Welcome to the LinuxFocus May 2001 issue

Your grandmother does not want to change to Linux?

There are still a lot of Windows users who are hesitant to install Linux. One of the reasons may be that after the 5th complete re-installation of Windows they have decided to not touch it anymore and are now happy that it works most of the time. This is often the case even though most of them would be very interested to see what it is like.

SuSE has found the solution to this problem. It's called SuSE live evaluation CD. It's a complete Linux distribution ready installed onto a single CD. The CD is bootable and there is as well a possibility to generate first a boot floppy in case the computer does not support booting from CD-Rom.

The Live CD is available since SuSE 7.0 and the most recent version is the "live-eval-7.1" for SuSE 7.1.

When booting from this CD you get first the typical SuSE Yast2 installation screen. This is however not a real installation. It is just configuration. During this process 3 files will be created on the first partition of you first IDE disk. It does not matter if it is a Linux ext2 partition or a windows partion the live CD can handle both:

suselive.710, about 2Mb - contains data for your SuSE Linux 7.1 Evaluation CD.
suselive.swp, about 80Mb - a swap file.
suselive.usr, about 100Mb - it's an ext2 file system with the user's home directory

Using this Live CD you can test a full Linux system risk free. No partitioning and re-arranging of data. It just creates these 3 files and there will be no more traces left on your hard disk after removing those files.

This is as well a convenient way to test a new Linux distribution even if you have already Linux installed. Try it and decide then if you should upgrade or if your old distribution is still good enough.
What are the drawbacks? Well, it runs from CD Rom and that means it is a bit slower than a normal Linux system as the reading of data from the CD Rom is a relatively slow process.

You can download an ISO image from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-7.1/. Try as well one of the mirror sites . SuSE's main site is at times quite under load. If you don't have a DSL modem to handle a 650Mb download in reasonable time then you can as well order it from SuSE or perhaps just ask a friend if you can get a copy. There might as well be a number of printed magazines in your country that include the Live evaluation CD into one of there issues.

It's a good way to promote Linux among your friends and perhaps not only your grandmother will finally, be convinced that Linux is the better system and switch to Linux ;-).

LinuxFocus.org Articles

Hardware

Building a Linux-controlled walking robot , by Katja and Guido Socher

In this article you learn how to build a small walking insect and control it with Linux over the parallel port. After reading this article you will as well be able to control any other self made electronic with the parallel port.

System Administration

Through the tunnel , by Georges Tarbouriech

This article is about SSH and friends.

Software Development

Avoiding security holes when developing an application - Part 3 : buffer overflows , by Frederic Raynal, Christophe Blaess, Christophe Grenier

This article explains how to exploit badly programmed software by using buffer overflows.

Do your job with make! , by Wilbert Berendsen

The article explains how to use make.

Graphics

Introduction to BORG , by Erdal Mutlu and Ceyhun Elmas

Borg turns a number of PCs into one big rendering farm.

Games

Game Review - GLTron , by Harald Radke

GLTron is a fast 3d racing game.

Applications

Real-time mp3 recording, part 2 , by Philip de Groot

Editing mp3 files and other mp3 tricks.

Articles at Linux Gazette

The MailBag
News Bytes
The Answer Gang
More 2-Cent Tips
The Weekend Mechanic
By Thomas Adam
HelpDex
By Shane Collinge
Interview with Ben Collins, the new Debian Project Leader
By Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa & Marcos Martins Manhães
Converting Linux HOWTOs into Book Format
By Mark Nielsen
Configuring GDM 2.2
By Mark Nielsen
CVS: Client-Server Version Control
By Kapil Sharma
Stopping Spam on Your Linux Box
By Suresh Ramasubramanian
The Back Page

The LinuxFocus Tip

How to print several pages per sheet of paper? Just try this. Hit the print button in netscape (or any other program) and replace the print command with:
psnup -2 | lpr
This will e.g print 2 pages per physical page. psnup is part of a whole set of commands for printing and manipulating postscript called psutils (available from http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/ajcd/psutils/). A very interesting command is e.g psbook. It re-arranges the pages such that you get a A5 book if you print 2 pages per physical page on A4 paper. All you need to do is fold the paper in the middle and staple it. However to do this you need a duplex (double sided) printer. The print command is then:
psbook | psnup -2 | lpr -Pduplex
In this example our duplex printer is called duplex. Even if you don't have a duplex printer psutils are very useful.
This command converts e.g A4 pages to US-letter:
psresize -PA4 -pletter in.ps out.ps

Directory index for persons translating this issue.