If you're an existing member and have a topic which you think belongs to the Operating Systems Basics module, please leave a comment.

The purpose of the module is to give a very high level overview of how modern operating systems work and to also explain the importance of securely managing all the available resources (hence a few topics on files, users and privileges). Almost every single topic deserves a separate module, if not a course, on its own – but for the moment it will be really basic stuff.

Here's the list of topics so far:

• What OS is and why we need it
• Features of a modern OS
• Kernel and kernel modules
• Features of Unix OS
• MINDMAP: Features and components of an OS
• Everything is a file! Types of files in Unix
• A typical filesystem tree of a Unix-like OS
• Users, privileges and file ownership
• Executing a binary file in Unix

To all those of you asking for the date when this module will be posted: I will make the Operating Systems Basics module available to all the existing Unix Tutorial Members on February 1st, 2010.

See also:

• Unix Tutorial – members area
• What Unix Tutorial members area is about
• Unix Tutorial gets a Facebook page

See you all there, and feel free to share your suggestions – either here or on the wall of the Unix Tutorial page.

Since Unix Tutorial is a technical blog, I'll try and stay as technical as possible within the topic.

Virtualize to consume less energy, get rid of old hardware

Old servers required a much bigger commitment in the past: not only did they cost a fortune, but they also needed a lot of space and required a lot of power. These days, 1u or 2u server solution can easily outperform a computing system which used to take a whole cabinet in your datacentre. And since the cost of supporting old hardware only increases with each year, it makes a lot of sense to simply but a new server to replace the old infrastructure.

If you're really big into the whole life cycle thing, an even better approach is to virtualize most of your systems. There are quite a few great solutions today – vSphere from VMware, Xen and KVM based virtualization from RedHat and the xVM family of virtualization solutions by Sun Microsystems (Oracle).

A ratio of 15 virtual machines per 1 physical server isn't that uncommon, which can give you an idea about the kind of improvement you'll get by following the route of virtualization.

The math is really simple: shut down 15 old servers, keep only 1 new server running – this means greatly reducing the amount of energy and therefore helping the planet stay green for a bit longer.

Read from your screen, print less

Perhaps on a much smaller scale, the issue of printing materials is also a direction you may want to explore if you're serious about helping the climate change prevention.

Many of us still print dozens of sheets of A4 paper a day. We print out emails and directions, man pages and screenshots – many of these to never be used again.

Start small and pay attention to every urge of yours to print something out. Ask yourself a few simple questions just to be sure that you absolutely need each piece of the information printed out.

As a Unix administrator, you should find ways to monitor your printing service. Even simple things like weekly stats of the top users printing stuff out might sometimes help you save really big on the paper and toner cost. Many users print stuff out without a certain reason for doing so – it's just their habit.

This means that if you're familiar with lpstat and lpadmin commands, you have a chance to help yourself and others become more aware of how much you're printing and what can be done to break your printing patters.

eInk-based book readers are a great alternative for those of you who claim they absolutely can't read off screen. It may be a while until A4-sized readers become widely available and affordable, but already you can get a book reader for just a few hundred dollars and this little device can be used for storing and reading of many books – all without much of an environmental impact, since you no longer need paper books.

Use only what you need

You'll be amazed how much can be saved if you run CPUs on your system at the speed sufficient to fulfill your computational needs instead of having everything running at 100% of their speed!

Many modern servers have power-awareness and intelligence built-in. I especially like blade server solutions – Dell, HP and Sun have all got a range of blade enclosures and blade servers on offer.

The beauty of using blades is that blade enclosures are extremely intelligent and configurable devices – you can use them to cap the power draw for your whole enclosure or a certain blade. Such power limitations will usually result in a lower performance, but for many solutions it's not critical at all. For example, if your blade hosts a FlexLM licenses server or serves web pages, it will be almost impossible to spot a performance difference even if you significantly lower the CPU speed.

Most operating systems support power management options. For desktops, this means ability to manage the speed of your cooling fans or the speed of your CPU which immediately has an impact. Sometimes you can also control your graphics card in the same manner. If you add screen blanking and hard drives management to this (configuring the sleep times for periods of long inactivity), you have all you need to reduce the power draw of your PC and ultimately help our planet stay the way it currently is or maybe even get refreshed over the next few years.

That's it for today! Sure enough, these tips may not seem to be all this climate change preventative, but trust me – we all have to participate with however small steps and environmental improvements we can think of.

See also:

• Blog Action Day website
• Change
• Desktop Virtualization website

If you're in need of quick help – drop me a message on Twitter – I'm UnixTutorial there. I can't promise a prompt reply, but at least this way you'll have some interactivity.

I see how many people leave questions in comments to my posts, and I don't always have the time to reply – so feel free to send me an email if you really need my help.

I'm back from my holidays, and it's time to open the Unix Tutorial members area for new registrations once again!

If you're still looking for a reason to become a member – please read the Becoming a Unix Tutorial member post.

This time around, new users will receive a life-time access to just one course, the Unix foundations one. This is going to be a constantly updated and expanded course so I'm sure you'll benefit from revisiting it now and then. New courses added at a later stage will never be available for free: I plan to make them very specialized and will charge for access – more on this later.

Wait no more – here's your chance to join: Unix Tutorial members sign-up. I don't have nearly as much time to further develop the course, but please take time to leave a comment to this post or update a thread on the Unix Tutorial members discussion board about what exactly you're interested in.

Let me know if you struggle with any graphics desktop functionality, and I'll try my best to help and show it with screenshots.

By the way: I really like one of the new community themes which come with Ubuntu 9.04, it's called the Dust theme.

[View with PicLens]

Unix news

• OpenBSD 4.5 released
• FreeBSD 7.2 released
• NetBSD 5.0 released
• Solaris 10 update 7 (5/09) released

Unix-related releases

• Wine 1.1.20 released – OLE copy/paste improvements, Direct3D code cleanup and traditional bug fixes

See also:

• Interesting Unix reads – Apr 21st, 2009
  
• Interesting Unix reads – Feb 3rd, 2009
• Unix Glossary
• Unix commands reference

Unix news

• Oracle buys Sun Microsystems

Unix-related releases

• GCC 4.4.0 released
• HP-UX 11i v3 update 4
• Gnome 2.26.1 released

Useful Unix tips

• Ubuntu package management with dpkg (UbuntuGeek)
• Ubuntu package management with apt (UbuntuGeek)
• Unix aphorisms (via Standalone Sysadmin)

See also:

• Interesting Unix reads – Feb 3rd, 2009
• Unix Glossary
• Unix commands reference
  

A warm welcome to all the new members!

In just 2 days, more than 50 of you have joined, so I'm confident we'll have great time sharing Unix knowledge in the next few months.

I've got the first few modules of material posted already – they're really simple but that's the whole idea as I target beginners of all levels with my introductory course. I'll be posting more modules in the coming days, and there's already a curriculum posted on forums for people to discuss.

Only 3 more days of free UnixTutorial membership

Unfortunately, I'm also seeing a lot of interest from spammers – because the membership is free, no credit card or Paypal transactions are involved, and this means anyone can register and start spamming the protected forums.

Given the above situation, and also because I'm going away for a few weeks rather soon, I have just decided to close the first wave of enrollments earlier than originally planned: Unix Tutorial enrollment will be closed down this Friday, midnight GMT.

If you know someone who's eager to get started with Unix, please tell them about Unix Tutorial membership so that they can get onboard before the enrollment is over. I'm looking for genuinely interested people prepared to commit some of their time, so if it's just about someone hoping to get a placeholder for accessing premium content in the future – please refrain from signing up at this time.

That's it for the moment! Thanks again for your interest, I'll do my best to make sure you learn plenty of new Unix tricks and gain immediately applicable knowledge from the Unix Tutorial members section.

See also:

• Learn Unix with me
• Your Unix story: where, how and why are you using it
• Become a Unix Tutorial member
  

Become a lifetime Unix Tutorial member!

If you think you know enough about Unix Tutorial membership, then wait no more and proceed straight to the Unix Tutorial Sign Up page. For everyone else, there's a bit more information below.

Why I'm setting up a members area

As you've probably seen, I'm trying to encourage as many people as possible to start using Unix-like operating systems. So far, I've been doing this by sharing tips and how-to guides on various Unix challenges I've come across in my 10+ years of system administration. While this had proved to be very popular, I would like to take it all one step further by publishing a few courses on various Unix topics.

Structure makes learning much easier, and I hope to involve even more people by providing a thorough learning plan for each level of Unix learners: beginners, intermediate users and advanced users which plan to use or manage Unix professionally.

I'm set up a membership section on Unix Tutorial, because this seems to be a great way to help you grow Unix systems from scratch or just fill in some of the gaps you might have in your knowledge. Some materials with be based on the existing articles, but most of the content is going to be an easy-to-follow series of guides, interactive diagrams, exercises and tests developed in accordance with the curriculum of each course.

Unix Tutorial forums had recently been  made a part of the members-only area – they will be used by the members to discuss any course topics, share ideas and solutions. I think there are plenty of public forums available – and so it doesn't make much sense to start and maintain yet another one. Instead, I will keep the private discussion board which will allow members to ask questions and get the support they need.

Before you ask: no, it doesn't mean I will stop posting on Unix Tutorial blog – in fact, I hope membership-only discussions will make many more Unix challenges visible and this will allow me to cover them on Unix Tutorial blog pages in my usual how-to manner.

How you will benefit

These are the reasons for you to become a member of the Unix Tutorial site:

• Structured approach to learning Unix – the Unix Foundation course is going to be an introduction to what Unix is and what are your options when learning or using it. If you're just getting started with Unix, or even if you're using it already but just want a refresher – this is going to be your chance to learn the basics and to address any gaps you have
• Individual support – I will be actively monitoring forums to help you with Unix challenges, and on top of this there's always going to be an option to contact me through direct messages on forums. This is not planned to be a technical support hotline, so please don't rely on this for any critical issues – this being said, I'm going to do my best to address your questions within days, if not hours
• Community of like-minded Unix users – it's much easier to interact in a smaller group of like-minded people. Those who wish to do so, will be doing introductions on forums, and this is bound to help you not only solve immediate technical issues, but to also find interesting blogs to follow, Unix users to learn from and to collaborate with, and Unix fans of all levels to share your experience with.
• Learn anything you want about Unix – many books and websites target what their authors believe should be taught to their target group. Quite often such works prove to be quite disappointing for both authors and readers, because not all the topics are interesting or relevant enough to the needs of the audience. You've probably seen already – most of my posts on Unix Tutorial are based on the search queries from my visitors or questions asked through the Ask a Unix question form. I love this approach! It helps me to always write about the things you want to learn.I plan to use the same approach with my study courses – anyone can suggest a topic for a course, but registered members will obviously get a preference for their suggestions. If you ever wanted to learn something about Unix – shell scripting, performance tuning or re-compiling a Linux kernel – I will gladly take your ideas, research them and present as learning objectives for you and other members of Unix Tutorial.

Will Unix Tutorial membership be free?

There's still a lot of planning to be done about the membership area, but here's how I see it so far:

1. There will ALWAYS be a number of free courses available at Unix Tutorial
   You will still have to register, but it will not cost you anything to join. Most likely the free courses will be of introductory nature – they prove to be both most popular and most beneficial to anyone learning Unix. After the initial enrollment period, I'll close the registration for a few months to polish off the few courses I have planned, to reopen membership sometime in summer or early autumn.
2. There will be paid content as well
   I'm going to spend a lot of time developing the courses, and therefore I think some of them will be available on a paid basis only. This is most likely going to be a set of niche topics in the intermediate-advanced level of technical expertise. From my experience, such topics will only prove useful to a small group of people who are willing to take their Unix knowledge to a whole new level.
3. There will be a  paid membership
   For those interested in constantly learning more about Unix, this will probably be the most attractive option – a small monthly fee will provide access to all the Unix courses available, including the new ones as they get published
4. Paid technical support/solutions architecture
   I've been doing this for quite some time – so it's probably going to be one of the services available to Unix Tutorial members. If you have a technical issue which needs a solution, I can research it for you. If you have a project requirement and want me to map out a technical solution for you – I'll be able to do this as well. Depending on how much time is needed for other activities in the Unix Tutorial members area, such services may come at an additional cost.

There's nothing set in stone yet, I'm really just getting started. I have a vision of a great learning environment where we'll be able to learn and share knowledge, and this is going to be my focus. I have a full-time job, so Unix Tutorial membership will not be a chance for me to make a living off it… That being said, if there's enough people willing to learn and to pay, I'll be delighted to have an opportunity to spend more of my time helping others.

First Unix Tutorial members

In the next few months, I will work with the first wave of members, help them go through the courses and answer all the technical questions they might have, and will use this experience to further improve the courses and the way they're presented.

The initial Unix Tutorial membership is a unique offer, because it will be a life-time access to Unix Tutorial courses. I would like to offer it free of charge, but with one condition – if you become one of the lucky first members,  you should be genuinely interested in learning Unix and being an active member of the community – participating in discussions and helping others. As one of the initial members, I would like you to help me improve the members area by completing a few surveys (sent out sometime between mid-March and mid-July, I promise not to ask too much of you but it's crucial that I get your feedback).

The full-scale opening of the Unix Tutorial membership area is planned for July 2009, but is still subject to change.

Sounds interesting enough? Register now! Look forward to meeting you in the members area!