FOSSCasts - Free Linux, Unix, and Open Source Screencasts

#30 Better Than Ever!

FOSSCasts will be returning in a few weeks with more screencasts and now with interviews from the FOSS community. I've got the first few interviews lined up, but if there is anyone you'd like me to try and get on the show let me know at john at fosscasts.com.

Also, follow FOSSCasts on Twitter to get info on future interviews, live chats with guests, etc...

Pardon the terrible video and audio for this short episode, I just wanted to get this out quick.

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#29 GNU Emacs Part 3

In the final part of our series on GNU Emacs, we'll checkout tramp mode and eshell. Tramp modes allows you to quickly and easily edit files on a remote system and eshell is a shell written completely in Emacs Lisp. As one viewer suggested, they can be combined for some very powerful remote editing.

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#28 GNU Emacs Part 2

In the second installment of our series on GNU Emacs, we explore using windows and frames, some useful shortcuts, your .emacs.d directory, and show off a highly customized GNU Emacs.

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#27 GNU Emacs Part 1

GNU Emacs is a highly customizable text editor that is available for almost every operating system. GNU Emacs has a huge learning curve and as time goes on most Emacs users end up with a highly customized configuration.

In addition to editing files, Emacs can check your email and news groups, be a Twitter client, be an IRC client, and much, much more.

In this episode, we'll begin looking at basic useage - moving, editing, killing and yanking - and next week look at customizing Emacs to suit our tastes.

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#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.

Download Quicktime 19.37 MB
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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.

Download Quicktime 11.07 MB
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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.

Download Quicktime 40.84 MB
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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.

Download Quicktime 12.30 MB
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Download Ogg Theora 20.44 MB

#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.