Entries from March 2008 ↓
March 31st, 2008 — Advanced topics, Linux, Ubuntu
Many software products, especially the commercial ones, are distributed as 32-bit packages. This means that they won't be installed on your 64-bit system unless you clearly specify that you want to override the architecture dependency.
If you're using Ubuntu or any other Debian based distribution, this post will teach you how to install 32-bit deb packages on your 64-bit OS.
Is it possible to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit OS?
In Unix world, yes: it is quite possible to run 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS. There should generally be no problem, but there are, as always, a few caveats:
March 28th, 2008 — Basic stuff
I see this question a lot in search engines requests which point to this blog. And if you're so interested how this is done, I'm happy to explain.
March 26th, 2008 — Basic stuff
To some this may seem like a trivial task, but I see great interest from Unix/Linux beginners arriving to this blog: how exactly does one confirm what a symlink points to?
First of all, if you haven't already done so – read my Unix Symlink Example post to learn what a symlink is and to refresh your mind about creating symlinks.
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March 24th, 2008 — Basic stuff, Linux, Ubuntu
I see that my Finding Large Files and Directories post is quite popular, yet there are a few more ways to simplify your search for the largest disk space consumers in your Unix system.
Make find command show file sizes
If you remember, the default way a find command reports results includes only the fully qualified (that means including the full path) filenames.
Now, if you look at a task of identifying the largest files, it's great if you can get a list of all the files bigger than some figure your specify, but what would be even better is to include the exact size of each file right into the output of the find command.
March 20th, 2008 — Basic stuff
Surprisingly, I see quite a few questions around file ownership asked all the time. And one of the first questions asked concerns the Unix user who owns a particular file.
It's very easy to confirm who the owner of a file is, and you can do it using the ls command.
March 18th, 2008 — Advanced topics, Linux, RedHat, Ubuntu
You probably know that modern Linux distributions have many things in common. Well, one of the reasons for this is LSB – Linux Standard Base. LSB is a joint project by a number of Linux vendors to standardize the OS environment.
From Linux Standard Base article on Wikipedia:
The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant system. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux.
One of the immediate benefits of LSB compliancy is ability to confirm the exact information about your Linux release using the lsb_release command. By exact information I mean the release version, vendor name and most interestingly the codename of your current Linux release.
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March 11th, 2008 — News
When you're trying to clean up your filesystems and reclaim some space, one of the first things you'll want to do is to confirm the largest directories and individual files you have. This can be easily done using two Unix commands: find command and du command.
Find files larger than a certain size
It's very simply to find files which are larger than a specified size. The find command accepts a size parameter, and you can specify the limits for file sizes in your command line.
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