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Printing a man page

By on October 23, 2006 in Linux

As I'll eventually get tagged to present a “Man Page of the Month” at the MonadLUG meetings, I thought I'd study a bit in advance when I found one I needed. 'top' seemed like a good candidate. But the man page is extensive, exhaustive, cross-referenced and difficult to read. So, I thought I'd print it out to scratch some notes in the margin and see if I could boil it down to a simple one-page quick reference. But how to print a man page? Well, you Google it, of course. The answer I found gave me the links I needed, even though their page neglected to display the key pipe symbols. Here's the trick:

zcat is a synonym to gunzip to pull the man page out of the .gz where it's stored. groff -man -Tps formats a file using the 'man' macro and outputs Type PostScript. Open the .ps file with the editor of your choice, and print it, convert it to PDF or whatever. So the entire command is:

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/top.1.gz| groff -man -Tps>top.ps

CentraLUG, November 6: Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques

By on October 23, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM.

Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.

For November’s meeting, Andy Bair will present “Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques.” Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.

In December, Tim Lind of Computerborough will present TrixBox, the Linux distro for running the Asterisk PBX software, formerly known as “Asterisk @ Home.”

January’s meeting falls on the first, so we’ll likely skip the month’s meeting. However, stay tuned for some exciting meetings coming up in 2007! More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.gnhlug.org.

New toy, day two…

By on October 21, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

A little more study on the ThinkPad T40 leads to the great Linux On Laptops web site with some specific advice on the T40 models and a tremendous amount of details on setting up the millions of little devices – mouse buttons, touchpad, IR, video, sound, modem, ethernet, power management, volume control, wireless – whew! – that make a laptop such a pleasure to use.

After setting the hidden non-partition to “Secure” so that no application would attempt to overwrite it, I used an Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD to resize the WinXPPro NTFS partition down to 18 Gb and set up a boot, root, and swap partition and then install Ubuntu. I set up all the optional repositories that Ubuntu comes with, update the local machine with 200Mb of updates and reboot. Up and running and current. Pretty cool.

Restarting in Windows, WinXP started CHKDSK, since the partition size had changes and it completed and forced a reboot. On the second start, Windows cheerfully reported it had “installed new devices” and needed to restart. What new devices? Hmm. Restarted again. Sheesh.

OOBE as it was meant to be…

By on October 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security, Technology

I've been holding off on purchasing a new laptop until IBM/Lenovo had a Linux-compatible ThinkPad T61p with the Merom (“Core 2 Duo”) CPU installed. “End of October” is the latest estimate, but knowing how long Real Soon Now can get to be, I elected to pick up a bench spare laptop Just In Case. My primary machine (“Lucky”) had a dead LCD, fried USB ports and a flaky wireless card. My older beater laptops have about bit the dust. I shopped around the BigBox stores and they were selling consumer junk. I looked at the Apples; they're sweet machines, but the software's still proprietary. If I was going to go for an Apple, I'd want to pick up a monster machine, and the budget doesn't allow that. So, for a while I was stumped. Finally, Laura suggested I look at a lower-model ThinkPad to tide me over.

IBM/Lenovo has a site for refurbished machines. I shopped over a couple of days. Keep an eye on the site, as inventory is changing often. I finally selected a T40, Pentium-M 1.5GHz, 256 Mb RAM (with a free upgrade to 512), 40 Gb HDD, WinXPPro, 1024×768 and CD-RW/DVD for just under USD $700.

With UPS ground shipping, it took less than a week to get here. The Out of Box Experience was perfect. Clean and well-packaged, the machine looked new. Other than a couple scratches on the serial number label, you'd think this thing had been vacuum-packed since it was manufactured in June of 2003. The HDD was a clean install of WinXP, and the “preinstallation” process took about an hour to install XP, forty million patches, IBM custom tools and drivers. A couple onerous registration forms (Yes, I want to register, no, I don't want you to have your “partners” send me mail) and I was up and running. First, a trip to Windows Update. A “new version” of Windows Update (the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage check — I passed! Whew!) and I was up to date. I was surprised to find that Windows Firewall was not running — I had forgotten is was off by default, and was glad I was within a reasonable safe network as I raised the shields.

Next, a backup before I broke things. Booting onto a Knoppix CD, I followed the same process I used in July to upgrade Laura's hard drive: with the machine off, plug in an external drive and Knoppix, boot, Ctrl-F2 to a root console,

mkdir /media/target
mount /dev/sda1 /media/target
partimage


and in eleven and a half minutes, the 4.5 Gb is backed up. Magick!

I was suprised to see that the recovery partition isn't a partion at all, according to the machine, but unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. That makes it a bit more difficult to make a backup copy for the inevitable hard disk drive failure. IBM's help file tries to explain how this is a feature to keep you from mis-laying a Recovery CD (You'll have to order one from IBM when the hdd fails, it explains. Of course, it will be a little difficult to read the help file on the hdd to discover this once it's failed.) Google, of course, will point you to solutions that can work around pretty much any “feature” the vendor throws in there.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the machine, and it will work great as a stopgap between Lucky and the next machine, and at a good price. Now, off to tinker some more…

MerriLUG: Rob Lebree on What's Inside a Mobile Phone

By on October 18, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group takes place on Thursday, the 19th of October at Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH. Dinner is at 6 PM and the main meeting (upstairs) at 7:30 PM. Driving directions can be found here

From the group's announcement:

“Rob Lembree from JumpShift, LLC [Edit: fixed broken link] will discuss the components and processes involved in the development of a modern mobile phone, from the processors and radios to the operating system technology, middleware and applications that bring the package together. He will also discuss the peculiarities of the mobile industry that make bringing a handset to market a unique challenge.”

“Rob will bring lots of mobile platforms with him in various states of completion for show and tell. Rob has two decades of experience in operating system technology, many of it in the embedded computing space, with three and a half years applying this experience to the mobile platform industry. When Rob grows up, he'd like to start a research and development company, hire smart people, and develop cool stuff that scares the heck out of big companies.”

Hope to see you there!

Baystar exec says MSFT behind high-burn-rate funding of SCO

By on October 10, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. “A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed “a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment”.

I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.

The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has… almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft… almost shipped Vista.

If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.

Ubuntu print to PDF

By on October 3, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

Working on a new install of Ubuntu 6.06 and needed the functionality of printing to PDF out of a variety of applications. OpenOffice.org has it built-in, but other apps don't. There's lots of support in Linux for PostScript as the preferred output format, but the magic of invoking pstopdf is magick to me. Enter cups-pdf, a printer driver that generates PDF files. Following the instructions here (especially the hint in comment 15), I was up and running and generating PDFs in ten minutes. Way cool!

DLSLUG, October 5th, 7 PM: Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples

By on October 3, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security

Bill McGonigle announces Thursday's Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group: “Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples” presented by Lloyd Kvam:

“Lloyd will talk about OpenWRT, the open source linux distribution that targets small routers such as the Linksys WRT45GL. He recently used one to make a bridging firewall, where a Windows computer needed protection, but there was no access to the router.”

“Lloyd will talk about hardware organization, installing packages, the layout of the default configuration, and how to customize the routing and firewall operations… Lloyd works at software development, preferably in Python.”

Should be a fun meeting. Hope to see you there!

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