Ubuntu

Ever shutdown/rebooted the wrong machine through ssh+carelessness? molly-guard comes to the rescue, asking you to type the hostname of the machine you intend to shut down if it detects you are connected by ssh. It's packaged for and available in the main repositories Debian and Ubuntu, I don't know about any other distros.

An example:

[sudo] password for charles:
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to reboot: lucifer

Broadcast message from charles@lucifer
(/dev/pts/0) at 17:44 ...

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

To cut a very long explanination short, google have some linux repositories for a number of the more packaging systems inclusing APT (debian, ubuntu etc), YUM, RPM, urpmi and YaST2.

http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/index.html

Currently only contains google-desktop-linux and picasa

I've just been searching for a how-to to give my mother. I am resisting the temptation to scream at my computer and vent my frustration in some entirely non-constructive manner.

Let's compare how-tos to cookery. Most of my recipe books will say 'beat the eggs' as opposed to going into a ridiculous amount of detail on how to beat eggs every time beaten eggs are called for, instead having a 'basic techniques' section in the front where the beating of eggs is explained in great detail.

Forget 'holy war' articles. Linux.com found the big red button.The article entitled Ten sticking points for new Ubuntu usersis a shortsighted attempt at fueling the kind of flame war that drives users away from linux.

Emacs, some love it, some hate it, and once in a while I stumble on something I wish I'd found years ago. I thought I'd share some of the packages I use, partly so I don't forget!

• debian-el contains a major mode for editing sources.list, as well as an interface to apt for the truly emacs centric. Also has useful support for bug reporting and bug numbers...
• emacs-goodies-el lots of toys, and of particular interest and use to me, a major mode for apache configuration files and color-theme which is somewhat self explanatory

There are those that would have you believe making samba work is a black art. On the flipside of this are a number of GUI options for configuring samba that make it very very quick to shoot yourself in the foot. I'm going to try and run through a few key points that I end up explaining repeatedly, and try and record the snippets I keep having to look up because I'm not infallible.

NFS is somewhat handy when you need to share stuff between multiple unix-like machines. Unlike CIFS/SMB/Samba, NFS is suitable for applications where unix style file permissions and case-sensitive behaviour are required. It's quite commonly used for sharing home folders in a homogeneous network, and for providing system images for diskless clients.

Grrrrrrrrrrrr