Category Archives: Linux

Sed one-liners

Cool! Several handy one-liners for use in Sed, the stream editor.

# double space a file
sed G

# double space a file which already has blank lines in it. Output file
# should contain no more than one blank line between lines of text.
sed ‘/^$/d;G’

# triple space a file
sed ‘G;G’

# undo double-spacing (assumes even-numbered lines are always blank)
sed ‘n;d’

The SBPost and Me!

about 10 days ago a journalist from the Sunday Business Post rang asking me about Linux in TradeSignals. A brief interview followed, but then 2 days later a photographer called out and took a picture of me stuggling with a laptop while smiling bravely. I prefer being on the other side of the camera..
Those of you who didn’t buy the newspaper on Sunday are spared the picture of me, and the article (unfortunately), but there is an article about a CEO who tried Linspire on his laptop and was surprised to find it easy to install and use.
They also put their obligitory Microsoft FUD article online too which is a bit disappointing as it’s quite misleading and repeats the usual MS line. Oh well!
Later… This was mentioned on The ILUG mailing list on Sunday, and here too, along with some more thought about the pro-Microsoft article.

Linux: Tuning Swappiness, eh?

Via slashdot, I thought this thread on how swappy Linux should be would be informative but it appears to be very subjective.
I tested with swappiness set high and low, along with Mozilla FF, Thunderbird, xchat and mgt, I opened 3 2560×1920 images in the GIMP and performed a few operations on each. Neither setting affected performance much, except that with swappiness set high it may have been a little slower. That said, the GIMP maintains it’s own cache, and I have that set at 256MB.
I have swappyness set to 10 now. Not sure if that’s good or bad, or whatever.. *shrug*

My Settop Box – Easy Linux PVR

This project looks promising. It’s an attempt to make MythTV easier to install by supplying it with Knoppix. AFAICT you install the backend on your server and it’s even possible to run the frontend from the Knoppix CD on a different machine. Unfortunately the recommended hardware spec is well beyond any of the machines I own. That said, I’ve downloaded the ISO so I’ll certainly give it a go!

Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

In a radio interview (realaudio link) this morning an “expert” told the nation that the DDOS attack on SCO was orchestrated by “people who are promoting a thing called open system software where by you can have competitors for the Microsoft products which are essentially free.” Peter Aherne provided a brief transcript of the interview and it looks shocking in it’s ignorance of the facts!
There’s a lengthy thread on the ILUG about it including links to articles debunking the interview.
The serious accusations in this interview need an answer and sooner rather than later!
Update! Nils posted a cleaned up transcript of the interview, and Gavin McCullagh posted one too.