Matt Van Stone

Here is a quick tip for Linux. I use this all the time. If you are trying to remember a command you once did but cant remember the syntax use the following:

history |grep keyword

So if I do history |grep chmod it will tell me all of the commands that I have typed in that contain the word chmod.

matt@ubuntu:~$ history |grep chmod
   70  chmod a+x vlc
  325  chmod a+x downgrade.sh
  326  sudo chmod a+x downgrade.sh
  505  history |grep chmod

You can pipe a lot of things through grep. cat filename |grep keyword can be handy too. This will give you all the lines in filename that have the word keyword in them.

Ubuntu will be releasing 7.04 Feisty Fawn within the next month and I’m pretty excited about it. Aside from the bluetooth issues I had with 6.10, the current version has served me well, and there has been a lot of good buzz about 7.04. By the way, in case you people aren’t up to speed, the Ubuntu “versions” are named by year.month since each release is significant enough to warrant a whole new version number.

At the same time as being excited there is sooo much I have customized on my current install that I dread having to go back and do it all over again now that it is working good. On top of that, the upgrade process NEVER works 100%, and since I have done so much to my install I’m guessing I would have a hell of a time with that. Here is the stuff I can think of off the top of my head that I will have to do:

Of course I’ll have to backup all of my files and settings from my current install. I found a pretty good method of making a tarball backup of everything, so I’m not so worried about that.

After I install 7.04:

• My monitor never works out of the box so modify xorg.conf to fix that
• Install the nVidia driver
• Install Beryl
• Tweak my Xorg.conf file for video/mouse/keyboard settings
• Install automatix and all of the extra apps
• Install Fasterfox, del.icio.us, and adsense extensions to Firefox
• Install smbfs and setup automatic mounting of shares from my fileserver
• Install Amarok
• Configure my desktop/theme/root theme/kde theme/custom logon/custom splash
• Turn off tooltips in gconf-editor
• Turn off panel animations in gconf-editor
• Tweak Beryl

This is all that I can think of off the top of my head too… I’m sure I’ll have a list almost equal in length of stuff that I forgot. I have been considering trying Suse or Kubuntu too. Who knows that’ll happen.

Anyway, the release date is April 19th. I’ll probably wait a week or two after that to see what all the major bugs are. By then people on Ubuntu Forums will have a fix for most of them.

This weekend we made the switch from Telus to Shaw for internet and phone. There were two things keeping me with Telus. One was they never complained about how much I downloaded. Well actually, they did once, but they totally had a right too (360GB in one month). To be honest I was just trying to see how much I could get away with. The other reason was to switch to Shaw phone would cost me $55/month instead of $30. But now things have changed. I’m not downloading nearly as much as I used to and Shaw has introduced their Shaw Phone Lite for $29.99 (+$0.04/minute long distance). So now for the same price I was paying for high-speed and phone at Telus, I’m getting high-speed (that’s twice as fast [5Mbps vs 2.5 @ Telus]) and Phone with call-display (call display is extra at Telus).

So basically it was a no brainer at this point.

A few things I want to mention… The guy who installed the internet had to look at my computer after the internet was installed and note all the specs. So I booted it up into Windows for him because he didn’t know crap about Linux. When it booted up he wanted to know why I didn’t have an anti-virus installed in Windows. Well, it’s probably because I don’t use Windows. Not only that, but be didn’t even want to look at the Mac. Anyway. I should have just left him in Linux and told him I didn’t even have Windows. Then he wanted to look at the setup on my fileserver. I just told him it was Linux too and it was internal only, both of which are lies. I can understand wanting to take a look a the computer just to confirm that you aren’t going to call Shaw in 20 minutes to complain about your speed when you are running Windows 95 and IE 5. But I thought it was pretty obvious that I had everything under control.

I think I might need a new router though. When I had the Shaw hooked directly to my workstation it was blazingly fast. Pages loaded instantly. I reset the router to factory settings and reconfigured it. That seemed to make it a bit faster, but I still found a delay when it is doing the DNS lookup.

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