<-- | Map | Index | Search

Welcome to the LinuxFocus July/August 2004 issue

summer 2004 The LinuxTag was held end of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is the biggest Linux event in Germany and as stated on the banner above the entrance also the biggest in Europe. However if we compare it to LSM in France or Fosdem in Belgium it is less international than the later two. LinuxTag had presentations in English but most things (including the web site http://www.linuxtag.org) is in German. It is also not so much a come together for Linux fans and developers but a Linux fair. Hp, Novell, Redhat, IBM and many others had all big booths. Non commercial projects like Gentoo, KDE, cinepaint, symlink, ffii ... were also there. Over 100 booth in total. It was good to see how big and important Linux is and LinuxTag is a presentation/exhibition of the Linux success to the public but I really missed the enthusiastic workshop atmosphere that you find at other Linux events. It would be nice if LinuxTag would be more international and had not only booth and presentations but also workshops for the community.

Click here to get to the LinuxTag 2004 picture gallery

-- Guido Socher

LinuxFocus.org Articles

UNIX Basics

Why does this not work!? How to find and fix faults in Linux applications. , by Guido Socher

Everybody claims that it is easy to find and fix bugs in programs written under Linux. Unfortunately it is very hard to find documents explaining how to do that.

Software Development

Temperature Monitoring With Linux (Part 2) , by Stefan Blechschmidt

In the second part of "Temperature Monitoring With Linux" we see how to store the data in mysql and represent it graphically.

Applications

Dia, a diagram creation program , by Katja Socher

Dia a gnome based diagram editor.

Kernel Corner

Data Loss: Worst Case Scenario , by Detlef Müller

A real-life case of data loss with a happy end, thanks to reiserfsck. Three cheers for journaling file systems and their tools.

Interview with Jeff Dike , by Floris Lambrechts

User Mode Linux, UML in short, is one of the many interesting features in the 2.6.x Kernel. This is an interview with Jeff Dike, the creator of UML.

System Administration

vsftpd - An Introduction to the Very Secure FTP Daemon , by Mario M. Knopf

This article gives a basic introduction to the "Very Secure FTP Daemon". I am beginning with a general description of FTP and vsftpd. After that we will have a look at the installation, configuration and start options of the vsftp daemon.

The LinuxFocus Tip

A HyperTerminal for Linux

Some times you just what to connect to a router via serial line or you need to test a modem. All you need is a dumb terminal that attaches to the serial line with a given speed, no parity, 8-bit etc... Most Linux distributions offer minicom or kermit for this task. Those program are however terrible to use for such a simple taks. They are way to complex to configure.

Here are two very good alternatives:

gtkterm:
gtkterm is serial port terminal written in GTK+. Just run

gtkterm -p /dev/ttyS0

and you can comunicate over the rs232 line. To dial out with a modem you just type ATDTyourPhoneNumber and hit return. A nice feature of gtkterm is that it shows you the status of the RS232 control lines (DTR, RST, CTS, CD, DSR, RI).
gtkterm is available from http://www.jls-info.com/julien/linux/ (local copy: gtkterm-0.99.4.tar.gz, 276Kb)

cu:
cu is a serial port terminal that you just start in a shell (no GUI). You use cu like this:

cu -l /dev/ttyS0 dir

To get out of cu type: ~.

cu is part of the uucp package: http://www.airs.com/ian/uucp.html