I bought a Dell laptop with pre-installed Linux and it’s been just great - all the hardware just works (better than a similar laptop with Windows)

One of the great benefits of Linux is that you get far more frequent upgrades than with other systems, as a developer it pays to keep ahead of the curve.

The basic search is:

aptitude search apache

Returns all packages that match

I just got a new gadget - a mobile internet modem.

As ever the manufactures provide little support for us Linux users - but setup was pretty easy anyway.

I plugged it in and it was detected OK with full driver support.

Just got a new UPS and it’s working nicely :-)

Running on Debian Etch I had to upgrade the NUT package but this worked very simply by bringing in the one from Lenny (in testing)

I’ve had too many hard disk failures over the years and decided to use RAID to ensure that all my photos, email and work are always copied to two disks so that if any one of them fails I don’t lose anything.

I’ve long been impressed with the wayback machine and found it very useful to find things that have disappeared from the rest of the Internet.

I use cvs a lot in software development and find it a real life saver to be able to restore any file I have been working on at any point in it’s history. This really helps me to find out when and why things went wrong, saving me from making the same mistakes again.

This is one of those tasks that I do infrequently and forget how it work…

I just got a nice big new monitor !

The command is dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

Having been running spamassassin at home with great success for some time, I have just set it up at work but had a few problems setting up a new Debian Linux box for this from scratch.

I found that spam was just not being detected nearly as well as at home, and the machine was struggling with the load (load average around 3).