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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
» Read the rest of this post…
In my second tutorial about Linux, I’m going to look at files and folders and how they work on Linux – because it’s very different compared to the Windows way of C:, D:, and E: etc.
Basically, in Linux (and other Unix-based systems, but I’ll keep it simple for now), there aren’t different drives. In Linux, everything you can access stems from the top folder in the stack. It’s called the root folder and it can be accessed using a single forward slash – /.
First things first, this is another post in the Explainer series. So, if you know what Linux and free/open source software are and/or don’t need refreshing, then you can just skip straight over this post.If you don’t know what Linux is, or have only vaguely heard of it, this post is designed to give you a brief introduction into what Linux is, what the ideas behind it are, and how to give it a try (without wiping over anything on your computer).
Great article coming up. For those of you unwilling to jump to Linux just yet (wait, I’m supposed to like all the platforms aren’t I?), there is a great tutorial at Gizbuzz explaining how to get a Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP server up and running.
It’s from the beginner’s perspective and focuses on installing the AMP bundle XAMPP (of which Mac OS X and Linux versions are also available).
Check it out if you’re interested, oh, and digg it too.
I thought this might be worth doing: a short tutorial for Linux newbies on how to compile programs by source. Talk about jumping in at the deep end. I’ll do some easier ones as well, don’t worry. Anyway…
Generally, on non-open platforms, you never see the source code of anything (think of the source code as the ‘recipe’ for the program). Even on Linux you generally get new software packaged as shiny binary .rpm (or .deb) files.
However, on occasions you might want/need to compile a piece of software from source; sometimes your distro won’t have packaged that particular piece of software, or you need to install a new version that hasn’t been packaged yet. In this tutorial, I’m going to look at how you can compile stuff yourself (so click Read On if you’re on the front page).
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