Articles and tutorials regarding Linux http://www.troobloo.com/tech/linux.shtml en-us http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/linuxjournal200009.php3 Tim Perdue Here is the code from my Linux Journal article on how to build a business application using PostgreSQL's transactions and PHP4. Download Code Common.php <?php //connect to postgres database $conn = pg_pconnect ( "user=tperdue dbname=linuxjournal" ); //see if our connection was successful if (! $conn ) { //connection failed - exit the page with an error //you could also try to proceed without the //database - it's up to you echo pg_errormessage ( $conn ); exit; } //now let's... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/11/07/linux_threads.html by Jerry Cooperstein 11/07/2002 Recent advances in Linux's threading implementation are expected to continue to ease migration from other Unix-like operating systems. These advancements have arrived with intense activity on two fronts. First, thread-handling improvements have greatly enhanced the kernel's scalability even to thousands of threads. Second, there are now two fresh, competing implementations of the POSIX pthreads standard (NGPT and NPTL) set to replace the aging... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/09/19/linuxlaptop.html by Dave Phillips 09/20/2002 Introduction Configuring sound for laptops running Linux can be a very tricky process. Drivers may be difficult to find or install, reference materials may be incomplete or misleading, and even after careful configuration, your system may still emit no more than the beep from its internal speaker. In other words, setting up sound on a Linux laptop can quickly become an unwanted exercise in patience and frustration. The following article describes my... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3081601 By Carla Schroder For us valiant Linux sysadmins, wireless networking is complicated by the difficulty of finding supported hardware. (Insert ritual rant about <cussing deleted> hardware vendors that are delighted to glom our money, but scorn to offer support.) Wireless Ethernet may no longer be new-fangled, but that doesn't mean it's all smooth sailing for Linux admins. In part 1 of this two-article series, we discussed the relatively straightforward stuff 5; wireless products that... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/07/18/licoris.html by Howard Wen 07/18/2002 Would you give your grandmother a PC with Linux as its main OS? The developers of a Linux startup, Lycoris , have been trying to make the answer a more likely "yes" with their Linux package. A year ago, Joseph Cheek, the CTO and founder of Lycoris, began the work of putting together an integrated Linux desktop OS that would be easy to use for almost anyone, including his own grandmother. The result, Desktop/LX, allows users to easily check email, browse the Web,... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/10/10/intro_gentoo.html by Daniel Robbins 10/10/2002 Hi there. I'm sure many of you know that in addition to writing Linux articles, I'm also very involved in a free software project called Gentoo Linux. In this article, I'll try to explain what Gentoo Linux is all about and also tantilize you with all the neat things we have in the works for Gentoo Linux 1.4, which we're currently developing and should be available from our Web site (at http://www.gentoo.org/ ) by the time you read this article. So, what is... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20030224.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 02/24/2003 Happy Monday Afternoon! The skies are clear, the wind has died down, and it's time for yet another Linux newsletter. Here's what happened last week on ONLamp.com: David HM Spector's Linux in the Enterprise column has returned. In spite of a sluggish economy, he sees a bright future for Linux, especially in the financial services industry. Read more about his trip to LinuxWorld Expo 2003 in Linux in the Enterprise at LWE 2003 . Howard Wen... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3559106 By Carla Schroder October 25, 2005 A lot of Linux geeks are master scroungers, because Linux is so adaptable that old AMDs, classic Pentiums and even 386es and 486es can be put to use in some way. It's a shame to throw away old equipment when it can be repurposed as networking devices like firewalls, authentication servers and routers. But as fun as it is to recycle, I'll wager I'm not the only who has gazed upon shiny new devices like the Linksys WRT54G and sighed "Wouldn't that be a... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3561951 By Carla Schroder November 8, 2005 Now that we have ripped out the stock guts out of our Linksys WRT54G and replaced them with a miniature, but mighty, Linux operating system, it's time to configure it to do some actual work. ( Part 1 and part 2 cover installation and setting up secure administration of your chopped, dropped little blue box.) Sharing a Broadband Connection Remember, none of these settings are committed to NVRAM ( define ) until you enter the nvram commit command. As... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/03/21/linuxps2.html by Howard Wen 03/21/2002 The bout between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft with their video game consoles could become even more heated when Linux enters the fray this spring. Sony will sell online the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" Release 1.0 in the U.S. in May 2002. (A European version will come out that month, too, and the Japanese version earlier in April.) This kit will include a Linux distribution on DVD that runs on the PS2 hardware, additional software, documentation, a 40GB hard... http://www.80211-planet.com/tutorials/article/0,4000,10724_953531,00.html By Michael Hall As with 802.11b in general, the world of wireless LANs as experienced through Linux is an interesting and challenging mix of implementations and approaches. Setting up access to a wireless network in Linux isn't a difficult undertaking to a motivated enthusiast, but it is somewhat complex. In this article, we'll look at some common stops for setting up an 802.11b PCMCIA card on a Linux laptop, provide a general guide to preparing to set up wireless support, and discuss... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2003/03/17/enterprise.html by David HM Spector 03/17/2003 Doing the Penguin Dance One of the things I used look forward to about twice a year was a new release of Red Hat (RH) Linux. I'm pretty conservative on my main desktop system, where I write my articles and do my main development, and tend to run a pretty out-of-the-box configuration. I leave my hotrodding for my experimental system, where it doesn't matter if I accidentally trash a disk. Up until recently (say, Red Hat 7.2), upgrading my system wasn't a... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/04/11/enterprise.html 04/11/2002 In the first article in this series we talked about the buzz around wireless networking. In the intervening time, the wireless network buzz has only grown louder with the release of actual hardware that implements the IEEE 802.11a 54Mbps standard, which is more than five times as fast as the current flavor 802.11b. What s the State of Linux Wireless Networks? Wireless networks are even more in the news than when Part I of this series was written -- for both good and bad... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3557251 By Carla Schroder October 18, 2005 Last week we had an bird's-eye of the current state of wireless security protocols, and a quick peek at using a RADIUS server for authentication, authorization, and accounting. Today we shall configure FreeRADIUS to secure wireless authentication and transmission. A RADIUS server running on Linux can authenticate clients on any platform. We are going to implement EAP-TLS encryption, because it is widely supported and secure. Be sure you have FreeRADIUS... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2002/03/29/ibook_linux.html by Edd Dumbill 03/29/2002 It feels a bit like a homecoming. After years wandering in the cranky wilderness of mix-and-match PCs I'm working again on a computer that feels like it has a soul. The reason I feel like this? The other week I switched from an Intel-based laptop to an iBook. However, this is a different story to the recent Mac conversions you've heard about. My day-in, day-out operating system of choice isn't Windows, it's Linux. To be precise, Debian GNU/Linux . And on my new... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/starkey20030401.php3 John Starkey One of the better inventions of the 21st Century is with no doubt PHP-Gtk. Released in March 2001, in an effort to show that PHP isn't just a web scripting language, PHP-Gtk offers coders running GTK the opportunity to create custom desktop applications without having to meddle outside of their language of choice. In this article, I'm going to walk you through the process of installing PHP-Gtk on a Linux desktop. I'm running KRUD 8 , from tummy.com, using Gnome, but... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3066371 By Carla Schroder For the harassed, overworked network admin, connecting new clients without having to run additional cabling is so much fun it feels wrong. Miles of pretty color-coded cables and tags are aesthetically pleasing and useful, of course, and who hasn't experienced the satisfaction of crimping connectors? There's nothing like the authoritative SNICK of a perfect crimp. (For some of us deskbound-geeks, grip strength is all we have.) But rasslin' bales of CAT5 cables is like,... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/10/10/cube3d.html by Howard Wen 10/10/2002 The last thing the gaming development community needs is probably another 3-D graphics engine designed for first-person shooters. After all, there are lots of them in the market. Some, such as the original Quake engine, have even been released as open source (although long after they became technically outdated and were no longer of value to license for game development). Cube , however, stands apart because it was targeted at Linux since its inception, and has... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3555556 By Carla Schroder October 11, 2005 The RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) protocol has long been a standard authentication, authorization and accounting protocol for Internet service providers and businesses. It determines who you are, what you're allowed to do, and records how long you did it for. It works for more than just dialup users- it also works for DSL, cable, and wireless users. Anytime you study RADIUS, you read about "AAA", the... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3560771 By Carla Schroder November 1, 2005 Last week we rambled over the OpenWRT landscape, issued dire warnings and concluded with the easy, but risky, installation method. Today we'll learn the harder, but much safer, installation method. This one is fun, because it depends on an unpatched bug in the Linksys firmware. Installing OpenWRT the Hard but Safe Way You'll need an FTP client to upload the OpenWRT firmware (See Part 1 to learn what to download and where to get it), and your router... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/05/09/sysadminguide.html by Kendall Clark 05/16/2002 The Problem Like many free software geeks, I run a one-person Web hosting shop, a combination business, hobby, and community service. I've become accustomed to doing complex tasks not only easily, but also as cheaply as possible. Since most of the time my modest Web hosting is more hobby than business, I can't really afford to buy expensive -- or setup and manage -- complex software and hardware monitoring solutions. I also, like many free software geeks,... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3592556 By Carla Schroder March 17, 2006 Ever since wireless Ethernet was born, a sizable number of folks decided that it should be freely available to the masses at no cost. So we have official community wireless projects, coffee shops, hotels, and other businesses supplying free wireless Internet, and a lot of purposefully-unsecured private wireless networks. Humans being what they are, admins of open wireless networks should be canny and careful. In these modern times you can be punished for... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/alberto20000919.php3 Alberto Dainotti In this article, I will explain how it is possible to connect and query an MS SQL server (running under a Windows operating system) from php installed on a unix box. The same problem, in the case of php installed under Windows is not covered here because it is well explained in php FAQ; sadly I cannot say the same thing for the unix case. In fact, there is a multitude of incorrect or outdated sources of information which will cause new people trying to solve this... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20030407.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 04/07/2003 Hello, and welcome to the latest installment in the continuing saga of the Linux newsletter. This week, we've published several good articles for your perusal. First off, Dru Lavigne concludes her look at file integrity utilities in File Integrity and Anti-DDoS Utilities . Though tripwire is well worth investigating, other solutions include aide and yafic . If you'd like to know when things change on your system, perhaps without your prior... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20030127.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 01/27/2003 Welcome to the post-Super Bowl Linux newsletter! It's also the post-LinuxWorld Expo newsletter, but the former had more television coverage, for some reason. Maybe next year. Here's what's new on ONLamp.com this week. In a plausably deniable coincidence, Iljitsch van Beijnum, author of the BGP book, wrote How to Get Rid of DDoS Attacks . There are three common techniques, each with advantages and drawbacks--but Iljitsch has a fourth. Look for... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/2003203.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 02/03/2003 Welcome to the first Linux newsletter of February. (There's no truth to the rumor that if Linus saw his shadow yesterday, there would be six more weeks of code freeze before 2.6 prereleases.) Here are the new articles this week on ONLamp.com: Probability and math have been popular among the anti-spam folks this past year, and no idea has been hotter than that of Bayesian filtering. By analyzing known good versus known spam messages, it's... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20021111.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 11/11/2002 Linux has long had a love/hate relationship with threads. Some of the POSIX standards are vague, others are obscure. Fortunately, the upcoming 2.6 (or 3.0) kernel supports two competing POSIX-compatible threading implementations. Jerry Cooperstein explores both in " Linux Multithreading Advances ". A few graphics here and there can really spice up your dynamic Web site, and where better to find inspiration than Hollywood? David Sklar,... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20021014.html by chromatic Linux Newsletter for 10/14/2002 Dear Reader, This week, we are pleased to present three articles for your enjoyment. In "Gentoo Linux Reloaded", Daniel Robbins, the lead architect of Gentoo Linux, explores the new features of the upcoming 1.4 release. Do you wonder why anyone would want to compile an entire operating system from scratch? Robbins explains this, and reveals that Gentoo just might make an interesting gaming platform. Gentoo Linux Reloaded Speaking of gaming,... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20020909.html by Tara McGoldrick Linux Newsletter for 09/09/2002 Dear Reader, We've got a bevy of articles this week with the Labor Day holiday last Monday, so to get started, here's an introduction to a relatively new PHP development called "Smarty." If you're a PHP developer you've probably included other files in your PHP scripts in an effort to reuse code. Smarty makes that job easier and allows you to separate HMTL layout from code logic. A PHP template engine, Smarty has several unique... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/newsletters/20020805.html by Tara McGoldrick Linux Newsletter for 08/05/2002 Dear Reader, Recent news reports have detailed the actions of Princeton University admissions officers who had broken into a Yale Web site and downloaded admission decisions on 11 students who had applied to both schools. Simson Garfinkel explains that Yale could have shielded its data from these attacks had it used a translucent database. Yet, with one notable exception--the Unix password file--translucent databases are practically... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/03/linuxhacks.html by Rob Flickenger , author of Linux Server Hacks 04/03/2003 Accomplish IP takeover with ping , bash , and a simple network utility. Directing traffic to one of several machines is fairly straightforward when using round-robin DNS. But what happens when one of those servers becomes unavailable? Here's one scheme for monitoring the health of another server, and standing in for it if it fails. First, we need to make a distinction between the server's "real" IP address, and the IP (or IPs)... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/02/20/linuxhacks.html by Rob Flickenger , author of Linux Server Hacks 02/20/2003 Installing your shiny new Certificate Authority certificate to client browsers is just a click away In order for your client browsers to trust your new Certificate Authority , they must be configured to accept your CA's public key. There are two possible formats that browsers will accept for new certificate authority certs: pem and der . You can generate a der from your existing pem with a single OpenSSL command: openssl x509... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/02/06/linuxhacks.html by Rob Flickenger , author of Linux Server Hacks 02/06/2003 Become your own Certificate Authority, and sign your own--or others'--SSL certificates. Well-known Certificate Authorities (such as Thawte and VeriSign) exist to serve as authoritative, trusted third-parties for authentication. They are in the business of signing SSL certificates that are used on sites that deal with sensitive information (like account numbers or passwords). If a site's SSL certificate is signed by a trusted... http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/12/06/taglines.html by Edd Dumbill December 05, 2001 Linux Gets SVG Browser Plug-in It came as a very pleasant surprise last week to hear that Adobe has released a version of its SVG browser plug-in for Linux and Solaris . Being an habitual Linux user, I had resigned myself to not being able to see SVG on the Web until the Mozilla project had progressed further with its implementation of the W3C's vector graphics standard, so news of the plug-in was welcome indeed. Downloading and installing the plug-in... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/04/25/enterprise.html 04/25/2002 Beyond all the battles between Linux and Microsoft on the desktop, Linux has already made its bones in business. IBM has invested over US$1 billion in Linux technologies, while Sun, Compaq, and HP have all made Linux a key part of their business strategies. One of the hottest areas of computing that Linux plays in has come to be called "grid computing." We used to call this variously "supercomputing," "high-performance computing," "distributed computing" and "peer-to-peer... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onjava/newsletters/20030220.html by chromatic ONJava Newsletter for 02/20/2003 Dear Readers, Your editor spoke at a Linux User Group on Tuesday night, and was treated to a heartwarming story about an ex-mainframe guy, laid off last year, who started his own company and now sells J2EE solutions to small businesses. (It was also nice to hear that he'd realized, on his own, that PostgreSQL fit his needs far better than Access.) To everyone involved in projects like Cactus, Ant, jUnit, Tomcat, and XDoclet (the projects he... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/jain20030228.php3 Jayesh Jain Introduction Your production machine might have PHP installed on an Apache server in a Linux environment, but most of the people (like me) will develop and test their code on a Windows machine before they move their work on to the production machine. Working on this assumption, in this article I am going to step you through the installation of PHP interpreter under BadBlueWeb Server in windows environment. In the article we shall use BadBlue Personal Edition v2.14 and PHP... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/banahan20010720.php3 By Mike Banahan Synopsis We have recently built and delivered an e-commerce project which runs both on Linux and Windows, talking optionally to either Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL. The software was built with PHP4 and is now deployed on a Windows NT server under IIS and SQL server. It runs equally happily (and somewhat faster) on Linux and MySQL. We thought there might be some people who would like to know a little about how it was done. Background The project objectives themselves... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/08/01/enterprise.html by David HM Spector 08/01/2002 Despite the reports to the contrary from such industry intellects as IDG, Linux has made quite a big splash in all areas of computing and not just "limited inroads" in the data center in terms of Web servers. Notice I said, "computing". Not desktop applications, Web servers, or clusters, but computing . Computing is something that transcends the mundane and goes to the heart of the nature of what it is that computers do and how we get them to do it. We... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/jain20030324.php3 By Jayesh Jain Introduction If you are a great fan of PHP, you might have installed PHP on an Apache server in a Linux environment. But most of the people will develop and test their code on a Windows machine till they move their work on a production machine. In this article I am going to step you through installing PHP under Xitami in Windows environment. What is Xitami Xitami is a small, fast, and powerful multiplatform Open Source web server which runs on all UNIX platforms, OS/2,... http://www.developer.com/dhtml/article.php/1014741 By Earthweb Staff April 23, 2002 -- IBM today announced new WebSphere Studio application development products for Linux and Web-site development, as well as new toolkits for building wireless, portal, and voice applications. They are all based on the Eclipse platform, which is supported by an open-source community for multi-vendor software tool integration. Using Eclipse-based tools, developers can integrate tasks easily and quickly to improve the quality of applications and time to... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/01/28/insecurities.html 01/28/2002 Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at two Linux kernel bugs; buffer overflows in RealPlayer, GNU Chess, and sniffit ; and problems in rsync , Squirrelmail, PHP-Nuke, enscript , Tarantella Enterprise 3, UnixWare and Open UNIX's sort , IPFilter/9000, and Maelstrom. Linux Kernel Bug Linux CIPE rsync Squirrelmail RealPlayer GNU Chess PHP-Nuke enscript Tarantella Enterprise 3 sniffit UnixWare and Open... http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/jayesh20021029.php3 Jayesh Jain Introduction If you are a great fan of PHP, you might have installed PHP on an Apache server and used MySQL as the backend on windows or a linux machine. Most of the people will develop and test their code on a windows machine till they move their work on a production machine. In this article I am going to step you through installing PHP under IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows 2000 and use Microsoft Access as backend (in fact you could use Foxpro, SQL Server,... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2003/01/17/coldfusion_four.html by Dick Applebaum 01/17/2003 Well, since we last got together, events have overtaken us. In Part 3 , we had just gotten our port of ColdFusion MX (CFMX) Linux to run on the Mac. On Jan 7, 2003 Macromedia announced that the combination of JRun and CFMXJ2EE are available for the Mac. This changes everything! JRun is a J2EE-Certified application server. It can be used to deploy enterprise-level applications on the Mac. CFMX for J2EE (CFMXJ2EE) is our old friend, in a new package, that can... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2003/04/06/mplayer.html by KIVILCIM Hindistan 04/10/2003 MPlayer to rule them all, MPlayer to show them, MPlayer to bring them together, and in the darkness encode them. You have Linux on desktop, you have broadband. You have cutting edge p2p file sharing programs, but cannot get all the fun. Why? Because you lack a very important component, a decent movie player. Search no more. MPlayer is here for all your needs. Be it mpg, avi, mov, Real Media, or even the latest version of Windows Media Player files,... http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/11/28/scrollkeeper.html by Kendall Grant Clark November 28, 2001 The Document Collection Problem Operating systems are very complex these days, composed of many parts and pieces. Linux, like other Unix-like, free software operating systems, is really just a collection of autonomous and dependent software packages. On my workstation there are about 850 packages at last count. A moderately busy, production Internet server might have as many as 650 packages. And a development server, supporting diverse activities... http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/SQL-Server/Executing-SQL-Server-Stored-Procedure-from-Perl/ ( Page 1 of 5 ) This article illustrates how to setup a development environment using Perl and SQL Server on the following platforms: Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux, and Sun Solaris. Step by step, you can learn, and may choose, the best way that fits into your own requirements. Stored procedures are intensively used in SQL Server-based development today. The Perl language is the most useful administration language on the Unix/Linux environment. Since Web technologies have risen in... http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2002_05/magazine/columns/strategy/ .NET applications are a sure thing for Windows, but it'll take cross platform expansion for Microsoft to compete in high-end enterprise accounts. by Mark Driver For this solution: .NET Framework, Java, C#, Linux, Mono I n last month's column, I compared .NET and Java and covered several issues related to how these platforms are becoming the de facto choices for the vast majority of new e-business-centric application development efforts. Because Java will be .NET's primary competition... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3595531 By Aaron Weiss March 30, 2006 Earlier this month we looked at NetStumbler , an application for surveying wireless networks. While NetStumbler is the most popular tool of its kind for Windows machines, users of Linux, BSD and Mac OS X have Kismet , a roughly analogous though some would say more thorough utility for discovering wireless networks. Kismet detects the presence of wireless networks, including those with hidden SSIDs. It can discover and report the IP range used for a... http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/newsletters/20020820.html by Derrick Story Network Newsletter for 08/20/2002 Dear Reader, We've just posted a good technical article titled, " Integrating Tomcat with Apache Via the mod_jk Module ." A few years ago this would have been a "Linux only" piece, but this excellent tutorial by Chad Thompson was written for Mac OS X, and is featured on our Mac DevCenter. Things have changed, haven't they? True, Linux continues to dominate on the server side of the equation (and deserves to because it has proven itself...