schof.org A journal of learning and doing

I'm transitioning my daily work desktop from OS X Leopard to Kubuntu Hardy. (I'll be writing more about that in the future.) My job is split between managing people and doing development and system administration for a bunch of Ubuntu boxes, so running the same platform that I'm administering makes …

I'm putting together a postinst (post installation) script for a Debian package I created for work. And there's a little C program in there that needs to run as root, but be called by a regular user.

Well, there's a standard way of doing that in Linux/Unix, called setuid …

So I'm trying to do an install with debootstrap onto a virgin partition. From my custom Ubuntu-based distribution. And I get the following error message:

E: Couldn't find these debs: 33024830

The error code itself is not Googleable, because it apparently changes for each install. (I got several different …

Learning about Linux really is a constant series of cool discoveries. I've just discovered Kernel Traffic (KT). KT is a condensed version of several mailing lists covering Linux development. There are more then 3000 messages a week; reading all the traffic on all the lists would be a full-time job …

There's a command in Linux / Unix called "sudo" which temporarily gives a normal user the power of the root user. In non-geek mixed metaphors, instead of having limited access, you have a backstage pass which lets you do absolutely anything on the system. (Of course, the command needs a password …

I got interested in a project called Linux From Scratch (LFS) about a year ago, going so far as to have a copy place print out the 4.0 version of the book. Never really did anything about it, though. This weekend I started working on the 4.1 version …