
now is your time to go and vote for your favorite Open Source applications,
Show the love for those Linux apps your have been using for free for so long

I’m voting for nagios in the “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins” Category,
and here is the direct link to vote for nagios.

But don’t stop there – other apps I’ve been lovingly using for the last years and I’m gonna give some voting love for are:

• xampp  -  apache mysql php and perl on windows/linux
• TortoiseSVN  -  SVN client for windows
• Notepad++  -  The best simple text editor
• Audacity  -  Sound editor
• phpMyAdmin  -  Management system for MySQL Database
• OpenOffice.org  -  MS office replacement
• KeePass  –  Password manager

There where some hard choices to do there, since in the same categories I had more then one app that I’m totally depending on for day to day work.

phpMyAdmin changed the way I’m working with Mysql databases,
Notepad++ is my favorite editor on my windows box,
and with Audacity i make all my ring tones

what are your favorite Opensource apps?

Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, windows, xampp

chattr and lsattr – protecting Linux Files

Lets say you have a public folder in your firm and you want everyone to edit the files in that folder except of one. how would you go about protecting that file?

Lets add to the equation the fact that you have scripts running as root on the folder and you want them not to be able to touch that file. any ideas?

That’s where chattr and lsattr step in, they manage special attributes for files under ext2 and ext3, and the one I’m referring to here is the ‘i’ setting – immutable, for a sample:

lets create a file:
echo `date` > filename

as root do:
chattr +i filename

And that’s it,you cant delete the file, move it, rename it, or save into it any changes, until you remove the ‘i’ settings from it.

So next time you find a file that you cannot modify or delete even as root, check it with lsattr, to make sure its not protected in some other way.

A short update – This will not work on NFS mounted file systems,
you will get the following error:
lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on

Technorati Tags: Command line, Linux

WordPress 2.8 and a new Theme

I have upgraded the site to wprdpress 2.8,
and it does feel faster for the admin part,
also I have installed the free Typebased theme from  http://www.woothemes.com/

From my first impression i can see SEO mistakes that need to be fixed, like H2 tags on widget titles like Categories,
ill finish the last updates soon.

Check the site out and tell me what you think !!!

Technorati Tags: wordpress