Suse Linux 9.3 For Dummies- P24 docx

SUSE’s Increasing Popularity Don’t you just love to be part of a trend? I do. SUSE is on the rise and we can ride high — at least, while the ride lasts. SUSE Linux is already popular in Europe and is continuing to improve. SUSE Linux’s fortunes are on the rise following Novell’s acquisition of Germany’s SUSE Linux AG for $210 million. SUSE Linux is poised for more growth in the U.S. marketplace, helped in part by IBM’s $50 million investment in Novell as part of the SUSE acquisition deal. Recently, Novell announced that SUSE’s YaST installation and configuration tool will become open source, licensed under the GNU General Public License. All these recent developments have generated a distinct “buzz” around SUSE Linux as the up and coming Linux distribution for everyone from home users to enterprise servers. And the nice thing is that you and I — we — are part of the crowd that’s contributing to SUSE’s popularity. 325 Chapter 21: The Ten Best Things about SUSE Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 326 Part V: The Part of Tens Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. Chapter 22 Ten Great Web Sites for SUSE Maniacs In This Chapter ᮣ www.suse.com ᮣ portal.suse.com/sdb/en/index.html ᮣ distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=suse ᮣ www.suseforums.net ᮣ www.linuxquestions.org/questions/f60 ᮣ www.linuxforums.org/forum/forum-36.html ᮣ www.linux-laptop.net/ ᮣ packman.links2linux.org ᮣ www.tldp.org/ ᮣ www.linuxhq.com/guides/ I n this age of the Internet, we look to Web sites when we need any informa- tion about virtually anything. For SUSE maniacs — those of us always trying to find the latest news and information about SUSE Linux and things related — there are enough Web sites out there to satisfy everyone’s informa- tion needs. From all the available SUSE and Linux-related Web sites, I have culled ten Web sites that I consider most useful for SUSE Linux users. I pre- sent these ten Web sites in this chapter. http://www.suse.com For anything related to SUSE Linux, you’ve got to start here — the official SUSE Linux Web site. You will be redirected to the SUSE Linux page at www. novell.com/linux/suse/ . You can browse this Web site for latest news about SUSE Linux, Novell’s Linux products, and the support and services Novell offers. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. From Novell’s SUSE Linux page, you can search the SUSE knowledgebase — click Support and select knowledgebase. Search the knowledgebase for answers to your SUSE Linux questions. http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/index.html This is the English page at the SUSE portal. If you want to use the site in other languages such as German, French, or Spanish, click the appropriate link along the top of the page. The SUSE portal gives you access to the SUSE support database (or SDB, for short). You can search the SDB by keyword or browse the database by cate- gory. There is a link to the main SUSE FTP server ( ftp.suse.com/pub) as well as a list of mirror sites from which you can download SUSE Linux. From the SUSE portal, you can also access and search the SUSE Linux hard- ware database to see information about how well SUSE Linux supports a spe- cific hardware device such as a graphics card, networking card, printer, modem, and so on. http://distrowatch.com/table. php?distribution=suse This Web page provides summary information about the latest SUSE Linux release as well as lots of links to news, reviews, forums, and documentation about SUSE. By following links at this Web site, you can also buy SUSE Linux on CDs and DVDs at a reasonably low cost (this can be convenient if you don’t have high-speed Internet access and cannot easily download huge ISO files). http://www.suseforums.net This is an online forum for SUSE Linux. You can register as a user for free and then post questions or search the forums for previously posted questions and answers. You can browse the forum without registering. 328 Part V: The Part of Tens Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. http://www.linuxquestions.org/ questions/f60 LinuxQuestions.org has a number of forums on Linux, including one for SUSE Linux. I show the URL that takes you directly to the SUSE Linux forum. You can browse and search the forums for answers to questions on topics such as installation, networking, and security. To post a question on the forum, you must register as a member (you don’t have to pay to become a member). http://www.linuxforums.org/ forum/forum-36.html This is another SUSE online forum where you can search for answers to your SUSE Linux questions. As with other forums, you have to register and log in before you can post your questions. You also must log in before you can search the forums. You can, however, browse the postings at the forum with- out logging in as a registered user. http://www.linux-laptop.net/ This Web site chronicles the experiences of many users who have installed various Linux distributions (including many versions of SUSE Linux) on their laptops. You can browse the information by the make and model of laptops. The information is useful if you are considering installing SUSE Linux on a laptop. http://packman.links2linux.org From this site, you can download software for SUSE Linux — in the form of RPMs — from this Web site. You can browse the RPMs by category, look at a complete index, or search by keyword. 329 Chapter 22: Ten Great Web Sites for SUSE Maniacs Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. http://www.tldp.org/ This is the famous Linux Documentation Project Web site. Here you can find links to HOWTO documents, guides, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), man pages with help on Linux commands, the Linux Gazette magazine, and much more. This site is not SUSE-specific; rather, it provides general Linux informa- tion. Nevertheless, it’s a treasure trove of information for anyone who wants to learn Linux. http://www.linuxhq.com/guides/ This Web page offers a collection of guides on Linux topics such as getting started, system and network administration, and programming. You can browse the guides and tutorials. Who knows? You may very well find a guide that addresses exactly what you want to know. 330 Part V: The Part of Tens Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. Chapter 23 Ten Most Commonly Used SUSE Commands In This Chapter ᮣ apropos ᮣ man ᮣ ls ᮣ cat ᮣ grep ᮣ locate ᮣ chmod ᮣ rpm ᮣ tar ᮣ pico O ne of these days, you’ll become a SUSE Linux expert, and then you’ll want to use cryptic commands for everything. Yeah, right! Seriously: Sometimes you do end up having to use some Linux commands either because you are stuck at a text console (X is on the fritz) or there’s no quick way in a GUI to do what you want. I’m going to show you the ten most com- monly used SUSE Linux commands. (I didn’t do a survey to find the ten most- used commands — these are simply the ones I use most often.) Linux commands are case-sensitive and all commands are in lowercase. Of course, directory and filenames can be in mixed case. Before I forget . . . if you are wondering where you use these commands, you type these commands at a shell prompt in a text console or in a terminal window, which you can open from the GUI desktop. See Chapter 16 for more information about shells and the syntax of commands. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. apropos: Finding Commands Based on a Keyword Sometimes you might be at a loss to find a command that does something specific like how to print from the command line. That’s when you can turn to the lifesaver command — apropos. The apropos command looks up the keyword in a database of all online manual pages (called man pages) and dis- plays all Linux commands whose description contains the keyword. The syntax of the apropos command is the following: apropos keyword This command displays all Linux commands whose man pages include key- word . By the way, I don’t show the more command as a top ten command, but you often need to use more to view output one page at a time. In this case, if the output of apropos is too long, simply type a vertical bar followed by more (| more) after the apropos command. For example, type apropos print | more and see what you get. Press the spacebar to continue. As much as apropos can be useful, when you try apropos with a simple key- word such as find, you may end up with a long listing of man pages because the word find appears in many man pages. Your best bet is to try apropos with as unique a keyword as possible. For example, to look up commands that relate to MP3 files, try typing apropos MP3. Here’s what I get when I type apropos MP3 on my SUSE Linux system: plaympeg (1) - MPEG audio (MP3) and video (MPEG-1) player normalize-mp3 (1) - adjust levels of mp3 or ogg files by running normal- ize(1), then re-encoding What you get on your system might be different, but, as you can see, apro- pos displays the commands related to a keyword. man: Reading Online Man Page The man command is for viewing online manual pages (also called man pages). The simplest form of the man command looks like this: man commandname 332 Part V: The Part of Tens Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. This causes man to display the man page (think of it as the online help) for the command you specify by commandname. For example, if you want to know how to use the man command itself, type man man. When you first read a man page, it can be somewhat daunting because a typi- cal man page has lots of information. However, after a while, you get the idea how they are organized and which parts you need to read to understand what the command does. You can use man in combination with apropos. First, use apropos to look up the commands for a keyword. Then select the command that seems most appropriate and use man to look up the description of that command. Use the man command to read the man page of each of the Linux commands I list in this chapter. That way, you’ll become familiar with these oft-used commands. ls: Listing Files and Directories The ls command displays the contents of a specified directory. If you omit the directory name, ls displays the contents of the current directory. By default, ls does not list files whose names begin with a period (.); to see all files, type ls -a. You can see full details of files (including size, user and group ownership, and read-write-execute permissions) with the ls -l command. cat: Feeding Input to Commands The cat command is deceptive when you find out what it does literally — it copies the contents of a file to the standard output (which means the text console or the terminal window). So what’s so great about it? Well, to see why cat is useful, you have to use cat together with the output redirection feature of the shell. Basically, you can feed the output of cat as input to other com- mands. For example, suppose you have several MP3 files that you want to consolidate into a single big MP3 file. You can type the following cat com- mand to perform that task: cat *.mp3 > bigone.mp3 This command concatenates all the files with names ending in .mp3 and cre- ates the bigone.mp3 file in the current directory. Incidentally, that greater-than 333 Chapter 23: Ten Most Commonly Used SUSE Commands Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. sign (>) is the output redirection character that causes the output of the cat command to go to the bigone.mp3 file. You can use cat to make an ISO image file of any CD. Assuming that the CD-ROM drive’s device name is /dev/cdrom, just type the following cat com- mand to create the ISO image file named cdimage.iso (you can use any file- name you want): cat /dev/cdrom > cdimage.iso How’s that for a multipurpose tool? grep: Searching for Text in Files If you have used Linux (or any variant of UNIX) for a while, you probably know about the grep command, which enables you to search files for a pat- tern of strings. Here is a typical use of grep to locate all files that have any occurrences of the string ethernet or Ethernet — on any line of all files with names that end in .h: cd /usr/include grep “[eE]thernet” *.h The last command finds all occurrences of ethernet or Ethernet in the files with names ending in .h. The grep command’s “[eE]thernet” argument is known as a regular expres- sion, a pattern that matches a set of strings. You construct a regular expres- sion with a small set of operators and rules that resemble the ones for writing arithmetic expressions. A list of characters inside brackets ([ ]), for exam- ple, matches any single character in the list. Thus, the regular expression “[eE]thernet” is a set of two strings, as follows: ethernet Ethernet There are many more ways to construct regular expressions, but I won’t go into that. Even if you don’t know much about regular expressions, you can use grep perfectly well to search for a specific sequence of characters in one or more text files. Later on, you can gradually learn more complex search patterns. Setting aside the regular expressions for the time being, here is the syntax of a typical use of grep: grep [options] pattern files 334 Part V: The Part of Tens Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. [...]... command and look for some other word that helps you find a specific file For example, when I want to see if there is a binary (executable) file with rpm in its name, I type locate rpm | grep bin because I know that the binary files would be in a directory whose name contains bin (for example, /bin, /usr/bin or /sbin, and so on) The locate command isn’t installed by default in SUSE Linux Please purchase... verbose (which means show lots of information as it works) I show tar.gz as the file extension for the archive file because that’s the customary way to indicate that it’s a compressed tar archive For an uncompressed tar archive, the customary file extension is tar The gz part is added when the z option is used to compress the archive The gz comes from gzip — the Linux command to compress a file Sometimes... watermark Chapter 23: Ten Most Commonly Used SUSE Commands pico: Editing Text Files The pico command runs a text editor that comes with SUSE Linux It’s easier to learn than the vi and ed text editors and handy when you need to edit text configuration files If you plan to edit any system configuration file (such as /etc/fstab), start by making a backup copy of the file For example, to save a copy of the /etc/... words locate: Finding Files and Directories the Easy Way The locate command searches a database of filenames for any name that matches a specified pattern If you are not sure about the location of a file, just type locate followed by a part of the filename For example, here’s how you can search for the XF86Config file: locate XF86Config This causes locate to display all file or directory names that contain... command is useful because most SUSE software comes in RPM files You can use the rpm command to install these files and find out information about packages that are already installed I cover the rpm command in Chapter 18 tar: Packing and Unpacking Archives The tar command creates an archive file that can contain other directories and files and (optionally) compress the archive for efficient storage The tar... these numerical assignments, to get the value of the sequence rwx, simply add the values of r, w, and x Thus, rwx = 4+2+1 = 7 Similarly, rwwould be 4+2+0 = 6 Using this formula, you can assign a three-digit value to any permission setting For example, if the user can read and write the file but everyone else can only read the file, the permission setting is rw-r r (that’s how it appears in the listing...Chapter 23: Ten Most Commonly Used SUSE Commands This grep command searches for the pattern in the specified files, and [options] denote one or more single-character options that begin with a hyphen Here are the options and their meanings: -N (where N is a... form of a compressed tar file The command syntax of the tar program is as follows: tar options destination source Here, options are usually specified by a sequence of single letters, with each letter specifying what tar should do destination is the device name of the backup device And source is a list of file or directory names denoting the files to back up Optionally, you can add a hyphen prefix for. .. user ID For example, to give everyone read access to all files in a directory, type chmod a+r * On the other hand, to permit everyone to execute a specific file, type chmod +x filename Another way to specify a permission setting is to use a three-digit sequence of numbers In a detailed listing of a file that you get when you use the command ls -l, the read, write, and execute permission settings for the... group, and others appear as the sequence rwxrwxrwx (with dashes in place of letters for disallowed operations) Think of rwxrwxrwx as three occurrences of the string rwx Now, assign the values: r=4 w=2 x=1 -=0 Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark Chapter 23: Ten Most Commonly Used SUSE Commands With these numerical assignments, to get the value of the sequence rwx, . chapter. http://www .suse. com For anything related to SUSE Linux, you’ve got to start here — the official SUSE Linux Web site. You will be redirected to the SUSE Linux page at www. novell.com /linux /suse/ and is continuing to improve. SUSE Linux s fortunes are on the rise following Novell’s acquisition of Germany’s SUSE Linux AG for $210 million. SUSE Linux is poised for more growth in the U.S has a number of forums on Linux, including one for SUSE Linux. I show the URL that takes you directly to the SUSE Linux forum. You can browse and search the forums for answers to questions on