L I N U X - M A D U R A I ----------------------------- Monthly Newsletter Issue - 01 Month: January 2002 Contents: 1. Message from the moderator 2. News from the world of Linux 3. Tips & Tricks for some kicks 4. A short guide to VI -- V.Suresh 1. Message from the moderator Firstly, let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year 2002. Truly speaking, I am amazed to see the member list grow by leaps and bounds every week or so. From 1 in February 2001, it has grown to 47 by the last day of 2001, Mr.Sathish being the latest to join us on the last day of 2001. Taking in view that so many are interested in Linux, I do hope that our LUG will keep growing and get more active in the years to come. I am indeed very much excited and happy about this new idea - the idea of having a monthly newsletter or journal of some kind. Linux has been making waves all around us, and we being a Linux User Group, I thought more interaction is needed and the LUG needed to get more active. I hope that through this newsletter, which will henceforth be released on the first day of every month, all members will come together and share their knowledge and voice their thoughts, about Linux and our LUG. This being the first issue, and the notice being very short, there hasn't been any contributions yet, but I do hope that all LUG members will spend some time to write up articles and contributions to this newsletter in the future. Also note that our LUG website has been changed to http://linuxmadurai.tripod.com. My hearfelt thanks to Krishna for creating the site single handedly. Good Work, Krish. See you all next month in this column. Till then, Happy Tuxing. :-) 2. News from the World of Linux Latest Kernel: The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is 2.4.17. It contains a lot of updates to USB support, ISDN fixes, supports ext3 filesystem, and fixes to some problems with the i810 sound driver. You can view its changelog and details from http://www.kernel.org. And for those of you using wget or lftp, the file location is http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.17.tar.gz Star Office 6.0: The latest version of Star Office is 6.0. Star Office is an office suite from Sun MicroSystems similar to Microsoft Office. Star Office 6.0 is said to be much better than its previous versions, and also a serious competitor to Office XP from Microsoft. Try it out. Linux PDAs: The latest in electronic gadgets have Linux in them. Embedded linux is in the news, with a lot of PDA(Personal Digital Assistants) having Linux inside them. Howzzat? 3. Tips, facts, and tricks for some kicks: If you have 'Fortune' installed, run it from your .bashrc or your login script file, say .profile. Thus you will get a nice quote or proverb whenever you login. Use 'setfont' to set different fonts for your console. A lot of fonts should be available in the director /usr/share/console-fonts/. See man pages of setfont for details. Use 'setterm' to change the background and foreground colors of your console. 'mp3blaster' is a nice mp3 player that you can try out from the console itself. Type 'vga=ask' at the lilo prompt, after specifying the OS option, to get a list of options for your console resolution. Open '/etc/X11/XF86Config' file and go to the 'screen' section which is in the end. You will find a lot of resolutions set there. Try changing your default resolution and get a more good looking X. Don't forget, if you are often typing long command names, you can have aliases set for them. Say, if you find yourself typing 'fetchmail -v' everday often, you can have an alias, say 'fmv', set up in your login` script; and forget typing the whole command again and again. 'Mutt' is a very powerful and configurable mail client that you can use from the command prompt itself. Once you use mutt, you will swear by it. Debian is the only linux distribution that is non-commercial and contains more than 3000 packages. The latest stable release of debian is 2.2r4, and is called 'Potato'. The next stable release is called 'Woody'. 4. A Short guide to VI -- V. Suresh Vi stands for Visual. Vi is an editor for unix and unix like operating systems, such as linux, freeBSD or Solaris. Vim is Vi IMproved, and comes as a part of every linux distribution. Vim is downward compatible with Vi, which means that the commands in Vi are still applicable in VIM, in addition to a lot of additional commands. The commands mentioned here are common to both Vi and VIM. To open a file for editing, type 'vi ' at the command prompt. The file name might be an existing one, or a new one. Vi operates in three main modes - NORMAL mode, INSERT mode and VISUAL mode. Initially when you open vi, you will be in NORMAL mode. Only in INSERT mode can you type in content. To switch to INSERT mode, type the 'insert' key, or better still, type 'i'. To start appending to an existing file, type 'a'. You will then be able to key in whatever you want. To give commands to vi, you need to exit the INSERT mode and in NORMAL moden press ':' and then the command key. The colon and the command key will appear in the last line of the screen. In order to return to NORMAL mode, just type ESC key. The commonly used commands are :w -- saves the current file :w -- saves the current file as given file name :wq -- saves and quits :q -- quits, but doesn't if changes have been made :q! -- quits without saving changes :r -- appends the contents of specified file to current file You may use the arrow keys to navigate. The 'hjkl' combination may also be used and is preferred. For cut, paste and copy actions, you need to be in the VISUAL mode. To get to VISUAL mode type 'v'from the NORMAL mode. Once in VISUAL mode, move your cursor to select text. After selection has been made, type 'y' to copy the selection to clipboard, and 'x' to cut the selection. Then locate your cursor where you need to paste the clipboard contents, and press 'p' to paste. VIM uses a configuration file called '.vimrc' which must be located in your home directory. '.vimrc' is a script file which is parsed and used by VIM at startup as user settings. You can modify it to your own taste, once you get the feel of it. Vim also supports colour highlighting for various languages and for this purpose, you need to install the vim-rt package. 'rt' stands for real time. Editing c, c++, java programs and html files with VIM is a good learning experience for using VI or VIM. At any point of time, typing ':help' will bring up a text file which contains all help regarding VI. Topics are listed inside || delimiters, and to view those topics, locate your cursor between that, and press 'CTRL ]'. Hope this small guide is enough for any newbie to start using VI or VIM. Happy VIMing. (For your information, VIM has been ported to Windows too, and this whole newsletter was edited with the windows version of VIM). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- L I N U X - - M A D U R A I -------------------------------------------------------------------------------