FOSSCasts - Free Linux, Unix, and Open Source Screencasts

#16 Hello Zsh! Part 1

Zsh is a great alternative to Bash and other Unix shells. It has programmable completion, paging, and many other great features.

We'll take a good look at paging and the completion that Zsh offers in this episode and explore more in the next episode.

As mentioned in the episode, the Zsh Wiki is an excellent source for Zsh information and help with your .zshrc.

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#15 Power Searching with Ack

Most Linux/Unix users are familiar with Grep, but for many situations Ack does a better and faster job.

Ack is smart enough to skip version control files and directories, temp files, can exclude or include certain file types, and use powerful regular expression when searching.

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#14 Incremental Backups with rdiff-backup

Keeping incremental backups is easy with rdiff-backup. In this episode, learn how to set up a simple cron job that will keep an incremental backup of a remote directory.

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#13 GNU Screen

This week we take a peek at GNU Screen - a terminal multiplexer. GNU Screen allows you to open multiple terminal sessions and easily switch between them from one terminal window. You can also disconnect from GNU Screen and your terminal sessions will stay in the background waiting for you to reconnected.

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#12 Getting Started with Iptables

Iptables is the de-facto firewall solution for Linux. In this episode, we'll setup basic rules to only allow certain traffic and even deny certain IP addresses from connecting.

NOTE: I did catch one minor error in the screencast after encoding - I mention iptables in conjunction with both Linux and Unix. Iptables has many hooks into the Linux kernel and therefore is not available for Unix. Sorry for any confusion.

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#11 Scripting SCP with Expect

Expect is a great automation tool. It is especially good at scripting SCP, FTP, and other interactive programs.

In this episode we'll create a bash script using expect to automatically SCP a log file from a server. The script could be easily extended as a cron job and modified for other uses.

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#10 Sysstat Part 2: mpstat & sar

In the second part of our introduction to the Sysstat utilities, we'll look at Mpstat and Sar.

Mpstat is a great little utility to view information about our CPU or CPUs/Cores.

Sar is an extremely versatile utilities that, when paired with the sadc daemon, provides extensive system logging and realtime monitoring.

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#9 Sysstat Part 1: vmstat & iostat

Sysstat provides some smaller utilities that can be used to monitor performance and troubleshoot an under preforming Linux/Unix based system.

In this episode we'll get introduced to two of those utilities - vmstat and iostat and how they can help us keep things running at peak performance.

Next week we'll look at two more utilities that are part of Sysstat - mpstat and sar.

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#8 Customizing Your Bash Command Prompt

The Bash command prompt can be fairly dull by default.

In this episode we add some color to help differentiate between files, executables, symlinks, and directories. We'll also change the format of the command prompt with the current time and better formatting.

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#7 Quick Editing with GNU Nano

GNU Nano is one of my favorite "little" text editors. While Nano is small, it does support some fairly advanced features like syntax highlighting, killing and yanking (copy and pasting), buffer support (think tabs), spell checking, and others.

In this episode we'll configure a good initial Nano setup, show how to navigate around Nano, and go over how to use some of the advanced - not enabled by default - features.

Keep in mind, when I mention the key "meta" this is also known as the "option" key in the Apple world and "ALT" in the Windows world. That is the key I am referring to.

As I recommend in in the screencast, swapping your CAPS and CTRL keys will help quite a bit while using GNU Nano. Consult episode 2 to find out how.

Macroron provided updated instructions to get spell checking working on Fedora 11