Sudo, the one command to rule them all. It stands for “super user do!” Pronounced like “sue dough” As a Linux system administrator or power user, it’s one of the most important commands in your arsenal. Have you ever tried to run a command in terminal only to be given “Access Denied?” Well this is the command for you! But, with great power comes great responsibility! It is much better than logging in as root, or using the su “switch user” command. Read on to see what sudo can do for you!
Archives For linux
For some of you, this is a basic command that you use literally all the time, If this is you, then this tutorial isn’t for you. But if you’re new to Linux or just new to the command line “ls” is a command you will get to know very well. At the surface level, ls is a simple command, and if typed in any directory or anywhere on the command line, all it does is list the contents of your current working directory. But if I were to leave it at just that I would have done you no favors at all. In fact, I’m going to tell you some tips and tricks to ls and we might even throw in a grep command if you’re lucky!
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Some time ago, Valve announced that they were releasing a Steam Client targeted at Linux systems. At the time, it was rumored that their first Linux playable game internally (other than independent titles that already had Linux versions) was Left 4 Dead. Although we have not seen the rumored L4D port, we do now have a full blown Steam client for Ubuntu Linux (at least that is the officially supported distribution, however, I have seen clients working in Mint, Fedora and OpenSUSE). Here, we are going to talk about the installation and configuration of the client, along with some of the ‘gotchas’ involved. We will then talk about a couple of the games available and some of the lessons learned during the client use and subsequent gameplay.
Whether it is on your desktop or server installation of Ubuntu, there will come a time that you may need to work with Apache and certificates. We will go into full certificates from Certificate Authorities (like Verisign or Entrust) as well as exploring some of the ‘Open Source’ Certificate Authorities (read: free) in a later article. Today we are discussing how to prepare Apache to answer HTTPS requests in the VHOSTS as well as installing and configuring the pieces. Finally, we will install a self signed certificate and access our system over HTTPS to verify it all works.
There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.
Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.
Working in Information Technology over the last twenty years (and the last ten or so as a senior engineer or team lead in various organizations) has exposed me to a lot of resumes over that time. Over the last five years, one of the more common questions I am asked is “how can I get a Linux related job?”. I will attempt to address that in this space.
The most important thing to remember is that your quest for a Linux position at any organization is really no different than applying for any other I.T. position. Once you have identified the company and the posting (and a great place to get an idea of who is looking for Linux talent and with what experience, is The Linux Foundation), you need to focus on the attributes and experience you have that are directly applicable to the position you want. Your resume should then be tailored to highlight that experience throughout your career as much as possible.
Alright, so you’ve created a new MySQL Database, you’ve added a user, even granted permissions to the user. Yet, that user forgot the password to their MySQL user account. How do you change the user’s password? There are several ways to do this, one of which we can do without even entering the MySQL command console. This quick tutorial will show you three separate ways to change a MySQL user password
Microsoft Open Technologies has recently launched a service called VM Depot that allows you to quickly and easily scan for virtual machines. Correcting for one of the original pitfalls of Azure, the inability to quickly find a list of virtual machines, this new service puts this list at your finger tips – and Linux stands out!
On some distributions, MySQL is installed without asking you to set the default root password for the MySQL server. If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu, the MySQL install will prompt you to create your password. However, some distributions such as CentOS aren’t as friendly. When MySQL is first installed on CentOS, it finishes without any user interaction. In fact, it finishes without a set root password, without starting the MySQL service, and without configuring the MySQL service to start on system reboot/boot.
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Today’s nifty bit of code is a startup/shutdown script for linux that allows you to add an EC2 instance to Amazon’s Route53 DNS automatically when you start up the instance, and remove it when the instance is knocked down. This script also allows you to add the instance to a weighted round-robin group.
This makes use of the very useful Python-based boto tool which is available in both Yum and Debian repositories under the package name python-boto.
Create this script in /etc/init.d and make it executable, and then add it to the requisite rcX.d directory for startup/shutdown.
