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January 2000 LinuxFocus issue
Welcome to the new Millennium. Looking back at 1999 it is really breath
taking what Linux has achieved. Linux Weekly News has published a 1999
time line.
1999 was the year of the 2.2 Kernel, Gnome, a very stable KDE and of course
the public offerings of RedHat, Cobalt Networks, VA Linux and a few other
Linux related companies.
The Gnome and KDE have very much changed the perception that Linux is
only a Server platform and the public offerings have brought a lot of
attention to Linux. 2 years ago it was often necessary to explain first
what Linux is. Now suddenly everyone seems have heard about Linux.
The Linux market is growing exponentially and I am quite sure
that this year will be even more exciting than previous years.
Despite the excitement we need to be alert. A patent lasts 20 years and
that is a very long
time in the software world. Especially in the software world
more and more patents get filed for rather
simple things. Originally patents were made to protect investment in
years of research and development. Today software patents are mostly filed
for obvious ideas and sometimes even techniques that are already in use.
These patents can block innovation and wide spread use
for a long time.
Software patents are especially a problem for developers of free software as
a patent basically makes it impossible to implement that idea as free
software. Richard Stallman has called for a boycott
against Amazon.com. Amazon, it seems, is trying to use its patent for
"one click ordering" against competitor Barnes & Noble.
The great innovative step of Amazon's patent is to store private data in a
web-browser cookie. A technique for which cookies were made after all.
System Administration
Applications
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FSViewer, a File Manager for WindowMaker
, by Georges Tarbouriech
Among the revolutionary tools of NeXTStep, the first in order of
appearance on the screen was indisputably the File Viewer.
Thanks to the path-view in that File Manager you always knew where you were.
It was more than a manager, it was a true browser.
FSViewer is a NeXTStep a like File Manager for WindowMaker.
-
WindowMaker the spirit of NextStep
, by Georges Tarbouriech
Window Maker 0.61.1 is the latest release of a NeXT look-alike
window manager.
Software Development
-
Perl part III
, by Guido Socher
This article explains how to use arrays in Perl.
The LinuxFocus Tip
The Linux EXT2 file system usually gets a forced
file system check after 20 mount counts. On todays big partitions
such a file system check can take several minutes.
Home and desktop computers are switched on and off more often
than server machines. As a regular computer user you may therefore see the
message ... has reached maximum mount count, check forced
several times a week.
A file system check once in a while is a good idea but once every
week or two may be too much for you. Here is how you can increase the
max mount count for your partitions.
- First rule: Never use tune2fs on a mounted file system.
Get a rescue software for Linux such as the tomsrtbt from
www.toms.net/rb/. Tomsrtbt is
a Linux system on just one floppy. You can boot from it and then
use the tune2fs as described below.
You may also download
the tomsrtbt-1.6.362.tar.gz or tomsrtbt-1.7.185.tar.gz directly from here. Unpack the file. Installation
instructions are included.
- Once you have booted from the rescue disk you can run the
command
fdisk -l
to see all your partitions.
- Run the command
dumpe2fs /dev/YourDev | grep Max
to see what the current max mount count on a given partition is.
Replace the YourDev by the appropriate device (e.g hda5).
- To change the maximum mount count to a higher value (e.g 50) use
tune2fs -c 50 /dev/YourDev
- Run the above tune2fs command for all your hard disk partitions which
are marked as "Linux native".
You can also change the mount count value a bit for every partition (e.g 50, 60, 70...). That
way not all partitions get a forced check at once.
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