Novell Linux Hack Week

Again, say what you will about "sleeping with the devil", but I still like the way Novell is going about embracing Linux. openSUSE has just been working for me and I've been very happy with the support. Now, they just announced "Hack Week", where the Linux engineers get a week to work on whatever Linux or open source project they want. Here's the blog documenting their efforts.

start @ Idea Pool

Hack Week is here! For the week of June 25 - 29, Novell is setting our entire Linux engineering team loose to hack on Linux or open source projects that they are personally passionate about. To make it easier for hackers to find and publicize their projects, we’ve created this web site where our ideas are shared and where we’ll post updates.

Symbolic Help

Today's obscure Unix command is namei, or the ol' "follow a pathname until a terminal point is found" command. You pass it a pathname and it will print out each "piece" of that path name, tell you what it is, and move down. This is particularly handy for figuring out what, if any, parts of a path are some kind of symbolic link. For instance, I have a partition mounted on /data, where I've created a folder for my user to use:

$ ls -l /data
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 8 jdarnold users 4.0K Jun 21 14:58 jdarnold
drwx------ 2 root     root   16K May  4 15:54 lost+found
$ ls -ld data
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jdarnold users 14 May  7 10:21 data -> /data/jdarnold
$ namei /home/jdarnold/data/message.backup
f: /home/jdarnold/data/message.backup
d /
d home
d jdarnold
l data -> /data/jdarnold
d /
d data
d jdarnold
- message.backup

Not the most critical tool in your belt, but it still might come in handy, especially, as the man page says, in those times of "too many levels of symbolic links" errors.

Another cool KDE shortcut

Perusing the KDE FAQ, I can across this:

Chapter 14. Useful tips

Move or resize windows quickly To move a window, use Alt+left mouse button. Alt+right mouse button will resize the window. Last but not least, Alt+middle mouse button raises/lowers the window. The KDE Control Center allows you to change these mouse bindings.

Walking on Sunshine

Sorry it has been so quiet, but it has been that way for two very good and positive reasons:

1. Everything has been working all too smoothly. openSUSE has just been solid, needing virtually no twiddling at all. Complain all you might want about Novell, but when something works as well as openSUSE does, I'm all over it!


2. And I just haven't had the time to fiddle. There's a few things I want to try, but with summer coming, and a new release imminent, I just haven't had the time or desire to futz about with the computer.

I have a few things in the queue to work on, and I'll post my results. But until then, I'll leave you with these little KDE shortcuts that I truly miss on Windows:

• Maximize a window, both vertically and horizontally - left click on the Maximize button (duh)


• Maximize a window, just vertically - middle click on the Maximize button


• Maximize a window, just horizontally - right click on the Maximize button

Religious War, continued

A fairly balanced, even look at the similarities and differences between Linux and FreeBSD, which are actually much more alike, especially at the user level, than you might think.

Comparing GNU/Linux and FreeBSD