L I N U X - M A D U R A I ----------------------------- Monthly Newsletter Issue - 03 Month: March 2002 Contents: 1. Message from the moderator 2. News from the world of Linux 3. Tips & Tricks for some kicks 4. Drives and partitions -- V.Suresh 1. Message from the moderator Glad to meet you all once again in this section. We all take great pleasure in welcoming the new members to our LUG during the last month. Wishing you all Happy Tuxing! Astonishingly, the Linux-Madurai list now shows a member count of 71. Though the traffic is not as encouraging, I hope it will pick up in the times to come. Also, due to lack of time, I am unable to create a html version of the monthly newsletter. A html version means more colourful, more beautiful newsletter. Volunteers required. Also, I invite all of our LUG's members to write up some article or the other(even funny jokes and other stuff are welcome), so that the newsletter is more fun to read. 2. News from the World of Linux The latest stable kernel version is 2.4.18. You can retrieve the full source, or the patch, or view the changelog at http://www.kernel.org. Redhat 7.2 is the latest version of Linux OS from the popular linux distribution. Redhat 7.2 has a seamless, smooth installation program, which almost runs automatically like any windows installer, comes with GNOME version 1.4, supports ext3 journaling file system, has kernel version 2.4.7-10 at its core, and consumes a whopping 2 GB of your hard disk if you opt to install with X. You also have the option of either having LILO or GRUB. Automated patching: Torvalds has started using software that will automatically apply patches and updates, after receiving complaints that the process is too slow. Details at http://clickthru.online.com/Click?q=f8-57ISQfsjKhr7AWHpiViLiGUg 3. Tips, facts, and tricks for some kicks: Put the name of your favourite Window Manager in a file called .xinitrc in your home directory. Then startx will start X and automatically your window manager will start. For example, 'icewm-gnome' in my .xinitrc starts ICEWM automatically. GRUB - GRand Unified Bootloader - is another boot loader like LILO. You can boot any operating system with GRUB, provided you know where the kernel resides. GRUB can be configured to have colourful/blinking menu options, selecting which you can boot your OS. GRUB also supports password protection of your menu entries. If you have an internal modem, and you miss those blinking lights of an external modem, don't worry. Get the package called tleds, which uses your keyboard's scrolllock, numlock LEDs to show no. of network packets arriving and leaving your system. You can configure sendmail or exim to directly deliver the mails from your system to the recipient's inbox, without using a smarthost or your ISP's SMTP server. This way you can be sure of the mail being delivered. The command 'eject' will automatically eject your CD tray. The command 'rpm -qa' will list all the rpm packages installed in your computer. Type 'rpm -qa > all_rpms' to have the output saved in a file for reference. Do 'rpm -e ' to all the packages that you don't need, to free up precious hard disk space. Use the 'watch ' command to continuously execute a particular command and show the output. For details, 'man watch'. To just create an empty file, use the 'touch ' command. Put an alias for 'ls' as 'ls --color' in your shell's rc file. It helps in differentiating between different types of files by color codes. Try to contribute to the Linux-Madurai newsletter, in your free time. Delete any vfat partitions. There's no 'Recycle Bin' in Linux, for your stupid mistakes. Run Linux. Happy Tuxing. ;-) 4. Drives and partitions -- V.Suresh So, you bought that new shining cute 40 GB hard disk, and didn't know how in the world to partition it for Linux. Well, boy, read on. Hard disks are great. You can store all your movies and mp3s, and have multiple operating systems run your computer. And today they are damn cheap. You can partition, fiddle, and install all hell in your drive. And still get away with it. Well, to use these magic disks effectively, you should know a bit about them. Hard disks are circular, they store data as 0s/1s using magnetic particles, and store them circularly in tracks, just like that old gramaphone record that you saw at your grandfather's attic. Each track is divided into a few sectors, and each sector can have some bytes of data. Your hard disk may have more than one disc, aligned one above other, like those IDLI stacks that your mom uses in the kitchen for preparing IDLIs. Same numbered tracks on each disk, together form a cylinder. You can imagine that, right? And there are different interface standards that the hard disk controllers use to interact with your motherboard and cpu - like IDE(Integrated Drive Electronics), EIDE(Enhanced IDE), SCSI(Small Computer Systems Interconnect), etc. Mostly our home computers use IDE as the default standard, that's why we call our hard disks as IDE drives also. PARTITIONS: Hard disks need to be partitioned, in order to secure your data, and to have more than one operating system reside in it. When you partition your hard disk, and when it burns someday, or when you burnt it someday, chances are that you lose data only on the working partition. The other partitions might just be safe. You can always re format your destroyed partition, and get going again. Now, isn't that great? You can always have your back ups in a 1 or 2 GB partition, and never bother about it until one day you find your working partition is messed up. Your hard disk can have two type of partitions, Primary and Extended. You can have a maximum of 4 Primary partitions. And only one extended partition. In your extended partition, you may further split it up into any number of sub partitions called logical drives. Hence, the ideal way would be to have 3 primary partitions, and one big extended partition where you can have a lot of logical drives and boast about those many number of partitions. And except the first primary partition, which should be big enough to accommodate your so called C drive(Windows), let the other two primary partitions be small, in the order of 200 to 500 MB, where you can have your linux root partition. See, you can have two distributions(Debian and SuSE, my choice ;-) ) installed in these two small primary partitions. And in your extended partition, you can have a pretty big logical drive of the order of 1 GB, to hold your /usr partition, and a smaller /home partition, which you can share between the two linux installations, and also a small(120 MB) swap space which too may be used commonly between the different linux distributions. By having the two primary partitions very small, you can ensure that all the three primary partitions fall before the first 1024 cylinders, so as not to encounter all those nasty LILO boot errors. It's necessary that your primary /boot partition should be before the first 1024 cylinders, because the boot loader program can read only those many cylinders initially using the BIOS, since only ten bits are used to hold the number of cylinders. The other bits are needed for holding number of heads and sectors. Since this total bit number is limited, we are constrained by this 1024 cylinder limit. I don't know if LILO has overcome this problem in its latest versions. You can have VFAT partitions(Logical drives) in your extended partition which you shall use as D: drive in windows. And remember, do always mount the /usr partition in linux as read only. This is very safe. Change the settings in your /etc/fstab file - change 'rw' to 'ro'. Then, whenever you want to install or uninstall something, you can remount it as rw. For details, 'man mount'. PS: I have given information here to the best of my knowledge. If I have gone wrong somewhere, please correct me. Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- L I N U X - - M A D U R A I -------------------------------------------------------------------------------