Linux Help – Newbies – New To Linux
New to Linux? Feeling a little intimidated? Starting to miss that cute little start button in the bottom left hand corner of your screen? Well….. don’t be intimidated and definetly don’t miss that button! Below you’ll find answers to the most basic questions/commands that you might be asking yourself right about now.
Tons of useful commands and advice for those Linux noobs out there.
Is OS X going to have to give way to another OS like Linux?
The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers- not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity. As of December 2004, the Mac share as measured by online activity is 2.7 percent (Linux is 3.1), with all the rest going to various flavors of Windows. I’m now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple’s inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins.
The company figures it has certain market niches locked down. This includes computer users in advertising agencies, news bureaus, and various professional organizations as well as creative artists and writers. I also count an odd, die-hard faction of true believers, but these people are inconsequential except in online forums, where they make a fuss whenever anyone discusses the Mac. They probably hurt the Mac community more than anyone by creating an unfair crackpot image that gets associated with the machine.
CEO Steve Jobs’ star persona makes the situation worse. His attention to the Apple flagship has been eroded by the success of Pixar, and more recently, by the iPod and iTunes initiatives. None of these has anything to do with the Macintosh. Keeping it on track is a full-time task- Jobs cannot be in the computer business, the movie business, and the music business and make them all successful. You see the results. Market share for the Mac is crap.
The Paper Napkin email rejection service
So here’s the scenario: You’re out at a bar, riding transit, or even just walking down the street, and some bozo who desperately wants into your pants starts up a conversation with you. Rather than make a scene or make them upset, you’re polite and at least nod at the proper times. Then, of course, they ask you for your number. Except this is 2004, so maybe they ask for your email address instead.
That’s where Paper Napkin comes in. Give them anyname@papernapkin.net (or paamail.com, to be less suspicious), tell them it’s your address, and when they write you, they’ll automatically get a response telling them how badly they’ve been rejected. If they sound desperate enough, it may even get posted and ridiculed. Yes, it’s cruel, so use it wisely.
How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)
How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)
Posted on 12/12/2004 12:45:50 PM PST by KoRnHere’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!
Put a Face on that Clam (Download)
12.23.2004 @ 09:05 AM PT | Mike Oliveri
A common question from Linux users, particularly new Linux users, is “Do I need antivirus on my system?” My answer is usually “it depends.” For the most part, unless you’re sharing files with Windows users (whether via Samba or across the Internet), dual-booting into a Windows environment, or running a mail server, you probably don’t need antivirus. For the time being, antivirus on Linux is more for the protection of others than of your own system.
If you do need antivirus, one of the most commonly-used Linux packages is ClamAV. It’s licensed under the GPL, it’s under active development, and it’s a very capable and flexible scanner. However, the base package is primarly command-line driven.
I have been using ClamAV for several weeks now- not because I share across a network with Drew and Dad much, but because I’m just paranoid like that. I get a lot of email from people on Windows, and the last thing I want to do is spread an email virus to other Windows users. Also, I do a lot of video editing and packaging, then uploading, so I don’t want to be the deliverer of virii to those who download. ClamAV is a great program, I most definitely recommend it for those interested in anti-virus protection on Linux. Their database has all of the Windows virii in there, and you can update the database with a simple ‘freshclam’ in the terminal. Easy and free protection, it doesn’t get much better!
Walmart.com debuts sub-$500 Linux laptop
Wal-Mart has added a sub-$500 Linux laptop to its online store. The $498 Balance laptop comes preloaded with Linspire’s desktop Linux operating system and is claimed to be the lowest priced laptop on the market that includes a complete operating system and office suite.
The 8-pound system includes a 1.0 GHz Via C3 processor with 128MB RAM memory (expandable to 512MB), a 14.1-inch LCD screen, a 30GB hard drive, and a CD-ROM drive. Software bundled with the laptop includes Linspire’s version 4.5 Linux operating system, the OpenOffice.org office suite, email, browser, instant messaging, Internet phone calling, photo, music, and firewall software. Dimensions are 1.5 x 13.0 x 10.75 inches.
Linspire says it supports the laptop with more than 1,900 free software programs available for download, and three months of software updates.
Further details are available at http://www.walmart.com
The Official Peanuts Website – Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Friends – Charles Schulz | Strip Library
I found this comic strip to be quite entertaining, especially since most students are going through finals week or have just recently finished.
Eric’s Archived Thoughts: SES Chicago Report
Based on what was said in the panel and the fleeting conversations I was able to have (sometimes from the podium) with Matt Bailey and Shari Thurow, here’s what I took away from the conference:
* Semantic markup does not hurt your search engine rankings. It may even provide a small lift. However, the lift will be tiny, and it isn’t always a semantic consideration. Search engines seem to use markup the same way humans do: headings and elements that cause increased presentational weight, such as
and (pibby notes: X’s added by me so formatting is ok), will raise slightly the weight of the content within said elements. So even the presentational-effect elements can have an effect. They also stated that if you’re using elements solely to increase ranking, you’re playing a loser’s game.
* The earlier content sits in the document, the more weight it has… but again, this is a very minor effect.
* Hyperlink title attribute and longdesc text has no effect, positive or negative, on search engine ranking. The advice given was to have a link’s title text be the same as its content, and that anything you’d put into a longdesc should just go into the page itself. (Remember: this advice is ruthlessly practical and specific to search-engine ranking, not based on any notions of purity.)
* Having a valid document neither helps nor hurts ranking; validation is completely ignored. The (paraphrased) statement from a Yahoo! representative was that validation doesn’t help find better information for the user, because good information can (and usually does) appear on non-valid pages.
* Search engine indexers don’t care about smaller pages, although the people who run them do care about reducing bandwidth consumption, so they like smaller pages for that reason. But not enough to make it affect rankings.
* A lot of things that we take for granted as being good, like image-replacement techniques and Flash replacement techniques, are technologically indistinguishable from search-engine spamming techniques. (Mostly because these things are often used for the purpose of spamming search engines.) Things like throwing the text offscreen in order to show a background image, hiding layers of text for dynamic display, and so forth are all grouped together under the SEO-industry term “cloaking”. As the Yahoo! guy put it, 95% of cloaking is done for the specific purpose of spamming or otherwise rigging search engine results. So the 5% of it that isn’t… is us. And we’re taking a tiny risk of search-engine banishment because our “make this look pretty” tools are so often used for evil.
kevin rose dot com: 2004 sucky site redesign goes to…
Winner of the 2004 sucky site redesign goes to… Pricewatch.com. What happened? Not only does the site design suck, but the code jacks up FireFox
Good call Kevin, it’s hideous!
Linux To Ring Up $35 Billion By 2008 (Linux)
12.16.2004 @ 09:17 PM PT | Matt Hartley
Ya know, for an OS that is not suppose to be making companies any money, Linux tallying up to $35 billion by 2008 is a rather surprising I think. $35 large people! That is insane, especially considering that much of those figures have to be hurting Microsoft’s market share.
Where will Linux be by 2010? Good question. At this point I would venture to guess that it is will not only surpass those dollar figures, but also be playing a major part along side of Windows in the desktop market by then.
Hello! My name is Katie, I'm 26 and from Houston, TX. I am a hardworking and passionate freelance web designer with a degree in eBusiness Web Development who creates clean and professional looking websites of the highest quality. I specialize in standards-based XHTML and CSS web development. The sites I develop are built to be search engine friendly!
You can find me on Twitter at @pibby for my latest updates. I am an avid computer user and my OS of choice is Mac OS X. I am most happy at home with my loving fiance', Drew, and our two loud but adorable dogs, Toby and Shelby.
Phone: (281) 374-4780
Email: KatieDixon [at] gmail · com