Riccardo | Linuxaria

introduction to zsh

Oct 182010

zsh it’s a perfect alternative to the classic bash that we have as default on our linux box.

zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language. Many of the useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh were incorporated into zsh; many original features were added.

Origin

The first version of zsh was written by Paul Falstad in 1990 when he was a student at Princeton University.

Etymology

The name zsh derives from Yale professor Zhong Shao, then a teaching assistant at Princeton University. Paul Falstad thought that Shao’s login name, “zsh”, was a good name for a shell.

Wallpaper changer for Linux

Guides, Reviews 8 Responses »

Oct 162010

In Linux, setting an image as the desktop wallpaper is not a difficult task, but getting it to change automatically at a certain interval is.

If you have a good collection of wallpapers and want to see them in action on your desktop, there are some nice wallpaper changer software, i’ll try to give you an overview of some of them:

Desktop Drapes, Webilder, wallpaper-tray, desktopnova, wally

setsid – start programs in a new shell

Guides, Pills 2 Responses »

Oct 132010

As someone posted in a comment of one of my former article (nohup, bg e disown), i’ve forget a command: setsid, while talking about the possibility of detach a process from a terminal or a shell

man setsid setsid - run a program in a new session

The main difference i see from nohup is that you “lost” your standard output, but for some programs this could be normal or acceptable.

Basic usage:
For example run a script called ~/src/compile.all on a remote machine:
ssh your.remote-box.com setsid ~/src/compile.all logoff (or < ctrl > D)

it’s also possible to pass arguments with setsid command:

setsid /usr/bin/totem '/path/to/my/file.avi'

Clock management on Linux

Guides 2 Responses »

Oct 122010

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks.

NTP provides Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). No information about time zones or daylight saving time is transmitted; this information is outside its scope and must be obtained separately. In isolated LANs, NTP could in principle be used to distribute a different time scale (e.g. local zone time), but this is uncommon

NTPDATE

ntpdate is a computer program used to synchronize and set computers’ date and time by polling the Network Time Protocol (NTP) server(s).

The accuracy and reliability of ntpdate depends on the number of servers, the number of polls each time it is run and the interval between runs.

How to run commands in the background in Linux

Articles, Guides 12 Responses »

Oct 092010

Suppose you have a long-running task (for example, compiling a large program) that you need to run, but you also want to get some other work done. Linux lets you start a task in the background and keep on doing other things from the command prompt.

We will see in this article how to send commands in the background, then return them to the foreground, and make sure that also closing the current shell or terminal the process doesn’t remains tied to the session but continue to work.

An alternative to these command is using screen, as read in a former article, but now let’s see the command bg and the special character &