Many times I find myself looking for applications that fit my need with a price that fits my budget ($0 most of the time). Sometimes I find applications that fit my need but not my budget like Microsoft Office. I hope you find these choices help you and your family out.

Word Processing

The best word processor I have found is Open Office Writer. This both fits my needs and its part of a complete suite of Office tools to help me be more productive. You can try this one out yourself by visiting their website at: openoffice.org

I have used this software for many years now and have found it most satisfactory. You can’t beat the price either as this is open source software and is free to the end user. They would certainly not turn down any donations, I am sure if you feel so inclined but use it without obligation.

This software also contains a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel) and presentation application (like Microsoft Powerpoint).

Database

Sometimes you find yourself in need of some data handling capability. When my needs turn to databases, I turn to MySQL. This is a full featured open source software package (spelled F R E E - which fits my budget).

If you have a need for keeping up with the company inventory or contact list. MySQL can help you. If you tie MySQL to OpenOffice, you have a force to reckoned with. You can put together a professional looking data entry application in short order using these tools.

You can find MySQL through their website at: MySQL

Desktop Operating System

If you are tired of an operating system that:

• is under constant attack by mal-ware (viruses, spyware, worms, etc.)
• is way too expensive
• is known to take over your computer at most inopportune times (like updates)

then it is time to consider other alternatives for your desktop. Today’s Linux is not just for Geeks anymore. Liunx has come a long way towards becoming user friendly. Upgrades and updates are becoming just the click of a button and initial installation is now almost automatic.

One of the concerns about changing operating systems is always what software will be available to run. The latest version of open source applications (several mentioned in this article) are meeting the needs of desktop users everywhere. Besides, you can always dual boot your computer to use that one piece of software you use once a year that must run under a specific operating system.

You can find many distributions of Linux available. My favorite one (Ubuntu) can be found at this web address: Ubuntu

Tags: mysql, office, OpenOffice.org, ubuntu

Introduction

How many times have you had your web server stop serving web pages because it was out of disk space? Well, it seems to happen to me quite often. That is why I thought I would put this post together to help find the culprit that’s eating up my disk space.

Determining where you need space

The first thing you need to know is “where do I need space?” To find out where (which partition/disk) needs the space use the following command:

df -h

The “-h” gives you a human readable format. So you see results like 29M for 29 megabytes versus stuff like 30234524. It is much easier to read the results with the “-h”.

Now take a look at the given results from the ‘df’ command to see which partition needs space. Here is a sample output:

As you can see my root partition (”/”) is 81% used. If I was having disk space troubles, this figure could be as much as 100%.

Finding the Big Files

With the information about where we are running low on disk space from the section above, change directories to the start of that partition using the ‘cd’ command as follows:

cd /

If my root partition was low on disk space that is the partition I would go to.

Now, I am ready to determine which files are taking up the majority of my disk space. Use something like the following command to accomplish this:

find . -size +20M -exec du -h \{\} \;

This command will first find file of size 20MB or larger. Next it passes that file over to the ‘du’ (disk usage) command to show us in human readable format (-h) the size of the file.

That is quite a handy little command.

Removing Large Numbers of Files

Sometimes you may find that you have a directory with a large number of files that you wish to get rid of. However, the normal method of using the “rm” (remove) command comes back and complains that the list is too long. What do you do now? Well, don’t despair use the following command to solve this dilemma:

find /tmp -type f -exec rm -f \{\} \;

Be very careful using a command like this. This one if JUST an example. Read the man page on ‘find’ to see just how useful this command really is. This particular commandline will find all files (-type f) in the /tmp directory and pass the filenames to the “-exec” command. In this case the “”exec” command is the remove command (rm). The “-f” forces deletion quietly. The curly braces are replaced by the find command with the filename being passed in. The semicolon (with the backslash in front) is the required end of command marker.

Luckily the find command is pretty quick and VERY useful!

Tags: system admin

Introduction

I am writing this post because the first time I attempted to upgrade a major distribution change, I did it without researching the right way to do it. Needless to say, it did not go well. So, I am putting this together to help those of you willing to “read the instructions”.

First thing to know is that there are different types of distribution upgrades. If you are upgrading within a major distribution (like say ‘Hardy’), then you use the “Minor” release method. However, if you are upgrading from one “Long Term Support” version to another (like ‘Dapper’ to ‘Hardy’), then use the “Major” release method below.

Determining which Release you are running

There are multiple ways to determine which release you are currently running. Here are a few of them (choice one):

1. lsb_release -a
2. more /etc/lsb-release
3. uname -a

NOTE: The last method will not give you the current release name (like ‘Gutsy’) but only the release number (like ‘2.6.24-19-server’).

Minor Release Upgrade Method

Use the following steps as a guide to upgrade from one minor release to another:

1. apt-get update
2. apt-get upgrade
3. apt-get dist-upgrade

NOTE: if you are not running as root you will have to use ’sudo’ (without quotes) before each of the above commands.

Major Release Upgrade Method

Here are some guidelines for upgrading from one major release to another:

1. apt-get update
2. apt-get upgrade
3. apt-get install update-manager-core
4. do-release-upgrade

NOTE: if you are not running as root you will have to use ’sudo’ (without quotes) before each of the above commands.

Tags: system admin, ubuntu, Upgrading Ubuntu