Linux HOWTOs

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These howto documents are intended to be the series of commands that I run (or instruct others to run) and any gotchas that you may come across in the process.

They were originally created for use by two former clients of mine. At one point, I took them offline but was innundated with mail asking me to send one howto, can I pay for access, etc. so I put them back up again. Thanks to everyone that offered to mirror them and especially those that donated. If these howtos help you out and you feel like making a contribution, take the PayPal link below. It would help recoup the cost of the bandwidth (my home cable connection) you're eating up, the time it takes me to add howtos that you request, etc.

Primarily thanks to Google, there appear to be lots of people using these, so whenever I get time I'm going to set up a static copy of the howtos that can be mirrored with rsync. Anyone that wrote me offering to become a mirror, I'll write back when I set up everything.

Each of these so-called HOWTOs uses source code, but is written for use on a machine that is running Slackware. These may or may not work on other distros that use a different layout of files and dirs. Don't even bother reading these if you use Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu or similar ones where you'd be breaking your package manager (rpm, yum, apt-get, etc.) dependencies... unless of course you don't mind doing that. You'll also see 'removepkg packagename' in most of them. This tells Slackware's package tool to remove the old package that we're replacing.

Slackware uses 'su' primarily, some others like Ubuntu use 'sudo'. You can use whichever you like, but at least as I write this now, I'll be putting 'su' in there each time you need to become the "Superuser" (root). With Slackware 13.37, I noticed that before you could use 'su' and $USER would still be set to your non-root user. Now it seems you have to run 'su -p' to get that same behavior. Running 'logname' (after 'su') works too. So, howtos that have not been updated lately may have 'su' and the use of $USER in there, but newly updated ones will use 'logname'. I've got it installed under Slackware 12.2, Slackware 13.37, Ubuntu 10.04.4, Ubuntu 11.10, ... so hopefully it's as widely used as it appears to be.

More than anything else, keep in mind that there are usually at least a few different ways of doing anything in a *nix OS. Just because I do it this way does not mean that it's the right way™. These instructions might blow up your computer and give you hives. Use them are your own risk.

Anywhere you see a time listed, like in the list of HOWTOs, my local time zone is EST/EDT in the USA (the time in New York).