FOSSCasts - Free Linux, Unix, and Open Source Screencasts

#26 GNUS, the News and Mail Reader for Emacs

GNUS is a great news reader built into Emacs. I've had some requests to do an episode on how to read mail from a Google Gmail account with it, so here it is.

I had the easiest time getting it all to work on Ubuntu 9.10, but as long as you have starttls you should be ok. Also, check out the Emacs Wiki for tons of great information - it is where I found most of what I needed for this episode.

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#25 The Firebug Firefox extension

Firebug is a web developer's best friend. Firebug lets you easily inspect the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS source code and make realtime modifications.

Firebug doesn't stop there - you can view HTTP requests, debug JavaScript and CSS, view page errors, and much much more. Firebug is also extensible. We'll take a quick peek at Yahoo's YSlow plugin which gives you report card like grades on performance.

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#24 SSH Tunneling (aka port forwarding)

SSH is a great tool and allows for more than just logging into a remote machine. SSH allows you to forward a port so TCP/IP traffic can travel safelythrough SSH.

Not only is this secure, but it allows you to do many things - like get around firewalls. In this episode, we'll look at how to tunnel our web traffic (port 80) over SSH to a remote server. Keep in mind that the method I use is not 100% secure - check this resource for how to tunnel DNS lookups with FireFox as well.

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#23 Bonus! Viewer Questions

I wanted to take some time and answer some of the most frequent questions I get from viewers - and let you put a face to the voice you hear every week!

Note: The files are a bit larger than usual - compressing a mostly static desktop or terminal is easier than full motion video. If you'd like to stream the video via Flash I've uploaded it to Vimeo.

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#22 Redirecting Standard Output and Input

Sometimes it is useful to have what would normally be output to the screen output to a textfile or even elsewhere. Luckily, this is trivial in a POSIX operating system.

In this episode you'll learn how to redirect Standard Output into more than just textfiles and how this can be used with a variety of of utilities.

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#21 Git for Non Programmers

Git has won the hearts of many programmers in recent years making it their version control system of choice. But, Git can be used by everyday users to keep configuration files or anything else that may change over time in version control.

In this episode we'll go through Git boot camp and walk through using GitHub to remotely host our Git repository.

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#20 Low Level Data Copying with dd

If you need to copy data, byte for byte, you use dd. dd can do many great things like copying a hard disk to another disk, making .iso's of CDs or DVDs, and making backup images of data.

Further, dd can zero out a drive, create files with random data, dig into your memory, make backup of your master boot record, bench test your disks... the list goes on.

In this episode we'll just scratch the surface by making copies of our hard disk, restoring that hard disk with the image, and making .iso's from a CD.

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#19 Using the Mutt Email Client With Gmail

Mutt is a great text-based email client I've been using recently. Mutt is very simple to use but still highly configurable.

In this episode we will configure Mutt to use Gmail's IMAP interface to retrieve our email from Gmail.

Check out the Mutt Wiki for lots of great info and help.

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#18 Substitution with GNU Sed

GNU sed(stream editor) is a great little utility. In this episode we use substitution to preform find and replace operations on a text file. Sed also allows regular expression matching for advanced substitution.

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#17 Hello Zsh! Part 2

In the second half of our 2 part series on Zsh, we look at globbing and using Zsh's qualifiers. This can be combined with the completion from episode 16 for some super powerful shell bliss.