Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[devilock76]

Another cool thing to do with the Raspberry Pi that I just thought of is get a USB splitter and like 3-5 cameras that are all on a stick or something mounted to a backpack. Then have it set up like a security system, whereby they are attached to the raspberry pi (also in the bag) and they take a picture and store it once every 5 seconds. Then you could go to a protest or some other event (or just walk around anywhere) and get a 360 degree picture of everything going on the entire time you are there. Batch stitch them together when you get home. Could be like the van from google streetview, if you could get the cameras up high enough which shouldn't be hard.

I have this other idea of setting up as an on board computer on my fatboy, yes I have a fairing on my fatboy.

Ken

[Los ßnus]

In arch that statement would be pacman -Syu. Look, less keystrokes. Not sure what the problem was with arch when you installed it. I am yet to encounter a machine that would not take a basic install of arch. The fun starts when you setup wifi and X.

Technically apt-get is not the "accepted" modern way to do that in ubuntu, at least I remember hearing that. Truly every linux has some version of that. Slackware clones have slapt-get. Your rpm based distros use yellow dog so it should be yum update.

Technically speaking it should be the combination of...

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Been a while since I used a deb based distro. On my BSD boxes I run ./sysupdate.pl but that is a custom script I wrote as dealing with it by hand became annoying.

Ken

aptitude is the standard for debian, apt-get for ubuntu. you can still use aptitude in ubuntu which I do for dependencies and the like but apt-get is simpler and easier to use.

Another cool thing to do with the Raspberry Pi that I just thought of is get a USB splitter and like 3-5 cameras that are all on a stick or something mounted to a backpack. Then have it set up like a security system, whereby they are attached to the raspberry pi (also in the bag) and they take a picture and store it once every 5 seconds. Then you could go to a protest or some other event (or just walk around anywhere) and get a 360 degree picture of everything going on the entire time you are there. Batch stitch them together when you get home. Could be like the van from google streetview, if you could get the cameras up high enough which shouldn't be hard.


Edit: Or you could get some webcams for like $10 and have them all stream to live ustream through a USB wifi dongle (assuming you are near a public wifi connection)

Check this out
http://www.zoneminder.com/

you could make a kick ass CCTV system with that little raspberry box.

[devilock76]

aptitude is the standard for debian, apt-get for ubuntu. you can still use aptitude in ubuntu which I do for dependencies and the like but apt-get is simpler and easier to use.



Check this out
http://www.zoneminder.com/

you could make a kick ass CCTV system with that little raspberry box.

When I used debian and ubuntu apt-get was all I used and on a rare occasion synaptic. The last time I used ubuntu was my first netbook and at the time ubuntu was really the best and one of the few netbook remixed distros.

Ken

[shikitohno]

Sgreger, I think you're forgetting that you'll need some way to power all this stuff.

For me, the main benefit of Arch is as devilock said, it starts with a real minimalist install. I don't use Gnome, KDE, Pulseaudio, Rhythmbox and so on. i3, mpd+ncmpcpp, and alsa work well enough for me. I can just go through the installer once, and have everything I use and its dependencies, and not have to dig around getting rid of crap I neither want nor need. A heavy install of Arch for me is still a good 7GB less than an install of Fedora or Mint, before I tear out all the crap I have no use for.

Also, everything is where it should be in Arch, at least as far as I'm concerned. It's a rare case where I need to go digging through my file system to find a global config file because some asshole didn't put it in /etc like it should be.

That said, got my replacement hard drive in the mail last night (current one was dying, needed to back it up and send the old one back), set up Arch on it, and set rsync to backing up all my music from the old drive. This represents saving me from reripping some 600+ CDs, a good 150-200 LPs and a handful of cassettes. The CDs aren't such a big deal, but records and cassettes represent several days (probably close to a week at least), of doing the entire rip at 1x speed, editing the tracks, and tagging them all by hand.

So I hit enter, rsync starts up, and my laptop's power supply dies. In the process, it manages to irrecoverably corrupt the partition with all that music on it. So now I'm left with no functioning full laptop, 28 days to try and save what I can off that hard drive, and ship it back before WD charges me $108. I think I'll head off tonight and go get drunk. Hopefully tomorrow I can either stumble across a comparable and fully functional laptop left by the curb, or come up with some brilliant solution to MacGyver my way out of this, but the odds are looking grim. So, it's not always sunshine and kittens when you start getting down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with your computer.

[sgreger1]

Sgreger, I think you're forgetting that you'll need some way to power all this stuff.

For me, the main benefit of Arch is as devilock said, it starts with a real minimalist install. I don't use Gnome, KDE, Pulseaudio, Rhythmbox and so on. i3, mpd+ncmpcpp, and alsa work well enough for me. I can just go through the installer once, and have everything I use and its dependencies, and not have to dig around getting rid of crap I neither want nor need. A heavy install of Arch for me is still a good 7GB less than an install of Fedora or Mint, before I tear out all the crap I have no use for.

Also, everything is where it should be in Arch, at least as far as I'm concerned. It's a rare case where I need to go digging through my file system to find a global config file because some asshole didn't put it in /etc like it should be.

That said, got my replacement hard drive in the mail last night (current one was dying, needed to back it up and send the old one back), set up Arch on it, and set rsync to backing up all my music from the old drive. This represents saving me from reripping some 600+ CDs, a good 150-200 LPs and a handful of cassettes. The CDs aren't such a big deal, but records and cassettes represent several days (probably close to a week at least), of doing the entire rip at 1x speed, editing the tracks, and tagging them all by hand.

So I hit enter, rsync starts up, and my laptop's power supply dies. In the process, it manages to irrecoverably corrupt the partition with all that music on it. So now I'm left with no functioning full laptop, 28 days to try and save what I can off that hard drive, and ship it back before WD charges me $108. I think I'll head off tonight and go get drunk. Hopefully tomorrow I can either stumble across a comparable and fully functional laptop left by the curb, or come up with some brilliant solution to MacGyver my way out of this, but the odds are looking grim. So, it's not always sunshine and kittens when you start getting down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with your computer.

1) The Raspberry Pi runs off 5v, and it claims 4 AA batteries can run it (but no mention of how long or under what kind of load). My idea for the streetview thing would involve a backpack and you could easily fit a power source in the backpack if you wanted, all of the cameras have their own power source, unles you are using webcams than you could just get a power source in there and an inverter even if you wanted (depending on how heavy you want this to be and how good you are at electrical things, you could rewire everything to run natively from whatever the power source is).

2) Sorry to hear about that man, that sucks. How much is a new power supply, or are you going to have to buy a whole new laptop? Sucks about all the data on the hard drive being wiped though. Do data recovery places charge by the amount of data? Taht is my fear too, I wonder how much it would cost to go to some place and be like "Yah i need to recover 3TB of data off these friend hard drives, how much will that cost?" lol.

[lxskllr]

So I hit enter, rsync starts up, and my laptop's power supply dies. In the process, it manages to irrecoverably corrupt the partition with all that music on it. So now I'm left with no functioning full laptop, 28 days to try and save what I can off that hard drive, and ship it back before WD charges me $108. I think I'll head off tonight and go get drunk. Hopefully tomorrow I can either stumble across a comparable and fully functional laptop left by the curb, or come up with some brilliant solution to MacGyver my way out of this, but the odds are looking grim. So, it's not always sunshine and kittens when you start getting down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with your computer.

The data's probably still there, no? How would a dying PSU corrupt a whole drive?

Edit:
I was looking up data recovery on GNU/Linux a couple days ago. Maybe it would be useful for your purposes...

http://digitizor.com/2011/01/25/linu...iles-photorec/

[Los ßnus]

The data's probably still there, no? How would a dying PSU corrupt a whole drive?

also, rsync should just copy the data from one drive to another not get rid of the data on the first. kind of strange.

If you can fire up a live cd try doing a fsck on the suspect drive. had it save my ass more times than I care to count.

[sgreger1]

Hey guys is there some sort of hard copy manual I can get somewhere that has a list of all the various CLI commands that are common for Fedora or linnux in general? I have seen some but they are like

fidks_do_somethign -because /said.so - Definition: Takes a bi link dual quad core fatdick and comingle allocates the sprockets with fdisk GPU750XMBC

Aka, it makes no sense. It's like an english dictionary that has all of the definitions written in mandarin, it does me no good. Is there any kind of beginners manual type of book or even something that gives more than a one line (and highly abbreviated) quick definition?

[lxskllr]

Try this. They'll be somewhat terse, but if you really need to know more, DuckDuckGo should help...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

[Los ßnus]

Hey guys is there some sort of hard copy manual I can get somewhere that has a list of all the various CLI commands that are common for Fedora or linnux in general? I have seen some but they are like



Aka, it makes no sense. It's like an english dictionary that has all of the definitions written in mandarin, it does me no good. Is there any kind of beginners manual type of book or even something that gives more than a one line (and highly abbreviated) quick definition?

the man command. I know it's not a hardcopy and it is cryptic at times but it is pretty damn useful.

> man command
man grep

GREP(1) User Commands GREP(1)

NAME
grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern

SYNOPSIS
grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...]
grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE] [FILE...]

DESCRIPTION
grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as
file name) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN. By default, grep prints the matching lines.

In addition, three variant programs egrep, fgrep and rgrep are available. egrep is the same as grep -E. fgrep is the
same as grep -F. rgrep is the same as grep -r. Direct invocation as either egrep or fgrep is deprecated, but is
provided to allow historical applications that rely on them to run unmodified.

................ and so on and so on

edit: check this out too. handy to print out for quick reference.
http://fosswire.com/post/2007/08/uni...d-cheat-sheet/

[Los ßnus]

$ man woman
No manual entry for woman

[sgreger1]

the man command. I know it's not a hardcopy and it is cryptic at times but it is pretty damn useful.

> man command
man grep




edit: check this out too. handy to print out for quick reference.
http://fosswire.com/post/2007/08/uni...d-cheat-sheet/

I guess i'm just an idiot because most of that didn't make sense.

grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...]

What do i put where pattern is for example? I wish there was something that gave a simple explanation of what pattern is for example here and how it oculd be applied, or maybe even an example or two

grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE] [FILE...]

This one makes even less sense, what does the -e do? Why does it also add -f FILE? To someone who doesn't know these terms, it makes these instructions unuseable. Again it's like a dictionary with English words, but the definitions are all in spanish and no examples or usage information is provided. There has to be something out there, even if it isn't hardcopy.

[lxskllr]

Los abbreviated the page. It goes on for awhile longer, and explains the switches somewhat. If you don't understand the man pages, you can DuckDuckGo the command, and get useful examples, and more thorough explanations round the web. Some are straight forward, and others not so much. You aren't gonna be able to sit down and memorize this stuff. It's too much to learn.

[devilock76]

Sgreger you should probably start with a book on unix sysem administration, preferrably geared to your preferred flavor of linux. You can probably find a free ebook version. If those man page entries are daunting then that might be a better start.

But to answer your question -x is command switch typically an the pattern is regex, regular expression. Regex is just about its own language in itself but learning perl wih regex creates a lot of power.

Ken

[devilock76]

Oh and when you don't know the command for the man page use the apropos command which can search man pages by keyword.

Ken