Red Hat 9

This is my first posting from Red Hat 9 and so far I’m impressed!
Fonts in the GUI are nice, and even though I knew about it, the animated cursors and cursor changes are “pretty” and gave me a pleasant surprise!

Out of curiousity I tried configuring a printer and opened the Red Hat Printer Config tool. This turned out to be a very familiar wizard type application.
When I selected “Windows Network (SMB)” printer the tool displayed the PCs on the local network allowing me to choose the printer easily.
The first test print did fail, but that’s because the printer was turned off. When I printed the test page again it printed! The colours looked a bit strange in the colour wheel, White was a gradient from blue to white, Yellow was white!
I’m not too worried however as all I’ll be printing will be b/w text documents.

More on my experiences to follow..

Connecting a Nokia 7650 to Linux via Bluetooth

And for my next trick I shall get my 7650 talking to Linux via the Bluetooth dongle that arrived in the post yesterday.
This howto is useful, and links to the Bluez howto too. Unfortunately it all looks rather beta and requires the user compile and patch code.
‘s funny, the CD that comes with the dongle just asks you to run setup.exe (although I couldn’t get it to see my Nokia when I ran it in WinXP last night..)
So, as ever, Linux needs to catch up in this area but then Microsoft and Apple are catching up with Linux in others. (No, I refuse to get into a fight with you Mark on this.. hehe!)

Red Hat 8.0 – man garbage

For as long as I’ve had Red Hat 8.0 installed I’ve had trouble using “man” and other marked up terminal apps. The marked up text appeared as garbage and only by careful examination could one spot the useful information trapped inside! Here’s the answer, courtesy of the Chicago LUNI list. European users may want to try another locale, and Irish users could find “en_IE@euro” most useful!

[ILUG] serious linux worm on the loose

I haven’t seen this hit the mainstream press, or slashdot or anywhere yet. It could be some obvious hole missed while configuring these Red Hat 7.3 boxes but I’m worried. 8 Red Hat 7.3 boxes were broken into and rooted. John doesn’t know how they were cracked, almost missed it but thinks it might be a worm mentioned in Phrack a while back..
I checked my own Red Hat 7.3 boxes and they appear to be fine but given the nature of the worm, it won’t be easy to find without shutting down first.