My Heard Space

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

find out more….

If you are one of those people who still love the command – line interface or you are a nood who wants to improve his command – line skills then I would suggest you try out this site commandlinefu which is still in alpha mode, I have contributed my own linux commands which I use on a regular base and also got some more from other linux users. You can also get the latest commands available to you via rss feeds. It’ shaping up to be a good site already and I will definately keep my eye out for it.

Sometimes you find yourself in a position whereby you have to connect to windows from your linux box, well there are various ways to achieve this and with this post we are going to explore rdesktop which works for most of the windows operating system based on the NT platform. This includes Windows XP , 2000 server , windows NT , Windows 2008 and Windows Vista.

You can install it by compiling from source or in my case I installed it as a rpm (suse 10.3), you can choose which ever method suits you best.

Before you try rdesktop please make sure your windows box is setup to accept remote connections. You can confirm this by accessing control panel->system->remote(tab)->remote desktop and select the checkbox there.

Now Lets begin, We first gonna connect to our windows box with minimal settings…

rdesktop -usonny -pmypass  192.168.1.24

This example will connect to your machine at ip address 192.168.1.24 and will login automatically.

Lets make it full screen
rdesktop -ffull -usonny -pmypass  192.168.1.24

Lets Connect to a windows machine on a domain network
rdesktop -ffull -usonny -pmypass  -dmydomain  192.168.1.24

There are many other settings you can set for e.g. keyboard layout , sound card redirection , clipboard redirection , printer redirection and etc…

This post is meant to be a quick guide on using rdesktop you can find out more information and other config settings by using the man pages

man rdektop

I came across this list of useful linux commands a while back , Some of them have been very helpful on my quest to learn linux and hope they can help you too.

alias Set and view command aliases.
arch Print machine architecture.
awk Pattern scanning and processing language.
bash Bourne Again SHell.
bg Move process running in foreground to the background.
biff Be notified when mail arrives.
cat Concatenate and print files.
cd Change directory.
chage Change user password expiry information.
chgrp Change group ownership.
chmod Change file permissions.
chown Change file and group owner.
chroot Run command with special root directory.
chsh Change login shell.
clear Clear the terminal screen.
cp Copy files and directories.
crontab Maintain crontab files.
csh C shell.
cut Remove sections from each line of files.
date Print or set the system date and time.
dd Convert and copy a file.
df Print file-system disk space usage.
diff Find differences between files.
dig DNS (Domain Name System) lookup utility.
dmesg Print diagnostic messages from system buffer.
dnsdomainname Show system’s DNS (Domain Name System) domain name.
domainname Show system’s NIS (Network Information System)
du Estimate file space usage.
echo Display a line of text.
env Run a program in a modified environment.
false Exit with a status code indicating failure.
fdisk Disk partition table manipulator.
fg Move process running in background to the foreground.
file Determine file type.
find Search for files in a directory hierarchy.
free Display amount of free and used system memory.
ftp FTP client.
fuser Identify processes using files or sockets.
gcc GNU C and C++ compiler.
grep Print lines matching a given pattern.
groupadd Create a new group.
groupdel Delete a group.
groupmod Modify a group.
groups Print all the groups the user belongs to.
gunzip Uncompress files compressed using Lempel Ziv encoding.
gzip Compress files using Lempel Ziv encoding.
host DNS (Domain Name System) lookup utility.
hostname Show or set system hostname.
id Print real and effective user IDs and group IDs.
ifconfig Configure a network interface.
kill Terminate a process.
ksh Korn shell.
last Show listing of last logged in users.
lastlog Show last login times of accounts.
ln Make links between files.
ls List directory contents.
mail Send and receive mail.
man Format and display manual pages.
mesg Control write access to a terminal.
mkdir Make directories.
more Display file contents one screenful at a time.
mount Mount a file system.
mv Move and rename files and directories.
netstat Print network connections routing tables interface statistics
masquerade connections and multicast memberships.
nice Run a program with modified scheduling priority.
nslookup Query Internet name servers.
passwd Change login and password attributes.
ping Send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to network hosts.
ps Report process status.
pwd Print name of working directory.
quota Display disk usage and limits.
quotaoff Turn off file-system quotas.
quotaon Turn on file-system quotas.
repquota Summarize quotas for a file system.
rm Remove files or directories.
rmdir Remove empty directories.
route Show or manipulate system routing table.
rpcinfo Report RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) information.
sed Stream Editor.
setquota Set disk quotas.
showmount Show mount information for an NFS (Network File System) server.
shutdown Bring the system down.
sleep Delay for a specified amount of time.
sort Sort lines of text files.
strace Trace system calls and signals.
strings Print printable characters in files.
su Run a shell with substitute user and group IDs.
tail Output the last part of files.
tar Archiving utility.
tcsh C shell with filename completion and command editing.
telnet Telnet client.
tftp TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) client.
traceroute Print the route that packets take to a destination host.
true Exit with a status code indicating success.
umount Unmount a file system.
uname Print system information.
useradd Create a new user.
userdel Delete user account.
uptime Print how long the system has been running.
vi Text editor.
w Show users that are logged on and what they are doing.
wa ll Send message to every user’s terminal.
whereis Locate the binary
which Show the full path of commands.
who Show users that are logged on.
whoami Print effective user ID.
write Send a message to another user.

Please use man command to find out more details about the command and it’s usage, I hope this helps.

This tutorial is meant for those who are newbies to the Linux environment and please feel free to add any suggestion to this material. The command tail is used to output the last part of a file (e.g tail mylog.txt ) this will output the last 10 lines of mylog.txt by default , you can change this by adding an extra parameter to your tail command (e.g tail -n 100 mylog.txt) this will now return the last 100 lines from mylog.txt as suppose to the default 10 lines.

My favorite parameter which you can use with tail command allows you to monitor log files as they are being populated (e.g tail -f mylog.txt) first it will show me the default 10 lines but then as soon as a new entry is inserted into the mylog.txt I will be able to see it without reloading the file or the command, This is useful if you are debugging anything that writes to a log file because you can monitor the log while you attempting to fix your problem.

So next time you want to monitor your log files try and use tail to capture your errors and please try not use vi on log files which are very big(e.g A 5 gigabyte log file will crash your server if you do a vi on it,unless you have a very very very big server thats never worries about Ram ) But you can always tail a big log file and if that does not help then you can try using grep which is something else all together.