April 19, 2009, 2:35 pm
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”
Continue reading ‘Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line’ »
April 18, 2009, 3:15 am
How many Linux users are there really?
It’s a darn good question, and there isn’t a darn good answer.
In one way, we’re all Linux users now.
Continue reading ‘How Many Linux Users Are There (Really)?’ »
April 17, 2009, 6:34 pm
Originally written by Matthew D. Fuller found here.
I run FreeBSD on my computers. A lot of my friends run Linux, or at least one of the distributions of it. Naturally, then, we agree that a Unix-style operating system is the right choice, but we disagree on which to use.
It’s been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that’s not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don’t really understand how and why it’s put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.
While there’s overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what’s important, some about who’s important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn’t tell you anything; it’s the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do.
Continue reading ‘BSD Vs. Linux’ »
April 17, 2009, 2:53 pm
In the following article, I refer to the GNU/Linux OS and various Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS) projects under the catch-all name of “Linux”. It scans better.
If you’ve been pointed at this page, then the chances are you’re a relatively new Linux user who’s having some problems making the switch from Windows to Linux. This causes many problems for many people, hence this article was written. Many individual issues arise from this single problem, so the page is broken down into multiple problem areas.
Continue reading ‘Linux is not Windows’ »
September 1, 2008, 10:18 pm
Here is a quick one line command to generate a random password from the Linux command line.
# < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c8
This will create an 8 character long password. To make it longer or shorter change c8 to c# (# being whatever number you want).
Another way to go about this is the pwgen command. Simply install pwgen and execute it and it will give you a bunch of random passwords, simply pick one out of the bunch.
