Free software wikishelf / Wikiothèque sur des logiciels libres

This wikishelf is a collection of guides of Free (libre) software.

• Power management: this section introduce power management on Linux. It includes insight about how the power is managed under Linux and also guide to optimise it (hopefully saving battery and energy consumption). It was first written for Ubuntu, but it is enough generic to be applicable for most Linux systems when using the Gnome desktop environment. I hope to extend it to KDE one day (I would need to have a bigger hard disk to install KDE by then...)

I have played a lot from 2000 until 2004 with CVS at work (though now we use Subversion, but via an Eclipse plug-in so I don’t really know it).

However, I discovered recently Bazaar which is used a lot by the Ubuntu devs. Both CVS and Bazaar are version control system (VCS), though the later is decentralised as opposed to the former which is centralised.

And today, I’m using Git at work, and I want to share the knowledge I’m gathering on this VCS system.

Sub sections:

• CVS guide
• Subversion guide
• Bazaar guide
• Git guide

Changing the hostname requires to execute the following command lines:

$ sudo /bin/hostname <new-hostname>
$ sudo echo -n <new-hostname> > /etc/hostname
$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

The last line is using the command line editor named vi, you can choose to use the more user-friendly nano or a graphical version like gedit. In the file /etc/hosts, you have to look for a line with the old hostname, and replace it by the new hostname.

You can now restart the network:

$ sudo service networking restart

Samba is a network service that allow computer to exchange data using the SMB/CIFS protocol. This protocol was designed by Microsoft for its systems, thus Samba allow other OS to communicate with Windows computers. As other OS are using Samba or similar implementation, one can exchange data with almost every computers (including *BSD, Mac OS X, etc.)
It is pretty easy to set-up Samba on GNU/Linux.

There are two ways you can share directories. You can either only use the graphical user interface and tools provided by Ubuntu, or you can use a more generic way (works with all Linux flavour and desktop environment) by editing the configuration file:

• Sharing directories in Ubuntu
• Guide to Samba configuration file

Samba can share printers too. However, for the moment I have no guide for it. Especially because I do not have a printer.

» Main article: Guide to Samba manual mount

The previous article was explaining how to share a directory on Linux using Samba so that other network machine can access it. The above guide is about connecting to an external network share and making this connection persistent. A kind of “network hard disk” in the Windows terminology.

Various guides concerning SSH and its features. Mainly based on the OpenSSH software suite. Those articles have been tested extensively on Linux (esp. Ubuntu), though some have been tested on other POSIX systems like OpenSolaris or Mac OS X.

• Tunnelling using OpenSSH can be useful to access services behind your firewall that you do not want to share with the whole world.
• Using SSHFS to share files and directories
• Guide to SSH authentication, it describes how to set-up SSH for public/private key authentication.
• Installing and configuring an SSH server on your Operating System.

• Zero configuration network (zeroconf) is a specification that want to seamlessly interconnect machines and interoperate services, without user deep knowledge of them. Its goal is that network should just work.

The detailed instruction to build Xerces-C++ version 2.7 and 2.8 is given on the Apache web site. Though, the instructions are incomplete and do not cover the actual installation part. Here, is detailed the instructions for a Linux 32bit configuration, adapt them to your platform using the Apache Xerces-C++ instructions.

$ tar zxvf xerces-c-src_2_7_0.tar.gz
$ cd xerces-c-src_2_7_0
$ export XERCESCROOT=`pwd`
$ cd src/xercesc
$ ./runConfigure -plinux -cgcc -xg++ -minmem -nsocket -rpthread -b32 -P/usr/local
$ make
$ sudo XERCESCROOT=$XERCESCROOT make install

The last line is a bit weird, but sudo will “lose” the settings of the XERCESCROOT env variable, and thus the installation will fail. The line just create the XERCESCROOT env variable using the one previously define for the user session. This is a necessary step for a successful installation.

If you do not have sudo, you can execute instead of the last line the following:

$ su
# export XERCESCROOT=`pwd`/../..
# make install
# exit

A page dedicated to Ubuntu-related articles is available.