David Both

I use Linux on all of my personal computers. Whether on my NetBook, my very old Dell laptop, my much newer ThinkPad, to my personal workstation and my email and web servers, Linux runs them all.

I am forced to use Windoze on my laptop at work, despite the fact that my job is a Linux Engineer. Go figure.

But every day I use Winblows at work is another day that I am thankful I have Linux at home; primarily because of the daily frustration of using a crappy operating system. Windows 7 is supposed to be better, but it does not take much to be better than before. Just because you are happy with it due to the fact that it is now better, does not make it good; it only means you probably don’t know what a good operating system is.

Well, this did not start out to be a rant but that is what it has turned into. I guess it is all the frustration from being forced to use it at work. My original point was to be that there is an interesting article about switching from Windows to Linux for your desktop.

Read the article here: This is your Brain on Linux Desktop

Don’t let my rant stop you from trying Linux. Or perhaps you should not try it at all. Things this good, like Linux, should really be kept for only those who are wise enough to use it; after all what could be better than something that costs nothing and works better than anything similar for which you could pay any amount of money?

I will be teaching a 4.5 day Linux+ training class in Charleston, SC, the week of September 21.

CompTIA Linux+ is a vendor-neutral certification, generic across distributions, targeted to individuals with a minimum of six to 12 months of practical Linux experience. The CompTIA Linux+ exam covers fundamental management of Linux systems from the command line, user administration, file permissions, software configuration and management of Linux-based clients.

This class is preparation for that exam using Fedora Linux. Even if you do not take the exam this is an excellent training class for relatively new Linux administrators.

The class will be held at DTC Charleston, a local training center.

1064 Gardner Road
Suite 212
Charleston, SC 29407

Sales: 843-402-0983
Main: 843-225-3494
Toll-free: 866-705-4522
Fax: 775-370-0477

Email: martha_nye@dtccharleston.com

If you are interested in attending this class, please contact DTC.

Check my business web page, Millennium Technology Consulting LLC for more information about me and my company.

Millennium Technology Consulting LLC provides Linux Consulting Services for small to medium sized businesses.

In these difficult economic times we offer Linux consulting services that can help you save money, extend the life of your existing computers and make your computers and network more secure. We can help you find the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is right for your business. We can provide training for end-users and system administrators, and long-term support tailored to your needs and budget.

We currently serve the Raleigh-Durham, RTP area of North Carolina. Contact us for more information.

I would like to announce that I have now started my own company, Millennium Technology Consulting LLC. We use Free Open Source Software (FOSS) to save money, improve security and extend the life of existing computers for small to medium sized businesses. Open Source Software is high quality, and it is more secure and much better supported than most proprietary restricted software.

Check us out and see how Millennium Technology Consulting LLC can help your business.

The “Complete Kickstart” article that I co-authored with Bruce Garland, a colleague at Cisco Systems, made #9 in the Linux Magazine Top Ten Best Articles list for 2008.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7195/

My job at Cisco is moving to India — And I am not going with it; I have not been invited to. However I have a good transition package which gives me some time in which to find a new position.

So I am now searching for a new job as a Linux Administrator and Guru. My resume contains all of my relevant data, but here is a quick overview.

Technical Skills

• I have many technical certifications including RHCE and Sun Certified System Administrator.
• I do a great deal of shell scripting, especially in BASH and Tcl/Expect.
• I am an expert Perl programmer.
• I was an instructor at Red Hat and taught their RHCE classes.
• While with IBM in 1981, I wrote the original training course on the IBM PC.
• I wrote a regular column as a contributing editor for the Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc. (POSSI) newsletter “EAs”
• I have contributed articles to LAN Magazine, Windows and OS/2 magazine, OS/2 Magazine, Carolina Computer News, Fedora News, Linux Magazine and Linux Journal.
• I am a Coauthor of the book “Inside OS/2 Warp”, New Riders Publishing, 1995, having contributed the chapters on File systems and Troubleshooting.
• Author of the “DataBook(tm) for OS/2 Warp”, 1996, 2000.
• I have many awards and letters of commendation from Customers, IBM, MCI and Cisco.

Last week I finally gave up totally on Fedora 9. Even after switching from KDE to GNOME I was constantly fighting with KDE applications which used to do the things I needed. Most of the applications were there, but they were either unfinished with many features missing, or the features worked poorly or were totally broken.

This is not a good state of affairs. Even though I am a super user and enjoy being on the bleeding edge, this was a hemorrhage, and I do still need to get work (and play) done and not fight the system constantly. I reinstalled Fedora 8 and am now much more productive and happy.

We can only hope that KDE returns to its former state of excellence.

An article I co-authored with Bruce Garland, a co-worker at Cisco Systems, has been published in the June 2008 hardcopy issue of Linux Magazine. The article has not yet been put up on the Linux Magazine web site, so here is a link to my own DataBook® web site and the article Complete Kickstart.

I have started a new DataBook® web site.

This new web site will be primarily targeted to Linux. I am writing two new books, The DataBook for Linux Administrators and the DataBook for Linux Users.

These two books are compendia of data about Linux, particularly about Fedora Linux, for Administrators and users, respectively. They contain information that I have discovered over the several years I have been using Linux and that I need to maintain for myself, but I also want to make this infomration available to all comers.

Although the entire book Databook for OS/2 has been lost, I will try to recreate it as time permits. I expect this to be a long and tedious process, so don’t look for much progress any time soon.

Please visit the new DataBook web site at http://www.databook.bz/.

DataBook is a registered trademark of Millennium Technology.

My KDE 4.0 desktop died early this morning.

First, everything locked up so tight I could not switch to another virtual terminal session and I could not ssh into my primary workstation from another host. So I hit the reset button. After rebooting and logging in, none of the launchers on the KDE Panel would work. Oh, they did highlight when the mouse pointer rolled over them, and they even looked like the were being depressed when I clicked on them. But no applications would launch.

I have now switched to GNOME which is still quite usable as a desktop. I will try using KDE again when the dot-one version comes out.

I have had some very bad experiences with Fedora 9, which includes KDE 4.0. I strongly recommend that you stay away from it unless you are a guru and enjoy self-flagellation.

Read my complete review.

I ran across these links today. I found them very interesting and perhaps you will too. The first, Running a business on desktop Linux, discusses how one single-person consulting business uses Linux successfully and how you can too.

The second link I found on the first link and it does not really deal with Linux directly. It is a white paper in PDF format about how to make your Windows computer more secure, and why it is not secure. Read “How to Secure Your Windows Computer and Protect Your Privacy” to be more secure even if you don’t use Linux. This stuff is really scary. Did you know that Windows records everything you do and sends a great deal of information about your computing and web activities back to Microsoft without even asking if that is what you want!? This document shows you how to use free software to disable all of the Microsoft intrusions upon your privacy.

After reading this document you may decide you want to switch to Linux.

Both the web page and the PDF document were written by Howard Fosdick of Fosdick Consulting Inc.

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 which now contains a very much improved search feature. Searches now included both posts, as before, and pages so that your search will find search terms wherever they appear on my site.

Back on October 20, of 2007, I installed WordPress as an experiment to see whether it would work well for my needs. It has, and I intend to keep using it. In the nearly six months since I started using WordPress, there have been two updates. Those two updates have brought WordPress a long way even though it was eminently usable as it was.

WordPress is flexible and powerful so I have also installed and started using it in the network lab where I work. We use it to manage important data such as Q&As for the users and to post notifications of outages.

I plan to continue using WordPress.

I found a very interesting web site today that is dedicated to helping Linux users tune the power usage of their computers. It does this with a program created by Intel, the maker of the processor chips that run most of our computers.

The program, called powertop, can be run on your Intel-based computer and will make suggestions for reducing power consumption, and even offer a one-keypress method for easily implementing the suggested changes. Each suggestion has an explanation of what change needs to be made and how it will save power.

Not all of the suggested changes are appropriate in all circumstances so you will need to use a little judgment. The program is primarily aimed at conserving power for laptops, but is useful for workstations and servers as well.

See LessWatts.org for details.

The powertop program is provided with some Linux distributions such as Fedora 8, which I use. It can also be downloaded from the LessWatts.org web site, but you will have to compile it.

I have just uploaded release 1.0-8.0.3 of Fedora Frog to SourceForge.

Fedora Frog is used by administrators to ease the task of installing many applications and files that are not installed by Fedora Linux. It installs the extra repositories needed by Yum and allows the administrator to remove any of these packages.

Fedora Frog can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/fedorafrog/