Linux

Today i learned how one can detach a running process on linux or unix from the terminal. I know that you can do this on purpose by putting a ampersand: & behind the command. But that was not the question. You see i had a process running at 17:00 hours and it would take another hour before it was done. I wanted to go home before 18:00 yet i did not want to interrupt the process because it should finish. So CTRL-C was not an option.
But you can tell linux to detach the process from the terminal, you just do this simple steps

• CTRL-Z (no this will not harm the process)
• bg n

Where n is the job number that linux returns after you hit CTRL-Z. Linux will continue the process in the background (bg) and you can close the terminal session.

That was an unpleasant surprise last Thursday. After coming out of bed and my usual shower I walked downstairs to have my morning coffee and go to work. I passed my squeezebox and noticed the black screen. I turned round and ascended to the attic. The absence of the normal buzz triggered a rush. The server was completely down. And so was my NAS. I was as you can imagine not amused. The strange thing was that anything not connected to the UPS was buzzing as normal, just the devices that get their current from the UPS were down. I tried to reset the UPS to no avail. Quickly i replaced the power cords and booted the server and the NAS.

Today I could not see some header images from a website I was visiting, with Firefox 2 that was. I started Konqueror to see if it was any different and yes it was. The images showed just nicely. So it was a perfect moment to upgrade firefox to the latest version; number 3. And I was particular curious because I read somewhere on a forum that Firefox 3 would solve a flash annoyance.
I followed this instruction on the eeepc wiki to get it installed. And I did a little dance of joy. The scrollwheel now could scroll over Flash movies. In previous versions, flash would take focus and would capture the mousevents. Now the page keeps scrolling. As it does on every other operating system.

With all this moving of my website I had hardly the time to play with my newest laptop, the Asus EeePC 900. I know, it's just a bigger screen and the one i had was only a couple of months old. But in those months I learned both to love as to hate the Eee. Hate because still a lot of web content won't fit on an 800x480 screen. It's not the Eee to blame, yet it's the reality.
So when I saw pictures of this bigger screen I knew it would fulfill my needs. It's almost the same size, with a tad bigger touchpad. And when I booted today, tweaked some settings as I've done before and started using it for a couple of minutes. I was pleasantly surprised. The screen was so much better, the rest of the device worked just like the predecessor; like a charm.

Run Linux apps in Windows with andLinux