Switching from Windows to Linux can seem a daunting task. Hell switching from any OS to any OS can seem daunting and invoke fear and frustration into anyone. This post is my attempt to minimize both the fear and frustration.

There are several things you will need to do in order to make a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. Many of these steps are equally important and of course importance changes based on individual taste / needs, so the order of steps presented here are simply my recomendation.

First a really quick Perl tutorial.

What is Perl?

Perl is a great language for almost anything. The syntax is consice and Perl makes simple things simple and makes hard things possible or so the motto goes.
Perl is one of the best languages there is for manipulating text and also makes an excellent glue language because Perl allows you to choose your quote opperater, supports here documents, and has built in regular expressions.  Perl also has a bad reputation for looking like line noise for the same reasons listed above.

First you need to be able to login to your N800 as root. just install the openssh package and it will ask for new root pass you have to ssh root@localhost to get root on the N800 Now, from your linux box, lets say you want to backup your n800 to /backups/n800/ from a terminal type

mkdir backups/n800

now login to your n800 Make sure you are not connected to the n800 via USB

ssh root@n800ip

where n800ip is the ip address of your n800 I didn't have any luck with rsynch or scp because of looped symlinks so use the tar across network method

tar -cf  

Most CVS gui's like Cervisia and Tortoise have this built in.
Doing this from a terminal is a little more difficult.
Unfortunately you have to check out the module before you can get information about it (really?)

mp3split is an awesome command line utility to split long audio files using silence detection.
It takes some playing around with to get used to all the options, but it is extremely powerful.

Recently I volunteered to record video for the DrupalCamp Seattle 2008. It quickly dawned on me that to record 10 hours of video, bring it home and capture it to disk and then compress it would take 30+ hours. Also, that wouldn't be anywhere close to live and they were hoping to post the video as soon as possible. Since I am only running Linux on my laptops now, I decided to see what could be accomplished via command line tools in Linux. I quickly stumbled on ffmpeg and dvgrab. DVgrab can capture raw dv from firewire and has features for detecting scenes when capturing from tape.

After reading several blogs saying this was not possible I almost gave up on this, but finally got it working - wohoo!

It is easy to accidentally commit symlinks to an SVN repository. Once you do it is not so easy to remove them.
When you commit a symlink to svn, svn doesn't commit the symlink file, rather it adds the symlink as a directory and follow the symlink adding the contents. This isn't really svn doing this but rather the filesystem.

For example (I will use a Drupal site example) I typically checkout files and modules via CVS in a contributions dir and symlink to those from the modules and themes dir so my file sistem is like this 

Ever want to shutdown a KDE application so that it goes through the normal shutdown procedure? Ever want to talk to an application from a script? Enter dcop and kdcop. dcop is a interface that lets you talk to KDE applications from the command line. kdcop is a nice gui interface to query kde's dcop server and see what commands are available for any running appications.

This is a nice little howto for tarring across a network. http://happygiraffe.net/copy-net#rsync