The man command (short for "manual") is great for listing documentation associated with a particular Linux command, but there is lesser-known, and arguably superior alternative, called info.

info works in a multipage, hypertext format for which you'll need a few basic navigation commands:

n - Next page p - Previous page u - Upper page l - Last page visited d - Go to info's main directory x - Exit the current window (if a sub-window is open) q - Quit

Links are prefixed with a "*". To follow a link, move the cursor over the text that follows it and press <Enter>.

The best way to get started is to simply type info on its own. From there, typing h will give you a primer for first timers, while q will list the basic commands.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Further proof that the whole anti-piracy scene is getting out of hand:

British website owners could face extradition to the US on piracy charges even if their operation has no connection to America and does something which is most probably legal in the UK, the official leading US web anti-piracy efforts has told the Guardian. The US's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is targeting overseas websites it believes are breaking US copyrights whether or not their servers are based in America or there is another direct US link, said Erik Barnett, the agency's assistant deputy director. As long as a website's address ends in .com or .net, if it is implicated in the spread of pirated US-made films, TV or other media it is a legitimate target to be closed down or targeted for prosecution, Barnett said. While these web addresses are traditionally seen as global, all their connections are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution. As well as sites that directly host or stream pirated material, ICE is also focusing on those that simply provide links to it elsewhere. (my italics)

So why aren't ICE starting a little closer to home? Visit a search engine, add the magic word "torrent" to any movie/CD/TV show you like, and ka-pow, a zillion links to pirated material! I just tried "avatar torrent" with the following results:

google.com:   103,000,000 hits
bing.com:       2,830,000 hits

Do I need to stress that both are not only .coms but also ... ahem ... US-based?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

lshw is a great little tool for extracting detailed information about the hardware on your machine. You can run it as a regular user, but it will only report paritial information, so it should ideally be run as the super-user (prefixing it with sudo or su as per your distro).

A basic report will flood your screen so either pipe the output to a text file:

lshw > hardware.txt

or a formatted HTML file:

lshw -html > hardware.html

For a compact listing of your hardware, try:

lshw -short

Adding the -C switch allows you to find detailed information by device class. So for details about all installed disk drives use:

lshw -C disk

and for your network's hardware and its capabilities:

lshw -C network

You'll find other classes listed in the lshw -short command.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )