Linux Cookbook

Linux tips, hints and how-to's.

Here are some tips, hints, and how-to's for Linux fans of all stripes. But don't just read the articles--keep going for even more help and insight from the readers' comments.

• Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins from IBM developerWorks comes this nice little collection of very neat tricks, including how to recover your root password, unmounting an unresponsive DVD drive, and more.
• 10 ways to make Linux boot faster includes even more tips on how to streamline your system's boot performance--and at the same time, performance in general. Simplify, simplify.
• Anatomy of the Linux file system is another nice, comprehensive and technical overview to the Linux file system. And it's from IBM developerWorks, so you know it's accurate.
• CLI Magic: For geek cred, try these one-liners is a nice, quick introduction to using pipes at the command line, as well as doing some text processing with grep and gawk. From Linux.com.
• Easily Password Protect a Website or Subdirectory OK, so this one isn't strictly Linux, but it's nice to know how to do it.
• Sync and Back Up Your Data with Conduit for Linux While it's great to have yet another tool for backup, there's more to Conduit than just backups. Check it out!

Let me know how you like these links--and if you have any good ones to add!

Good advice about backups

There are many approaches to doing backups. Unfortunately, most of them are some variation of "it's too much trouble". But even if you are doing backups, this article reminds us that Your backup is only as good as your last restore.

Which brings me to another article about backup, this one much more technical and complete, from IBM: Automate backups on Linux. Maybe not everything you need to know about automating your backups, but it's a good place to start if you need to know your backups are being done, and being done securely.

Command line-fu from Foogazi

You only really get better at the command line by using the command line, so it might seem counter-intuitive to write about 10 Linux Commands You Probably Don’t Use. If you don't use the command line, there's a lot more than 10 that you don't use--but if you do use the command line at all, or what to use it more, definitely read that link.

Check out Foogazi for more Linux tips/news/etc. The last week or so seem to have been heavy on the "what's so great about Linux" articles that Linux-lovers always love, but there's plenty of other how-to goodness in there.