guru in progress

When real guru’s say to use vim please listen to them and simply use it. Vim comes from vi editor which is 32 years old program. You can call vim it’s child cause it’s younger but much more powerful.

For some weird reason ubuntu decided to use striped-down version of vim (package: vim-tiny) which comes by default install. Problem with vim-tiny is it’s weak and not powerful as real vim.  However you can install it by “sudo apt-get install vim“. After that copy default vimrc file from /etc/vim to your home directory with the name .vimrc

cp /etc/vim/vimrc ~/.vimrc

After that edit it and turn syntax on (more info). Here is little example of my editor:

If you want to read/write Hebrew perhaps you should read wikipedia which says to use “:set rightleft” and “:set norightleft” (or short :set lr,:set nolr). It also says it don’t support BiDi very well for it’s simplicity, but this way writing hebrew is better that lot of IDEs that i know.  Better than my favorite komodo edit.
I remember at beginning when i saw Vim and when i started to read man pages i decided to stay with nano. I used nano for few years but today, no way that I’m returning to nano/pico after vim.

I have a dream! - No, it’s not Martin Luther King, it’s little garage owner who had a vision of linux mandriva.

I was always wandering can linux make someone go crazy. And i found my answer, YES! Specially if you invest your money with hope it’s “investment worth”. One month ago i started to work with a guy who invest his money for spreading linux mandriva and funny thing is that he don’t have a clue about computers.

Anyway, while working i learned lot of things in mandriva and it’s products like mandriva USB (wonderful stick) or powerpack. It’s tools like amazing drakconfig which makes it easier then ubuntu… Overall very very good distribution!

However i had very bad experience with mandriva office in Israel. I don’t like to gossip which i could easily cause CEO of that office can’t read English but it’s pity that this distribution holds a man who don’t have a clew about linux, about it’s ideas and ideology. I, as outsider, can tell one thing: no dream for mandriva in Israel with this guy!
I wish I’m wrong.

I decided to learn LPIC-2 and RHCE by myself. If you read previous post you’ll see how expensive courses are in Israel. Learning alone is always hard, it’s not easy as it’s in group but there are few benefits which i don’t know them at a moment.
I wish i can find more few blogs with same target as mine, having LPIC & RHCE, which could be very good practise for me.

Material?

Very good matterial for LPIC-1 is IBM docs (registration required) but they web site is really buggy for downloading and showing updated material. For example if you go to: lpic-1102 you’ll find material for topics: 103, 104, 110 missing but if you try from index site you’ll see it’s there. I also had a problem with logging into the site. Overall the web-site too buggy and hard to get used to.
But if you have any good free alternative material for LPIC please contact me and I’ll update here.

There is also few tutorials which are not free, like Cbt nuggets which is very good alternative if you’re lazy to read However, I’m used to read man pages so IBM docs is fine by me.

How LPIC is build?

LPIC is separated into two certification.

• LPIC-1

LPIC-1 certification is separated into two exams:

1. exam 101
2. exam 102

• LPIC-2

LPIC-2 is also separated as LPIC-1 into two exams:

1. exam 201
2. exam 202

So, bottom line is, if you want LPIC-2 you’ll need to have 4 exams which each of them costs about 100~150$. It’s little expensive so you got to learn very good before you take them.

I was looking for motivation for doing those certification alone so i decided to write at least once a week about the progress so maybe somebody will join me I’ll try to find material and questions to check myself and I’ll share my knowledge to the world. So next exam is 101 of LPIC-1 and expect next few posts about

After CCNA certification i decided to move forward and perhaps leave cisco as it is. I don’t know why i choice cisco. Cisco is company that i don’t like it’s policy but I’ll leave that topic to another post!

And again, after CCNA i decided to have some Linux certification. After reading and asking people there are 2 main certifications for Linux. LPI and Red Hats certifications. There is few more like Suse or CompTIA Linux+ but they are not so popular as RHCE or LPI.

RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certification is most popular certification for linux out there (at least for Israel). The population of RH probably comes from very good linux distribution (even if closed). RH is usually installed for server and if you’re looking for linux career you’ll probably need get used for it’s RPM package manager and to get it’s certification. In Israel if you want to get a course of RHCE you can do it in John Bryce school for 17.5K NIS  or $5193 (current course). If you know any more courses in Israel that teach you RHCE please contact me. The course is 6 months long and i would like to find another opinions about this course.
You can find example questions here (registration needed).

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LPIC on another hand, don’t depend on any distribution out there. You will find questions from all kind of package manager - debians: apt-get; red hat: rpm; suse: Yast…
But main material is same as RHCE. People say that LPIC-2 is hard  as RHCE except that LPI ask more questions for another distributions. I guess that what makes it harder/better.
Another interesting thing with LPIC is non-profit organization.
Examples for LPIC-1 question you can find here. In Israel you can find LPIC-2 course in hi-tech collage for 15k NIS ($4451)

Conclusion: It’s interesting that RHCE teachers keep telling me that RHCE is best for me, and on controvery, LPIC teachers says same for LPI. In my opinion if you don’t have linux experience on-hands then RHCE will help you with finding new job easier then LPIC. Cause LPIC is simply not so popular as RHCE. Most of linux servers that i met in companies was RPM based. But if you already have regular job and you simply want to learn more about linux then my suggestion is LPIC. Cause it’s more material to learn and much cheaper then RHCE and more challenging. But that’s only my humble opinion.

It’s old news. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) will be default installed with XP. When i first hear it i was wandering why in so small hardware people would like heavy OS as XP is? One of biggest advantages with Linux is that Linux can run on really low hardware (good example is damn small linux) so why not choosing Linux? OLPC is using sugar so child won’t have any interaction with OS anyway! Even if does, why XP?

I started to dig in, i was really curious about this. I found thousands of articles on this issue and i was looking for conclusion. First of all I’ll write down why not XP:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic
&articleId=9079798&pageNumber=2

But that’s not the slimmed-down version of XP that Negroponte told the AP Microsoft had been working on for about a year, apparently with the XO in mind. Instead, for most low-cost laptops, Microsoft is licensing the full Service Pack 2 version of Windows XP Home, which gobbles up 1.1GB of disk space. Moreover, patches and updates such as Service Pack 3 will add about 165MB to XP each year, according to Microsoft (download PDF).

The current XO, meanwhile, comes with only 1GB of storage. That’s more than enough for the existing environment, which includes the Sugar GUI and stripped-down versions of Fedora, Firefox and other open-source software. Together, they take up only 200MB, leaving 800MB for students’ files.

Using only stripped-down versions of open-source apps has its downsides. For instance, the XO comes with Gnash, an open-source media player, instead of Adobe’s Flash player, which is free but not open source.

Gnash is compatible with Flash apps only until Version 8, according to OLPC’s own online documentation. Many popular children’s Web sites such as Webkinz.com and Disney.com require Flash 9.0.

I was laughing at this. For installing XP you’ll need more space then OLPC can have and they will recharge it 3$ per child. So this is perfect, they will need to dump prices for bigger HD and for each laptop it will recharge 3$ for Microsoft! They already sold 500 000 units, if they sell more 500k it’s 1.5M for Microsoft.

And what’s the point of gnash? Gecko (firefox) is working perfect with adobe flash plug-in [link]. Why they choice gnash instead of adobe plug-in?

I decided to read from insiders and i found interesting blog from Ivan Krstić. Ivan Krstić was director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child but he quit. He wrote:

Sleight of hand
But really, I digress. The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software. And the most upsetting part of the Windows announcement is not that it exposed the actual agendas of a number of project participants which had nothing to do with learning, but that Nicholas’ misdirection and sleight of hand were allowed to stand.

The whole “we’re investing into Sugar, it’ll just run on Windows” gambit is sheer nonsense. Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won’t magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its “availability” as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Do i need to add more? It’s almost one man call! Nicholas who invented OLPC like more windows then Linux so he choice windows.

Conclusion: OLPC has nice idea but not obligation! It has nothing to do with ideology despite it has nice name (One Lap Top Per Child). Child will need to pay more $3 only for microsoft and more money for HD. Will it stay 100$? I honestly wish…
Unless MS won’t pay for difference, prices will rise, less computer will be selled, no ideology to achieve…
I wish I’m wrong…

Well, after using 7.10 i decided to upgrade to 8.04. Some people says it didn’t make any difference, all they did is installing Firefox 3.05b and nothing else.

Well, that is not true! First of all, you can look at they changelog list. You’ll find hundreds of new lib’s. What is most important for me is they finally decided to upgrade lib’s for my favorite dictionary stardict so i finally have dictionary that is free and working

Then i notice i have problem with flash, i can’t listen to the music while playing music flash. I fix that problem by typing “gstreamer-properties” and choosing “Pulse plugin”. By doing this you’re telling all your programs to choice Pulse plugin for playing music
I don’t know why they added it, ALSA plugin was working perfect with my box!
If you have still have problem with your sound after upgrate you might visit: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio. it explains why you are having problems and how to fix it!

Generally, upgrade was smooth, it was really GUI-like installing new software. It also upgrade kernel to 2.6.24-16. I remember when i had to upgrade red hat from 6.x to 7.x. It was pain in the a**. This was really joke. IMO, it’s only question of time when ubuntu will win desktop computers.

It’s very known that every new Linux user has problem with fonts. As explained in Avi Alkalay’s how-to Why Fonts on Linux Aren’t Straight Forward ? the main problem comes from web-designers cause they make web-pages for windows font. Whole how-to is very well written for newbies, i suggest to everybody who have similar problem to read it.

His solution is to install MS fonts and i start from there, why i didn’t like MS fonts!

1) Using MS fonts

In Debian world you can install MS fonts with command ″apt get install msttcorefonts″. My experience using MS fonts is very bad. And this is why, after installing my fonts got even worse then they were…
* With Hebrew:

* With Latin:

I don’t know about you but FireFox Sans-serif shows much much better then Arial. Really, all credits go to Sans-serif and Arial simply is not for my platform. It’s just my taste, lot of people like this! So i found myself where i started.

2) Using default linux fonts

I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 and this problem became much annoying after upgrade from 7.10. I used Ben Dodson FireFox plug-in Font Finder 0.5b for detecting CSS font (very useful plug-in). I decided to test whatsup.co.il page for this purpose. This is screenshot.

On first picture is sans-serif font, this is the way i want it. On second picture is CSS which says:

font-family: arial,sans-serif,helvetica
font-size: 14px

So, IMO English is better on sans-serif, English with CSS looks little and annoying. But look at something weird, CSS says to use Arial font, if you don’t have it then use sans-serif and if you don’t have that then use helvetice. But wait, on first picture i hacked it to use only sans-serif and by rules of CSS it should render sans-serif cause i don’t have Arial. So what’s the trick? I really don’t know, it could be a bug in firefox3 beta5.

I found some pages where CSS says:

font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif

And there English letters are so terrible that’s very hard to read. So it returns me to main question, if i don’t have verdana, arial, helvetica fonts why i don’t use sans-serif then? I decited to leave it as it is and i found another solution.

Well, not so perfect solution but it will solve the problem. Go with your firefox: Edit–>Preferences–>Content–>Advanced..–>
then uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of  my selection above”

This is not so perfect cause it will show only one font for whole Internet but crazy thing that all the rest fonts are ugly with my platform. Still looking for perfect solution and if i found any I promise I’ll post

Well, i decided to open new blog!

It took a while cause ’till today i didn’t know in what language should i write it! i decided to write in English even my English is not mother tongue. Why English? Well if you gonna write tech stuff you should choice English cause (thanks god) English is international language that all geeks can communicate.

So the question is how to open new blog so it will be popular? Is popular what you really want? The question is, why people write blogs? There is little philosophy in this topic but mean point is that people write it cause they what to share they knowledge/experience with others. So at begging you should not run fast to report it to bots (search engines). Do what i did.

No need to rush, for example i made blog.confiq.org domain for this purpose and after writing 5-10 articles than I’ll share it on main domain: confiq.org

After that I’ll report it to search engines and I’ll write my sites link wherever i can. Examples: Another blogs, Forums signature…

The search engines works that way. More links it founds on another domains it gives more points to your site. More point better results…

Well, this is my first post i had to write non-senses but next posts you can except tech info from:

networks, Linux, Lamp