Linux Certification

‘System administration command. This simple backup utility accesses ext2 and ext3 file devices directly, quickly backing up files without affecting file access times. files may be specified as a mount point or as a list of files and directories to back up. While you can use this on a mounted system, dump may write corrupted information to the backup when the kernel has written only part of its cached information. Dump maintains a record of which files it has saved in /etc/dumpdates, and will perform incremental backups after creating an initial full backup. Use the restore command to restore a dump backup.
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‘Last year Vector Linux came in four flavors. The list has now been expanded to seven different variations on the distribution: Standard, Deluxe, SOHO, Live, Light, Mini, and Light Live. SOHO, with KDE as the default desktop and all the most popular applications, is the full featured version. Standard is based on the Xfce4 desktop and provides superior speed and performance. Both are freely downloadable. Deluxe, available for purchase, is Standard plus a second CD with additional applications including KDE and OpenOffice. Live, as the name implies, is a live CD version of Standard. Light is a paired down, extremely lightweight version designed to run on older systems with as little as 64MB of RAM. In reality it will run with less than that. Light is built around either a JWM or Fluxbox desktop and lightweight applications. Mini is a further reduced version of Light that fits on a 5cm/3″ mini CD and requires only 1.1GB of disk space. Finally, Light Live is, as you’d expect, the live CD version of Light. So far only new Standard and Deluxe versions have been released but the others, all in various stages of development and testing, can already be sampled. This review will stick strictly with the Standard version from here on out.

‘A few weeks ago a new version of RSSTail came out. After reading the RSSTail page I found out that you can use RSSTail as a plugin to a fantastic application called multitaill. That is when I realized that multitail is actually written by the same person.

Run Levels in a Nutshell
Filed under: Quick Linux Tutorials — TheLinuxBlog.com at 9:03 am on Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Run levels in Linux are a great thing. Basically, a run level is by definition a configuration for a group of processes. The run levels and default run level is specified in /etc/inittab. Most Linux systems these days, with exception of a few boot into run level 5 which is generally a graphical user interface such as KDM or GDM. The others boot into run level 3 most servers will boot into this run level which is multi-user with networking but no X, and is many users preference.

“This is a small distribution designed for i386, derived from SuSE 6.4. The base version contains only that needed to run Linux. The package is small and requires approx 7MB. The purpose of this TinyLinux is to have a small and clear system that can be used as starting point for further developments. Its use is not limited to desktop systems. It can be suitable for embedded systems. All binaries, directories and configuration files are taken from SuSE”

“You got a new hard drive and attach it to your laptop/desktop but before you can use it, you need to partition and format the hard drive. This can be done with a series of easy steps. This is a small and easy tutorial which will show you how to use fdisk, one of very famous utility for disk partitioning.

Fdisk is the utility which we will be using for this example. Though there are other options also like parted/gparted and use of them depends totally on personal preference. For Fdisk, you need to provide the device name as an argument. For that the possible options could be:

“The Linux Standard Base, or LSB, is a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation (merger of the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Labs) to standardize the software system structure, including the filesystem hierarchy, used with Linux operating system. The LSB is based on the POSIX specification, the Single UNIX Specification, and several other open standards, but extends them in certain areas.

According to the LSB:

“A Linux distribution (also called GNU/Linux distribution by some vendors and users) is a member of the family of Unix-like software distributions built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions (often called distros for short) consist of a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players and database applications. The operating system will consist of the Linux kernel and, usually, a set of libraries and utilities from the GNU project, with graphics support from the X Window System. Distributions optimized for size may not contain X, and tend to use more compact alternatives to the GNU utilities such as Busybox, uClibc or dietlibc. There are currently over six hundred Linux distributions. Over three hundred of those are in active development, constantly being revised and improved. Linux distributions are software development systems that are constantly revised and improved.”

“Some concern has arisen about the suitability of object-oriented classes in LGPL’d software being inherited by non-(L)GPL code. Generally, these concerns are unfounded, and clarification is given on the official GNU website:

The LGPL contains no special provisions for inheritance, because none are needed. Inheritance creates derivative works in the same way as traditional linking, and the LGPL permits this type of derivative work in the same way as it permits ordinary function calls”

“The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter can be linked to (in the case of a library, ‘used by’) a non-(L)GPLed program, regardless of whether it is free software or proprietary software.[1] This non-(L)GPLed program can then be distributed under any chosen terms if it is not a derivative work. If it is a derivative work, then the terms must allow “modification for the customer’s own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.” Whether a work that uses an LGPL program is a derivative work or not is a legal issue. A standalone executable that dynamically links to a library is generally accepted as not being a derivative work (in LGPL). It would be considered a “work that uses the library” and paragraph 5 of the LGPL applies.