...making Linux just a little more fun!

The Answer Gang By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and... (meet the Gang) ... the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You!

Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Troubleshooting boot-time video mode problems

NameVirtualHost in Apache

shutdown down the system using power switch --or--

alternatives for the Big Red Switch
consider journaling...

Question on writing Server program for multiple client connections.

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hello everyone, and welcome not only to the world of the Answer Gang, but a very Happy New Year!

Considering how terrible the economy is these days, Linux didn't do too badly for itself. The question is increasingly not "is that linux thingy safe enough to use in our enterprise" but "where can it serve us" ... with the advent of stabler desktop software has come some legitimacy, even among sites that really don't care as much about their desktops. Also as our installers have been improving, near as I can tell from the messages, Windows' has been getting worse, and the number of mswin distrss is increasing the chance that formerly innocent end-users will someday soon have to endure installing a new OS. And there are a fair number of free-OS hardware vendors now; the preload advantage is no longer entirely in Redmond's court, either.

Heck, Red Hat's in the black too. Not a bad year for the penguin.

Statistics, statistics. That brings me to the Gang's message queue. It was really light tthis month, about half the usual volume. I'm not even counting the spam, which we hardly see anymore. (Thanks Dan! Bunches!) And if we had ignored everything that had come as HTML or text+HTML rather than plaintext, we darn near could have gone on vacation, leaving me to gather threads from past months.

Fear not, however. We do have some good stuff here. There were plenty of good tips as well.

Of course it's time for some new years' resolutions. Being a rather techie soul -- gosh! who could have guessed?? -- I'm for 600x600 full color. dpi, that is. A pal of mine gave me a scanner as a winter-gift. Now all I have to do is find desk space and some time to drop SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) into place. My dream last year of LCD prices coming down decently hasn't really settled in yet.

For a more serious resolution, regular backups. The day your computer decides to go on a magnetic starvation diet and lose a few pounds ... approximately the weight of one hard disk ... will be really annoying if you don't have 'em. Too bad DVD writing devices are still such a pain in the butt to use. They seem to be where video cards were a year or two ago - if it works then it's just beautiful right out of the box. And if it doesn't... well, have a lot of fun digging through docs and scratching your head in puzzlement. I've barely met anyone who's actually done it yet... and DVD-RAM doesn't count, since it's a different media entirely from the DVD-R and DVD+R. For that matter a mere 9Gb at a time is chicken feed to some modern drive setups. I think most folk will be backing up their medium size hard disks to even larger hard disks this year.

Have a great month, folks.