I Have The Power! – su vs. sudo: Core Concepts of Being a Superuser

Credit: http://sunshinewonderland.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/heman.jpg

For the new Linux user, that is quite a bit of weird looking garbage in the title, right?  The concept of the “Super User” is one that is often mis informed, or very much abused.  Too often users will use the super user account for things that do not even require it, or use it exclusively as their regular account.  This ia very bad way to go about things, and you’ll soon find out why.  A good misnomer:  I am *not* an expert, but pride in learning the best methods and concepts of any particular concept.  Read on for more.

Core Concepts: Examining Load Average

I was going to summarize this long article, but do not really have the time to do so right now, and the words are still best preserved by the original author, Ray Walker of the Linux Journal.  Yes, Yes, I realize the article is dated 2006, but pretty much all of theses concepts still apply, even if a command or /proc location behavior has slightly altered.  If I am wrong, I gladly will correct myself.  Enjoy!

_professor

Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001

Featured Articles: “Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split”

Note:  This is probably the best writeup of the fragmented bin and lib system of Linux I have ever read so far.  Head past the quote for the full article:

“Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation (which consumed the Free
Standards Group in its’ ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily
document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand
why it was there in the first place. ‘Ken and Dennis leaked their OS into the
equivalent of home because an RK05 disk pack on the PDP-11 was too small” goes
whoosh over their heads.”

Source: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html

Core Concepts: Understanding Kernel Versioning

Often someone will ask in a forum, what the the heck the numbers mean in reference to the Linux kernel.  Most people just pass this off, and go on with thier lives, but isn’t it better understanding what it means!?  Ha, I know I know, boring right?   But I thrive on understanding neat stuff, and I wanted to simply break it down, just in case you were curious…

Getting To Know Your System: Basic Terminal Operations Guide

Knowing how to get around the Terminal is crucial to getting any further in its understanding in the first place. On any given command, appending “–help” or typing “man” and the command name will list very helpful informatino and additional options. Keep in mind, when specifying multipled options, you may add them together, i.e. “ls -lah” instead of “ls -l -a -h” Let’s go over the basic operations:

 

How To: Encrypting Files With Seahorse (GnuPG)

Part of the Series:”Encrypting Files With GnuPG”

MAIN ARTICLE

Hooray! an EASY way to use GPG! Well..sort of. You still should read up on gpg by reading the man page here before continuing.   In short, GPG stands for “Gnu Privacy Guard” and it is a tool that you can use to encrypt information. GPG implements the OpenPGP, which sets the norms and rules as to how data should be encrypted so that it can be passed along safely.  That said, I rather like Seahorse as a front-end GUI implementation of GnuPG.

Core Concepts: The Linux Filesystem

One of the common things most Linux users come into contact in learning their system is the file system structure.  Whether it be modifying files, making symbolic links, configuring Xorg, SSH, and much more, it is highly useful to familiarize yourself with the common paths and sections of your root (denoted by the “/” symbol) directory.  I will also list non-root directory and their purposes as well.

Read on for more…

Core Concepts: Understanding /etc/fstab, and seriously, WTF is fstab???

I just couldn’t help myself, I had to post at least something on my birthday, and what better thing to talk about, then fstab! Many new Linux users are mystified when their external drives, even mounted internally in their computer enclosures, don’t auto mount. They typically only discover this after manually mounting them in the File Explorer, then adding this media directory/source to something like XBMC, only to discover that there are no files if they reboot and re-enter XBMC.

Well fear no more Bros and Lady types! Hopefully by the end of this, you know how to auto mount your external drives and anything else you throw at it. Heck, I’ll even show you a few newbie-friendly GUI/Graphical applications if requested! If you have any questions, be sure to ask in the comments. Ok, let’s get this rolling.

Read on…