You might save some time and have a little fun by putting some aliases and functions in your .bashrc file. You can put functions or aliases in .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory. But by using .bashrc instead of .bash_profile, they’ll be read in not only when you log in, but whenever you start […]

Sometimes in the course of a system’s existence you find that the swap partition you set up at install-time just isn’t enough anymore. Maybe you’re upgrading your system to RedHat 7.1 from a version of RedHat that used less swap in relation to physical RAM. Perhaps you’re running Oracle. Or maybe you’re adding more memory […]

You can get it from the mirrors here: kernel.org/mirrors or here: kernel.org. Check our our article on compiling the Linux kernel. One trick we’d like to remind you of from the article is to use “make oldconfig” to migrate your old .config file (usually in /usr/src/linux). You will be asked about just the options that […]

You might save some time and have a little fun by putting some aliases and functions in your .bashrc file. You can put functions or aliases in .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory. But by using .bashrc instead of .bash_profile, they’ll be read in not only when you log in, but whenever you start […]

Before you do anything else, make sure you have a way to boot the OS.  Make a bootdisk and test it. Get the source for the kernel and put it in /usr/src. cd /usr/src tar -xzf <kernel source file name> The kernel source lives in /usr/src/linux.  Linux is usually a symbolic link to the source […]

uname -a You’ll see something like this: Linux u-1.signalq.com 2.4.6 #2 SMP Sat Jul 14 09:02:08 PDT 2001 i686 unknown

One task that we often do is remove rpms that are installed by default. In this example, we will find out what rpm apache uses and we will uninstall it. What we need to do is find the name of the apache package: [root@srv-3 RPMS]# rpm -qa | grep apache apache-1.3.19-5 [root@srv-3 RPMS]# So, we […]

For those of you who wish to learn more about how a GNU/Linux system is put together, or if you want to have more control over your GNU/Linux system, check out Linux From Scratch (LFS). The commands for building a system from scratch are provided, as well as step-by-step instructions and explanations. Simply download the […]

I’ve mentioned Linux From Scratch in previous articles. I’ve discovered another tool related to this project that rocks called ALFS, or Automatic Linux From Scratch. ALFS puts all of the specifications for compiling a linux system into an XML document and generates most of a Linux From Scratch system automatically. There are a couple of […]

For those of you managing GNU/Linux systems, you are certainly familiar with the wide range of filesystem heierarchies and utility locations. This makes it difficult to move between different vendors’ distributions. This is changing, in a large part due to the FHS standard. Check it out: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/