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Yes, LinuxFocus is 5 years old! It started
in November 1997 when
Miguel
put the first issue together with some friends. Since then it has
developed into a really big knowledge base with a lot of different
articles. From the original team only John Perr is still with us. In
1997 I was still a Linux newbie and had Slackware running for just
over one year. When I discovered the magazine at the beginning of 1998
I was fascinated by the idea of a free international magazine. The
quality of the articles was good and it was an "honest" magazine. Quite
in contrast to many commercial magazines full of advertisements and
product reviews financed by the manufactures. I still remember that I
couldn't wait for the next issue to come out. When it was there I read
the articles until late in the night. And I started to write articles
myself. Of course it was a shock to see that the original LinuxFocus team wanted to give up after the January
1999 issue and so I became editor in chief... Over the years the site
changed from editing every article manually to a more manageable system
that separates content and layout. The layout is generated by scripts.
LinuxFocus continued with a
team of new and old people but it kept its
original spirit until today.
Happy Birthday!
-- Guido
LinuxFocus.org Articles
Hardware
Kernel Corner
-
Fail Safe Port Allocation for
Linux Device Drivers
, by
Dr. B. Thangaraju
Writing a device driver is a challenging and an adventurous job. Once the
device is registered in the driver's init_module routine, the resources
for the device should be allocated. One of the main resources for the
device is I/O port. For dynamically linked drivers, the developer should
be careful to allocate unused range of port addresses for their device.
Software Development
Unix Basics
-
(X)dialog: Talking shells
, by
Katja and Guido Socher
Xdialog and dialog are two classic utilities to enhance your shell
scripts with a graphical user interface.
System Administration
-
Root-kits and integrity
, by
Frédéric Raynal
This article presents the different operations a cracker can do after
having succeeded in entering a machine. We will also discuss what an
administrator can do to detect that the machine has been jeopardized.
Applications
The LinuxFocus Tip
How to reduce the size of compiled files? A compiled file
still contains a lot of symbol information. This symbol information
can be thought of as symbolic references. During normal execution
this information is not needed and can be removed. This reduces
the size and accelerates start-up because less data needs to be
read from disk. All you need to do is run
strip /the/compiled/binary
Here is an example:
/usr/bin# ls -l kmail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2363005 Apr 17 17:04 kmail
/usr/bin# strip kmail
/usr/bin# ls -l kmail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2004492 Sep 1 14:27 kmail
The size is reduced by 358513 bytes!
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Guide