Many useful tools exist to easily write HTML text but putting off the difficulties found in this language. These tools are mostly found in Wikis and doc-comments. One great example of such a language is MediaWiki used in the well-known Wikipedia. I’ll write more on these tools and languages since I have more knowledge and discretion with them.
The ones I have found are:
- reStructuredText
This format is used mostly in Python programs. - Markdown
Very popular nowadays, a variation of Markdown is used heavily in GitHub. It is quire simple and elegant. Here is a short tutorial of the format.
As it’s mentioned in its official web site, “Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web.”
So, Markdown is heavily used for HTML conversions and simple text reading of a document. In contrary, creation of PDF files is not so elegant. - AsciiDoc
This format is my own favorite. It produces rather elegant Web sites.
I just discovered a light-weight but yet quite useful and functional blog engine, Nibbleblog. I intend to install it locally and use it as a simple, personal diary.
There is also a demo version for validating before installing it in your web server.
Very often I come up with an interesting live distribution that I want to test or look around, but I don’t want to spend another one CD/DVD for just testing this live distro. Of course, many of these live CDs come also with images for USB startups. Unfortunately, most of my computers are so old that they can’t boot properly from their USB sticks. So, I have left a lot of unseen information on my disks without bothering to burn all these images on yet another CD.
All this situation was happening until now. Now I discovered Plop Boot Manager, a tool that lets you boot from a USB disk with the help of a single CD or (even) a Floppy disk. In other words, you burn once and test many live distributions! I’ve first read about this useful tool at this article. Read more…
In another great introductory article at ServerWatch, the tool pam_limits is introduced (actually is kernel’s module). It makes administrator’s life easier by limiting access and usage of a system to specific users or groups.
I’ve just read in an article at LinuxJournal about some tools useful for network administration and hacking. Although some of them are already well-known, the list on this subject steadily grows as new members are added. I note this list here so I can use these tools in my local machines and any server I have to administer. Certainly, I have to investigate and test them more thoroughly, so that I can discover their potentials and any vulnerabilities in my systems. Read more…
Last week I made some extensive changes to the partitions of my Linux machine. Although most of them went with no problem, nevertheless I faced some problems when I’ve changed the size and type of my boot partition. This time the problems related to Grub.
More specifically, after I resized my boot partition, changed its filetype, copied all the original files back to their previous place, I finally updated my /etc/fstab file (I used to spread my filesystem across many partitions, now I merged most of them into a single one, the boot partition) and, of course, my /boot/grub/menu.lst file. The changes to the last file were minimal and, I dare to say, secondary, since I’ve only updated the new UUIDs of my boot partition (when a partition changes in size, its UUID also changes). Everything seemed perfectly done and I’ve expected my system to normally boot after the reset. Unfortunately… Read more…
I’ve read in this article at Linuxaria.com about the possibility of administering a Linux system through a Web interface. Although it doesn’t sound like a great idea to administer a system through Web (instead of my favourite method, editing text configuration files!), I leave a note here for future reference. I may investigate more the mentioned open-source solutions for Web Administration and I need to write some notes about. Read more…
I needed the previous day a small and fast to load LiveCD, without any perky luxuries of X or graphics in general. After all, I had a very simple job to do and I wanted something to boot really fast and let me perform any actions from the command-line. I did boot an Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, but that was too much for me, since it booted in a Gnome environment. After that, I used the terminal application to run my commands. So, why all this trouble of loading this huge desktop environment if I’m going to use only simple command-line tools?
After a little research, I came up with a small distribution, called INX (INX Is Not X, exactly what I needed for).
INX can also be ran as a virtual machine. In its site there are some downloads for virtual machine images, ready to run with Qemu or VirtualBox. Interesting!
In this answer of a user’s question, the author mentions the use of rsync -aH while copying directories or filesystems, for preserving the hard-links of a filesystem (together with preserving permissions, owner/group information and symbolic links), and also the use of -A and -X for preserving any ACL or XATTR attributes of the filesystem.
He mentions that there is nothing wrong on using these options to rsync invocation except for slower backup operations and more memory needed during the operation. Read more…
A great feature of Bash, but rather arcane, is its auto-complete function. A function that is very customizable and expandable. Bash not only offers some off-the-shelf ready features for auto-completion, but it allows anyone to expand this list in any way she/he wishes.
Unfortunately, Bash‘s manual is not very helpful. Since it references only the interfaces, it doesn’t give many hints on how to use these features or giving any helpful examples. Nevertheless, I found a great article, where many of these features are explained in a well understood and simple language.
I don’t know if this issue is in concern (it might become in the future). I’ve just read an article about synchronizing the time of a Windows machine using the NTP protocol. Just in case, I copy the relevant section with the unknown information regarding the setup of the Windows environment. Read more…
Trying to solve a similar problem in Gnome, I came up with the following situation: how someone can alter the filetype associations? In other words, which program is responsible for opening/working with a specific type of files and how can we alter this relationship? Read more…
Or, in other words, alternatives to Gnome and KDE!
It is an unquestioned fact that both Gnome and KDE are, maybe, the best desktops around. Unfortunately, they come with the expense of needing a lot of horse-power from the computer’s resources. Since I still maintain a few rather old machines, I need to have a list of alternate desktops or window managers that can be used instead of the two “beasts”!
Recently, I’ve found a site with great tutorials. I need to spend some time on skimming them. There is indeed great information hidden in there.
I started reading the tutorial about basics on Gnome. I realized that everybody knows to work with Gnome when he first confronts with it, but very few have dived into its inner mechanisms. Basically, I may say that I know nothing about Gnome. And this is a great property of a software. It’s almost intuitive! Read more…
break linux 