10 Expert Ubuntu Tricks

That'd be me.

I just recently installed Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and I've gotta say... the installers have come a long way since compile-it-yourself-Red Hat 1.0.

I was always a Red Hat user, but they lost me at version 7 (a buggy piece of crap) when they started becoming a little too corporate. Although I still have a few web servers running 5.0 stuffed in a closet somewhere, I relinquished my home computers to Microsloth when I couldn't get any Linux USB drivers for my then new fangled digital camera.

One thing that struck me as odd about Ubuntu however, was that a web page with a java applet froze the computer hard. I've never seen any variant of Unix that you could not switch to another terminal to kill a rogue process. No amount of Ctrl-Alt-F1 or any other combination would give me another login screen. I had to power the computer off.

Another odd thing was after installing an update, it asked me to restart the computer. I once had a Red Hat server run for over a year, updating software continually, and never once rebooted it.

I'm going to play with it some more this weekend if I get time and see if I can tweak it... and maybe become familiar with bash again.

 

You mean people still use Solaris? LOL

Command line is where it's at in Unix—just about everything can be scripted and automated. I was a regular Unix Guru back in the day... not so much anymore. It's been over ten years since I ran my software company.

LOL, programming is kinda similar to driving a truck... long hours holed up in a dark cave away from family and friends... no sleep... excessive caffeine use... poor diet... yet, strangely addictive. I used to spend days without sleep, pouring over lines of code, trying to find one little bug... forever trying to achieve the perfect program with no bugs.

In the end, it got the better of me. The workload got to be more than I could handle... customers always wanting this or that added (feature creep) and always for free. Then I started a dial-up service when cable was just coming on the scene. I lost my butt and drowned myself in alcohol.

I can look back on some of the code that I wrote and wonder how the heck I came up with it... some of it is still floating around the net thanks to Google's archive of Usenet Newsgroups. I was a regular on comp.databases.ms-access, comp.language.c++ and misc.transport.trucking.

Yeah... weird, I know... a programmer/truck driver/computer geek.

 

Network security and digital forensics eh? In other words, figuring out how they busted in, who they are, and then locking down the system?

Yep, then we do have something in common.

I had a mail server that someone kept busting into. It was like a challenging game... they'd bust in, I'd kick them out and lock the door... they'd bust in again, I'd figure out how they did it and lock the door again.

Job security, I tell ya! Every time you think you've kicked 'em out for good, they're baaaack. lol

Ever read Digital Fortress?