Dave Taylor

What happens when you turn a perfectly good Apple PowerBook into a tri-boot system with Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, and Ubuntu Linux? Read on to find out. Mac OS X is built of two components: Darwin, the BSD-based Unix underpinnings, and Aqua, the beautiful graphical user interface we Mac heads have all grown to love. However, there are other operating systems and other work environments that can be installed on an Apple system, based on popular open source Linux applications. If you're looking for Intel-based versions of Linux, there are dozens and dozens, but the PowerPC chip cuts those options down quite a bit. I decided it'd be interesting to install the most popular Linux for PowerPC - Yellow Dog 4.0 - and an up-and-coming Debian-based Linux distro that's getting q... (more)

The Worlds of RSS, XML, HTML, and Linux Meet

I'm a rabid Linux fan. I write books about it, I have servers running it, and I even have various flavors of Linux as dual-boot defaults on my PCs. But keeping up with Linux news can be a bit of effort, particularly if I want to have that up-to-date news on a Web page, rather than in an RSS Aggregator. Fortunately, it's a matter of ten minutes of shell script programming to remedy this. In... (more)

String and Numeric Test Statements

Last month I talked about the file-related options to the test command and how that helps you create smart and sophisticated shell scripts. This time I want to look at the additional conditions available for looping and flow control. String TestsOne common test in shell scripts is to ascertain whether something the user has typed in or something pulled out of a data stream or file matche... (more)

Loops Within Loops: "hilow.sh"

If the print gods are with us, this time, after seven previous columns, we'll finally have a shell script that you can type in and experiment with. Imagine! The last column addressed the challenges of generating a reasonably random number to enable us to write a rudimentary hi-low guessing game. After experimentation, we settled on using the date command with some fancy footwork to gene... (more)

Ask the AnswerSquad!

Q:  AnswerSquad, I need your help. Try as I might, I can never seem to keep my users from sucking up all the available disk space. I know I could try using the quota system on my Linux box to keep people in check, but I know my users and know that they'd just get cranky about the system enforcing limits. Instead, I'd like to just have some automated way to send them pestering e-mail if t... (more)