linux

RSH and RLogin aren't that difficult to set up once you've gone through the man pages and done the installation a few times, but those first few times are a pain. They're old and insecure, but still frequently used on small compute clusters. I get the impression that a lot of beginners get stuck fiddling with them for hours or days. They're quite possibly the biggest stumbling block one faces when setting up a compute cluster by hand (setting /etc/hosts.equiv, setting /root/.rhosts, making sure the right flags are being sent to the rsh and rlogin daemons, etc).

Both use the xinetd daemon, which is one of those carry-overs from ancient Unix. Plenty of old Unix stuff made sense, but inetd is backwards. To enable a service, you set "disabled = no". To disable a service, you set "disabled = yes".

Putting double negatives in your configuration file is not a good idea. When a setting this basic takes a couple seconds of thought, you're doing it wrong. Were it something more complicated, administrators would be selecting the wrong option all the time.

Kids love to watch movies, but they are not kind to equipment. Some of the older media, such as VHS tapes, might be technically inferior to DVDs but they certainly were more durable. We have tried to get our kids to carefully handle DVDs, but it just doesn't happen. A few were destroyed before I learned my lesson.

It turns out that most geeks with kids have realized the same thing: you just can't give kids DVDs. All the films and videos they love can be stored on your hard drive with much better results: no more messing with scratched discs, no more fumbling for the right video case, instant access to whichever video they want to watch, and you won't have to replace broken DVDs over and over (something which will make our corporate overlords very unhappy).

This had been working well for us until I tried to save the new Pixar film Up. A quick bit of googling revealed that movie studios have attempted a new form of disc copy protection: ship broken discs.   read more >>

I'm thankful to work in one of the most Linux dominated fields in the industry. But the rest of the world still uses Windows all over the place, so I do have to use it as part of my job. I recently made my life much better by installing Windows under Ubuntu Linux using VMware. Now the couple Windows apps I have to use are relegated to one virtual desktop on my Linux box.

The setup was mostly painless, but I did run across some very frustrating behavior with a couple of the Windows applications.   read more >>

There are a lot of user interface inefficiencies that we've all been forced to get used to. Moving and resizing windows is definitely one of them, as you have to carefully position the mouse cursor over a tiny section of a window.

However, there's no need for Linux users to do this. X-Windows supports moving and resizing windows by clicking and dragging on any portion of a window - the mouse cursor can be over any portion of the window, no matter what's underneath.

Here's how:

• To move: Hold down ALT while clicking and dragging with the left mouse button
• To resize: Hold down ALT while clicking and dragging with the right mouse button

You'll find that even though it's a small tip, your work will be just a little more efficient.

I've had to use VNC many times to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux systems. It's not always the prettiest or most efficient way to get things done, but it can be quicker and less complex than virtualization or X11 through Cygwin. One stumbling block in my workflow has been the clipboard - you become so accustomed to moving data from one application to another that you really miss it when the functionality is missing.

Fortunately, there are VNC clients that will take care of this for you. I typically choose TightVNC, as it offers very good performance (including some accelerated Windows drivers) and is available for a variety of platforms. The details below may be specific to TightVNC.   read more >>