Linux Help

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This page is a listing of common issus that I have found while working with Linux. As well as some additional resources to assist in problem resolution.

List of my common issues

Tape drives

When using a floppy tape drive it's eaiser to use the onboard floppy controller than it is to use the controller card that comes with the tape drive.
If you are like me and prefer to do things the hard way, you must go into the ftape.c file and manually enter the parameters for your controller card before recompiling the kernel with ftape support.

Security

Everything has holes
Malicious users are abundent
Turn off all of the services that you don't use
Patch all of the services you do use with the latest patches

Which brings us to patches

Patches can be a pain in the neck because upgrading one package usually means having to upgrade all of it's dependencies. This in turn causes you to have to upgrade the versions of many different packages.
What I have been doing is downloading all of the rpm updates for my distribution that apply to the software that I use.
I am then installing all of them in a batch (and usually dealing with the ones that fail one at a time)
When there are no updates but you know there is a newer version and the old version has holes (SSL), I download the tar file and install it manually.

Monitors and X Windows

Set your horizontal and vertical frequency settings low if you are not sure what your monitor supports. A good guide is 31.5 horizontal and 70 vertical (as always I am not responsible for damage to your hardware).
If your screen says "Frequency out of range" then it means just that. Go back and set your frequencies to something sane.
If it goes black and you get no video, it probably means you have selected the wrong video card

Online How-To documents

These are directions addressing how to get things working in Linux. They deal with specific hardware and software applicaitons. There is even a coffee how-to that details how to connect your coffee maker to a Linux box so that it acts as a timer. This is very cool from a home automation perspective. These documents can be accessed here.

Online Man Pages

These are the same documents available in Linux using the man command in conjunction with the command you are looking for help on. The difference here is the ablity to search, and the pages are cross linked to related commands or files. Very handy stuff. These documents can be accessed here.

Documentation for services

These are some helpful links to the documentation for some of the common services run on Linux.

Apache
Sendmail
MySQL
PHP (while PHP is not really a service it is a pre-processor
that runs in the background to provide dynamic web pages and other neat stuff)

Other Online Help

Here are some other helpful links to sites providing Linux assistance. If you are still having trouble, send me a message via the feedback page, and I'll do what I can to help you.

Linux Self Help - Nice structure easy to find what you are looking for.
Linux Online - A lot of documentation and other good resources.
Linux Forum - A searchable forum for issues not covered in documentation. Here you can post questions and get answers from very knowlegable people, but be forwarned: Read the documentation first!!! Do not ask questions that are covered in the documentation. People who are typically very nice will become agitated and abusive!!