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Hot tips to get the best of Linux in 2008

brajeshwar.com — Sometimes you can have a frozen window, and there are two fast ways to solve this problem without turning off your computer or restarting it. The first is the traditional key combination of Ctrl Alt Backspace.

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  • schestowitz, on 01/06/2008, -6/+12Good tips worth bookmarking. Another fairly recent article with additional related tips is this one: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/closing_ ...
    Very handy.
  • InuX, on 01/06/2008, -6/+5lol, you know your a geek when you can name the distro's in the picture.
  • canthraxp, on 01/06/2008, -2/+14I never knew there was a calender included on the shell. "cal"

    Let's see if I can get to Y2k38, I surely think nothing will happ
  • bsdboy, on 01/06/2008, -1/+3Didn't we go through all of this yesterday?
  • IHatePants, on 01/06/2008, -1/+18rexec == bad
    ssh == good
  • jbrevik, on 01/06/2008, -1/+2Locked Process? "ps -e" will display running processes and display process ID. Use "kill -SIGKILL [process id]" to end the process. Always found this one handy
  • JamesSaveker, on 01/06/2008, -5/+2Hmm made popular 10 mins ago and now the server is down :-(
  • twodayslate, on 01/06/2008, -3/+361 diggs and already down?
    mirror?
  • arbulus, on 01/06/2008, -1/+1Link is borked and duggmirror didn't catch it.
  • ian13, on 01/06/2008, -1/+2http://209.85.135.104/search?hs=sUq&hl=en&lr=&c2co ...
  • PHiZ187, on 01/06/2008, -1/+6How about some tips about how to prevent your server from melting in 2008?
  • snapple112, on 01/06/2008, -1/+2MIRROR: http://mirror-wire.com/digg/brajeshwar/hot-tips-to ...
  • tauntz, on 01/06/2008, -1/+2"Sometimes you can have a frozen window, and there are two fast ways to solve this problem without turning off your computer or restarting it."

    Inaccurate - Linux users told me years ago that Linux can't freeze. Only M$ Windows does that.
    • TheWindBlows, on 01/07/2008, -0/+1mostly its for an annoying program or a driver bug.
      when all my proccess's are using 0-1% of my processor and its at 80% load its got to be some type of bug most likely a faulty driver i Ctrl+Alr+Backspace :P.
  • infinitycircuit, on 01/06/2008, -0/+0This guy forgets the most useful way to stop a freeze: Alt + SysRq + K? That will kill running userspace processes, e.g. X.

    Alt + SysRq + U will reboot.
    • kahrn, on 01/06/2008, -0/+1hmm.. strange. On my system it is Alt + SysRq + B that reboots the machine.
  • WorldGroove, on 01/06/2008, -0/+4That ctrl-alt-backspace will kill X and all gui programs running in it.
    If you really wanna take care of a single window, do ctrl-alt-escape... most linux distros, your cursor will change into Skull & crossbones. The next window you click will be killed.
    Also, he should explain the LANG=C thing and why it's faster to sort files under this way.
    • KloroFormd, on 01/06/2008, -0/+0If ctrl-alt-escape doesnt work, xkill in a terminal window.
  • sholdowa, on 01/06/2008, -0/+2It would be good for the author to a) reread the article and fix the errors: eg display all recently used commands actually only lists 10, and b) get an experienced sysadm to do the same. For example, the kill firefox thing will also kill your private 123firefox5456 process as well - and kill -9 should only be used as a last resort as any decent software will trap and act upon signals that *can* be caught, which of course SIGKILL cannot.
    • aiten, on 01/06/2008, -0/+1If you're so great, why don't you write a ***** article?

      Also; Cheers for the info - I hope the author improves his article accordingly.
  • Hermmunster, on 01/06/2008, -0/+2I use linux as my primary OS. That whole page was pathetic. It is not representative of linux today. Move on.
  • patrick24601, on 01/06/2008, -1/+1Just what I want to show my mother to convince her!

    1. Avoid out of the session or close the terminal with the command Ctrl+D

    * set -o ignoreeof Enable Ctrl+D
    * set +o ignoreeof Disable Ctrl+D
  • jonester, on 01/06/2008, -0/+2By looking at that site, I thought it was a typo, 1998 instead of 2008.
  • NOFXY, on 01/06/2008, -0/+1anyone have any "Hot tips" to get my 8800gt working?
  • parax, on 01/06/2008, -0/+2Some of the tips are nice, but I think in general it would be better to recommend people learn to use the commands he's using instead of telling people to just type those. A good tip is to learn how to use "sed" and "awk" instead of listing a bunch of specific "sed" and "awk" commands.
  • maheshexp, on 01/06/2008, -0/+1Good ones...
  • erlkonig, on 01/07/2008, -0/+4This article is mostly, and in some cases, dangerously wrong.

    1. Control-D isn't a command, it's a control code for the TTY driver

    2. Aliases are unique for one special quirk relating to trailing spaces - if you don't know what that means you should be using functions, which are far more general:
    name_of_function () { code_to_run }

    3. The code given doesn't even do what the title describes; it lists the most FREQUENTLY used commands, not the most RECENTLY used. Not being able to tell reflects rather badly on the author.

    4. One should start with kill -HUP, not kill -9 (aka kill -KILL), to give the process a chance to clean up after itself and save work in progress. kill -9 is a LAST RESORT, not the first choice.

    5. He shows the uname commands with trailing crap that would be interpreted and cause errors. Apparently he doesn't know about the # to start a comment. or "uname -a".

    6. The commands cal and date are in virtually all versions of Unix, not just Linux - and of course his sortof-examples have trailing crud in them. He also doesn't show that the +___ argument usually needs to be quoted to protect spaces.

    7. More stupid use of "=", and a lackluster version of the more useful "du -k | sort -rn | head" .

    8. LANG=C is left totally unexplained (and only affects the sort, not the uniq, which is funny), there's still more use of the broken "= comment" delusion. Few people would need these tricks anyway - hardly a "top 10" idea.

    9. The first example is broken - the (.*) should have been ([^
  • erlkonig, on 01/07/2008, -0/+4The rest of that was:

    9. first example should have used, instead of in the 2nd ".*", left-square, carat, less-than, right-square, asterisk. Perl would have been a better choice due to the single-line bias of the example and HTML titles' ability to be split across lines. The example doesn't bother to show where the text is supposed to originate.

    10. Another stupid application of alias, broken "=", use of fine on lists of filenames without using the
    -print0 option, and a basically unexplained complication in the locate command.

    11. C-A-backspace is NOT traditional, although common, and certainly shouldn't be your first action. Only someone who is barely using a desktop would do this - many serious Unix/Linux users have X sessions that stay up for a month or more, 40 windows or more up in carefully structured groups over at least four screens worth of virtual desktop (my IBM friend has a 9x9 virtual desktop - and it's often full), and again the kill -9 is an idiot's first choice.

    12. Only a complete fool (or possibly simply totally, woefully informed, and probably doesn't read Digg enough) would recommend remote execution through rexec. It's usually disabled, and almost anything it ever did should be done with SSH instead.

    Summary: the article is poorly-written, pitifully-research, naive, misleading garbage. The only good part is that someone is motivated enough to try to write it, and interested enough that s/he'll probably learn a lot more and be better about in the future. But the article as it stands is a hazard, not a boon.
    Not one single idea it presents can be accepted safely at face value.

    Buried.
  • Arkh4m, on 01/07/2008, -0/+11) I like Ctrl+D to close a terminal.
    3) history | tail ? I don't find difficult to reverse a list.
    4) pgrep || pkill ?
    11) startx is not the kernel, I could be using /usr/bin/X

    Other points are manual pages, regular expressions and pipes. Period.
  • dudley9, on 05/25/2008, -0/+0http://www.genericsmed.com/
    http://www.generics.ws/
  • dudley9, on 05/25/2008, -0/+0http://www.genericsmed.com/
    http://www.generics.ws/
  • SunAlex, on 09/02/2008, -0/+0never heard about ctrl alt backSpace combination.
    http://sooslic.com/?id=674
    http://www.dvci.org/programs.htm
    http://shpe-sac.org/membership.htm
    http://www.mkzine.com/References.html
    http://search.ashtech.info/
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