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A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tutorial about how to convert OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 to the rolling release OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I decided to try it, and recorded this video while doing so. Enjoy!

Nessus is a great security audit tool, and it works quite well with Ubuntu. But, if you install Nessus from the Ubuntu repositories, you're going to be stuck with an older version. If you need the better functionality of the newest version, you'll need to download it from the Nessus.org website. To complicate matters a bit more, there's a 64-bit version of the Nessus server, but there's only a 32-bit version of the Nessus client. So, if you're running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, you'll need to work a bit of magic to get everything to work properly. (Don't fear, though, it's not that hard.)

Lynis is a handy, simple-to-use security auditing tool by Michael Boelen, who also wrote Rootkit Hunter. It's free GPL-licensed software that can be used on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PcBSD, Mac OSX, or Solaris.

Super GRUB Disk can fix a wide variety of boot-up problems on GRUB-based systems. It's easy to use, yet versatile. And, it's quite well-documented. As good as it is though, it doesn't seem to get a lot of publicity in the Linux press. (I only know about it from perusing a Linux help forum.)

As you study for your LPI exams, you may find that what's in your study materials doesn't always match what's on your Linux system. That's because the study materials still contain quite a bit of out-of-date information. To make things worse, as of this writing in July of 2008, the official LPI exam objectives also cover some out-of-date material. So, there's a chance that you could see some of it on your exams.

Sometimes, you can learn things by watching your Linux system perform an update. A few weeks ago, I was updating one of my Ubuntu systems, when I saw that "lshw" was one of the items that was getting updated. So, I pulled up its man page to see what it's about.

Sometimes, you can learn things by watching your Linux system perform an update. A few weeks ago, I was updating one of my Ubuntu systems, when I saw that "lshw" was one of the items that was getting updated. So, I pulled up its man page to see what it's about.

As I was perusing the Linux forums this morning, I found a thread that was started by someone who was interested in learning about Linux server administration. He mentioned a (ahem!) certain commercial website that specializes in selling Linux training courses. His basic questions were, "Does anyone know anything about this outfit?", and "Are their training courses worth the price?" A few people answered positively, but a few others, who hadn't had any experience with this site, answered with "Why spend the money, when there are lots of free training courses on the Web?"

Modern CPU's can be power-hungry beasts, and they can also run quite hot. Take, for example, the highest speed offerings from both Intel and AMD. Intel's 3.0 Gigahertz Yorkfield Quad-core is rated to consume about 130 Watts of power, while AMD's 3.0 Gigahertz 6000+ Dual-core is rated to consume about 125 Watts. Fortunately, modern processors from both companies now include a power-saving technology known as CPU Frequency Scaling. So, when super-high speeds aren't needed, the frequency will get scaled back, so that the CPU consumes less power and runs cooler. (AMD's implementation of this is called Cool n' Quiet, and Intel's implementation is called SpeedStep.) This is all supposed to happen automatically, but there may be times when you'll want to control it manually. Here's one example of why.

When Ubuntu 7.10--aka "Gutsy Gibbon"--came out, one of the major complaints from the masses was about video problems. Some video problems were so bad, that the machines were all but unusable. To their credit, the Ubuntu folk heard their cries, and quickly released a raft-load of bug-fixes. However, that didn't fix all of the problems.

Just about every Linux distro comes with a variety of programming tools. Some automatically get installed when you install Linux, and others are available in the distro's package repositories. But, what if the development tools that come with your distro don't do the job for you? What if, for example, you want to develop software in Pascal or BASIC, and your distro's repositories don't contain tools for those languages?

A while back, we bought a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with a winning bid of about $20.00 or so. It has a 360 MHz SPARC processor, 128 Meg of RAM, and an eight gigabyte harddrive. Most computers from Ebay are sold without operating systems, and this machine was no exception. Installing an operating system on Sun equipment isn't hard, once you know how to do it.