Gary Matthew Rogers

During a recent trip from Sacramento to Salt Lake City, our flight on a Delta (Song) 757-200 was delayed during pushback onto the taxiway. The flight attendants explained that they were trying to get the saftey video to begin playing, but the LCD monitor on the seat in front of me told me differently. The screen flashed a few times, went black, and then started to display a BIOS POST. Intrigued, I watched intently as the boot process continued. To my delight, a Linux kernel was unpacked, and a Red Hat init process, complete with Tux in the upper-left hand corner, was displayed! I smiled, and quickly tried to capture the moment with a few blurry photos from my cell phone.

From what I can gather, the linux system is used on-board to manage the in flight entertainment system. This system feeds music, Dish Network TV, flight information, and games to each screen during the flight. One of the free games even allows you to play a trivia game against the other passengers. It even appears to have a simple transaction processing system for purchasing several items. I am glad to know Linux is alive and well at 30,000 feet!

My close friends and associates know that my Linux distribution of choice has, and will continue to be, Debian. I have been using Debian for home and commerical projects for a number of years. Back when I first became familiar with Debian, few others had ever heard of it.
I was recently pleased to read an article posted the Sydney Morning Herald about Debian’s growing popularity among commercial web servers. The article highlighs the recent release of Debian “Sarge” which was three years in the making. This new release brings a wealth of new featues to the stable software branch of the operating system.

I am constantly finding myself using the Windows Command Prompt and accidentally entering commands such as:


C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>ls
'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

So I went on a quest to see if there was an easy way to use POSIX (Portable Operating System based on Unix) commands in the Windows Command Prompt.

The answer… Cygwin!!

Cygwin is about the niftiest thing since sliced bread. In a nutshell, it is a collection of a buch of common GNU posix applications ported and compiled to run on Windows. And best of all, it is a sinch to install.

Steps to install Cygwin:

1. Download and run the installer
2. Select Download Source

   

3. Select Root Install Directory

   

4. Select Local Package Directory

   

5. Select Connection & Download Mirror
6. Select Packages (Toggle the View to “Full”). Be sure to go over the list and add any extra packages you would like to download.

   
   The installer will then download and install your selected packages.

Steps to make Cygwin commands available in the Windows Command Prompt:

1. Hold ALT and Double-Click “My Computer” and select the “Advanced” tab

   

2. Click the “Environment Variables” button
3. Under the “System variables” section, double-click on the variable “Path”

   

4. Then, simply add ;c:\cygwin\bin to the end of the variable section of the pop-up.
5. You can then safely “Ok” out of all the open windows.
6. Restart your computer. A reboot is required for the path variable changes to take effect.

Once rebooted, you can then issue your chosen linux commands in the Windows Command Prompt:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>ls -la
total 518
drwxrwx---+ 14 Administrators SYSTEM      0 Nov 29 23:21 .
drwxrwxr-x+  8 Administrators SYSTEM      0 Nov 27 12:29 ..
dr-x------+  6 ????????       None        0 Nov 27 16:33 Application Data
drwx------+  2 ????????       None        0 Nov  8 13:21 Cookies
drwx------+  2 ????????       None        0 Nov 29 23:38 Desktop
dr-x------+  3 ????????       None        0 Nov 27 12:29 Favorites
drwx------+  6 ????????       None        0 Nov  8 06:07 Local Settings
dr-x------+  2 ????????       None        0 Nov 27 12:29 My Documents
-rwx------+  1 ????????       None   524288 Nov 29 23:38 NTUSER.DAT
	

To aide one’s quest for godhood in the Linux world, might I suggest an extremely handy application called “less�. Less is somewhat similar to the program “more�, but extends and adds some additional features such as:

• forward and backward movement within a file
• searching (including regular expressions) and highlighting
• watches on the end of the file (similar to tail)
• line numbers
• toggle line wrapping (useful for large log files)
• open simultaneous file
• many more (see )

To run less, simply type the following command (prompt$ = your shell prompt):

prompt$ less helloWorld.txt

Below you will find some tips on how to use less once it is up and running.

Navigation:
You can then navigate up and down through the file with the arrows, or the page-up and page-down keys.

Searching:
To initiate a search, simply press the “/� to bring up search prompt. Then either enter a string or regular expression and hit enter. Less will then highlight all matches. To keep searching through the file, simply press “/� and hit enter once more to look further for the previous phrase. HINT: Use the search feature in conjunction with the file watch command to highlight your search phrase in incoming data.

Watches:
To initiate a watch, you can issue the command “F� while running less. This will tell less to start examining the end of the file for incoming data. This can be very useful to keep an eye on raw web access or error logs, as well as system and mail logs.

Wrapping:
To toggle line wrapping, issue the command “-S� while running less. Note that once line wrapping is disabled, you can scroll left and right with the arrow keys to see the extended data.

For more information on using less, please refer to their website at: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/)

NOTE: If you don’t have less installed, see your specific distribution docs or download it from here.

Take my word for it and add the program “less� to your bag of tricks, right away.