Supplemental tips/topics for 95-799 Linux

Printing lecture notes

The white-on-dark-blue color scheme used in the class Powerpoints is optimized for display, not printing. Powerpoint may print them as solid black backgrounds, which is harder to read and uses lots of toner.

There is a simple fix - Look for the option in the print dialog box for "Pure Black and White". Choose this, and you will get the desired black text on a blank background.

Where are the files stored when booted from the LiveCD?

The directory structure you see when booted from the LiveCD is essentially a ramdisk - a section of memory formatted as if it were a disk drive. When you shut down your machine, all those files disappear.

It is possible to access ("mount" in unix terms) your physical hard drive partitions. Prior to Ubuntu 7.10 you would have to do extra steps to look at those, and if the drives/partitions are formatted with NTFS, they would be read-only. In Ubuntu 7.10 onward, you can simply click on the disks in the file explorer view and access them read/write.

VMWare networking tip

If your networking in your Linux virtual machine doesn't seem to work, try these steps:

As root in a terminal window, run "dhclient". This requests a new IP address from the DHCP server.

If that doesn't help, try stopping and restarting the VMware NAT Service in your windows control panel.

How to stop beeps from virtual machines

You may notice that "beep" sounds from your virtual machine are emitted by your host's speaker even if you host volume is set to low or mute. The reason your sound settings don't affect this is:

"PC Beep is a port on the motherboard, and actually has nothing to do with the sound card. I don't know how it works on Linux offhand, but on Windows there is an API call (now deprecated) to generate beeps and the beep port emulation directly calls that API."

To disable it, add the following line to your C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini file:

mks.noBeep = "TRUE"

Installing Ubuntu directly on Thinkpads

Ubuntu-Thinkpad.html
For those interested in installing Linux directly on their laptops, instead of running inside VMWare. This is NOT REQUIRED for class, and you risk TOTAL LOSS OF ALL DATA ON YOUR LAPTOP.

Microsoft Business Practices

Microsoft-business-practices.html
The topic of why many people in IT (and OSS in particular) hate Microsoft comes up repeatedly, so in this document I lay out an overview of my perspective on their business practices to give you some sense of the things they do to deserve this reputation.