FOSSCasts - Free Open Source Screencasts

GNU Emacs Part 3

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:02:55 +0000

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.

GNU Emacs Part 2

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:22:16 +0000

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.

GNU Emacs Part 1

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:11:25 +0000

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.

GNUS, the News and Mail Reader for Emacs

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:19:24 +0000

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.

The Firebug Firefox extension

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:38:27 +0000

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.

SSH Tunneling (aka port forwarding)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:24:45 +0000

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.

Bonus! Viewer Questions

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:33:43 +0000

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.

Redirecting Standard Output and Input

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:55:17 +0000

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.

Git for Non Programmers

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:59:11 +0000

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.

Low Level Data Copying with dd

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:32:11 +0000

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.

Using the Mutt Email Client With Gmail

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:35:23 +0000

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.

Substitution with GNU Sed

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:31:52 +0000

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.

Hello Zsh! Part 2

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:08:16 +0000

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.

Hello Zsh! Part 1

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:10:29 +0000

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.

Power Searching with Ack

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:01:02 +0000

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.

Incremental Backups with rdiff-backup

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:21:03 +0000

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.

GNU Screen

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:19:54 +0000

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.

Getting Started with Iptables

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:23:03 +0000

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.

Scripting SCP with Expect

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:55:12 +0000

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.

Sysstat Part 2: mpstat & sar

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:30:04 +0000

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.

Sysstat Part 1: vmstat & iostat

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:06:18 +0000

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.

Customizing Your Bash Command Prompt

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:07:43 +0000

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.

Quick Editing with GNU Nano

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:13:00 +0000

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

System Monitoring With Monit

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:43:45 +0000

Monit is a great open source tool for keeping track of your server or system. Monit can make sure daemons are running, permissions are correct, remote servers are responding, and much more.

In this episode we'll show you how to configure Monit to monitor our webserver, Apache HTTPD, starting it back up after a crash, and emailing us an alert.

If you'd like to try other monitoring utilities check out God, which uses Ruby for configuration, and Reconnoiter, which has some very robust features.

Command Line Tips #2

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:19:27 +0000

In this episode we continue the multipart series with some more of my favorite command line tips including a surprisingly little known cd argument, quickly searching the bash_history, a sudo tip, and how to temporarily start a tiny webserver so we can share files with a single command.

Command Line Tips #1

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:22:51 +0000

In this episode of a multipart series, we go over a couple of tips for the command line including Bash aliases and using pushd and popd to quickly traverse common directories.

Load Testing with Apache JMeter

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:38:34 +0000

Apache JMeter is a great tool to load test your web applications, API, and even databases.

In this episode, we go through how to record a short work flow with JMeter and use that to simulate load on a web application.

Remapping CAPSLOCK and CONTROL

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:31:52 +0000

One of the best changes I've ever made to my computing work flow is swapping my CAPS and CTRL keys. It is much easier on your pinky to hit the CAPS key instead of the standard mapping for CTRL and the CTRL key is used exponentially more than CAPS. In fact, you will likely find that you completely forget about the CAPS key all together.

This is a very easy change to make and have a good effect on your computing for years to come. We'll go though how to do it In MacOSX, Ubuntu Linux, and any Unix/Linux system with Xmodmap.

Easy Nginx with PHP

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:11:44 +0000

Nginx is a great alternative to other webservers like Apache and Lighttpd. If you're looking for something with a bit less overhead and a bit more speed, give it a try.

We'll get Nginx compiled from source on Ubuntu 9.04 and get PHP playing nice with it.