You may well have recently read my glee at getting a decent screen recording solution for Linux running and working, and this tutorial on how to get it to work for you has been brewing for a while now.

However, this solution is not just for Linux. It’s actually cross-platform and works across the big three main operating systems and should work on other Unix systems with little changes. Don’t worry, the Windows tutorial is coming up soon!

(Quick note - there are a couple of issues that I haven’t ironed out yet in this tutorial, but I wanted to get it out on my site sooner rather than later. They don’t affect installation, but I can’t seem to get recording in Ubuntu yet. It’s still worth running through the install, however, and rest assured I am working on the problems and will get them fixed as soon as I can!) All fixed!

This is also the first tutorial to be brought to you courtesy of my fresh new Ubuntu installation, just for doing tutorials (so I don’t have to uninstall and reinstall everything from my main machine where it’s working nicely, and of course for Ubuntu specific stuff).

OK, let’s go!

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Finally found a decent video screen capture solution for Linux (well, actually it’s cross-platform but that’s even better). It’s called pyvnc2swf and hopefully it will allow me to augment my future tutorials with video and audio.

So to test it out, here is a quick demo of killing processes, tying in with my recent tutorial on the subject.

Don’t worry, I’ll reveal all on how to set up pyvnc2swf with audio and all that stuff in due course.

Watch it here.

(While I can get KDE running in my recording VNC system by running killall twm;startkde, I can’t seem to find the command for Gnome, and it would be great to offer cross-desktop screen demos. Someone tell me how! Please…)

It’s time for another quick Beginner’s Linux!

I’d love to say it doesn’t happen on Linux, but very rarely it does. I can say it happens less often than on Windows, though. What am I talking about? Programs and processes misbehaving - locking up, stopping working and generally causing a problem.

The problem on Windows is that if this happens, there’s no sure fire way to just nuke the offending app from your running processes. Yes, you can use Task Manager and close the process, but if that doesn’t work, well… (bad memories here).

On Linux, if this situation does occur, you have a couple of wonderful programs called kill and killall that are invaluable for killing things when they go wrong (saves many a restart of the whole system).

This is going to be quite a quick tutorial, partly because the subject matter doesn’t take that much time to cover and partly because I’m starting to get quite a lot of work I have to do, which means I’m going have to be a bit brief. Anyway, onto the tutorial…

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Greetings and welcome to an all-new tutorial series, Peter’s Webdev Workshop. This tutorial series will focus on web development, mainly focusing on using PHP as a server-side language, but I’m not ruling out having a crack at Python or Ruby, ASP.NET/Mono C# or something like that. This series will also look at JavaScript on the client side and we’ll be using XHTML for all the markup.

Before I jump into today’s topic, there’s a bit of admin and introduction I need to do to start up the new series. See you after the jump!

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It’s back! Well, it’s about time for Part 3 of my file permissions tutorial. Just before we get stuck in to the gory details of the content of this tutorial, it’s worth mentioning that it’s a good idea to read up on Part 1 and Part 2 before trying this, especially if you know nothing about file permissions on Linux.

Right, let’s get started!

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Hello again! This is Part 2 of my tutorial on understanding file permissions on Linux. If you haven’t already and don’t have much of an understanding of Linux file permissions, try reading Part 1. If you’ve got an understanding, but don’t know how to change them, you could start here!

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Recently, I made the move from Microsoft Office Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Yes, I know, webmail is cool and everything (I’m on Gmail and the webmail is awesome), but I’ve always preferred a desktop email client.

My problem is/was that I use both Windows and Linux and want my client to be updated with my latest mail on both operating systems (previously I had to be in Windows to use Outlook to get my mail, which is partly why I switched). Now an IMAP server would be a great way to do this, but Gmail only offers POP access or standard webmail.

So I wanted a solution that would synchronise my profile across Windows and Linux so both clients had the same set of messages.

Mozilla list a series of solutions for doing this, but I chose the easiest and less hack-involved solution.

Basically, I have a dual boot machine with Windows and Fedora Core Linux. I have loads of partitions here and there, one of which is a FAT32 partition for easy file transfer between the two OSs. That looked like the obvious choice to do the syncing.

In theory this process should also work for Mac OS X, but since I don’t yet have a Mac or access to one, I don’t know where the Thunderbird files are stored and/or whether this works in practice (Mac users fill me in with the details and I’ll update this post - would be useful for Boot Camp’ers I’m sure!). This also assumes Thunderbird is installed in the default locations on Windows and Linux and you’re not already running some groovy multi-profile setup.

So this post is really to recap my steps so that anyone else with a similar setup can set up sync.

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It’s that time again. Beginner’s Linux is back and this time I’m going to be taking a look at file permissions in Linux. In fact, the details should apply to any Unix-based system, but for simplicity I’ll use the term ‘Linux’. This is Part 1 and lays down some of the basic concepts before we put them into practice in Part 2 (coming soon).

Background reading

If you don’t know anything about how the file system works (i.e. you don’t understand where / is and what the symbol ~ represents), then I’d strongly recommend checking out my guide to files and folders before coming back here for the rest. Don’t worry, it’s written in nice and friendly language as well.

There’s a short intro into Permissions there, but here we’re really going for it and by the end you should have an understanding of file permissions, how they work, how to change them and why they’re necessary.

OK, let’s jump in.

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Flash Player 8 (or 9) isn’t on Linux. Well, Flash Player 9 is being built for Linux, but in the mean time we Linux faithfuls are stuck with Flash 7. Flash 7 on Linux isn’t so bad, if you discount the instability, the ugly interface…

This hack is no longer needed as Flash Player 9 for Linux (beta) is out, but I’ll keep it up here just in case…

But let’s not go there. There is a workaround to run Flash Player 8 in Linux, albeit a messy and Wine-requiring one. Plus it only works on standard PC architecture at the moment (that is almost of you, just not people running Linux on PowerPC Macs and other funky hardware). I will try and show you how to do it. First of all, an apology. I can’t remember where I found this, so I’ve got no-one to attribute this to. If you found this out first or covered this somewhere, comment here and I’ll give you a link.

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Welcome back to my Beginner’s Linux tutorial series and today I’m going back to the subject of software installation. A while ago I looked at compiling software from source, but this time I’m going to look at installing RPM packages.

Note that this tutorial is specific to distributions that use the RPM package format. That is most distributions (SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva etc.) , but there are a few very notable exceptions including Ubuntu, MEPIS and anything else Debian-based. For those distros, a completely different packaging format and set of tools is used, so I might cover that in a future tutorial.

Just before we get into things, if you’re a complete newbie, I’d recommend reading my Linux Explained tutorial at Gizbuzz and my basic introduction into files and folders here to get you started with some of the concepts (I’m jumping in quite quickly to terminal stuff, so you need a basic understanding).

Oh, and the ‘consuming packages with yum’ section is weighted towards Fedora users, but the rest is sound advice for any RPM-based distro.
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