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LINUX howtos and advocacy documents

Welcome to linux.sgms-centre.com!

Over the years I've been using Linux, I've been faced with several challenges. The main drawback of GNU/Linux is its lack of documentation accessible to the newbie, so I decided to start writing down some of the stuff I learned as and when I learned it.

This endeavour turned itself into a collection of hardware driver pages, howtos and general advocacy documents, in both English and French, which was then stripped down by removing out of date stuff, then moved from provider to provider because I didn't have my own domain at the time, then corrected, then added to again, then.....

Yes. It's a big mess now, and it's time to clean things up a bit and at least try and organise them into some kind of logical structure.

It just so happens that a combination of several factors has finally given me the impetus I needed to sort this out:

  1. My LAMPS (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/SSL) howto desperately needed updating and putting in a more logical place. This was done as of 05/Oct/2003, see here.
  2. I've had the sgms-centre.com domain since January 2001, which means that I can organise stuff on this site and under its subdomains how I choose. It's time to take advantage of that possibility (better late than never).
  3. A webserver has been running on my own machine since not long after we got our DSL connection (September 2001), and I have full control over the DNS entries for the sgms-centre.com domain.
  4. It's a pain in the proverbial arse uploading small files (html pages are small files) to a remote server via ftp because it takes ages to punch a hole through a firewall in order to initiate the ftp exchange in passive mode. You end up spending far more time waiting for the ftp connection to be established than actually doing any uploading. Now, if most providers were to deploy if not ssh, at least scp or sftp, things would be a little more flexible...

So, from now on I'm hosting linux.sgms-centre.com on my own machine. Any changes made to the files here are live immediately and I don't have to waste time with ftp transfers. Plus it's more fun, not to mention the "geek" factor :o)

Of course, it's always possible you were redirected here after pointing your browser to an older link. I'll keep the redirections up for as long as I can, but eventually they will disappear, so it's probably a good idea for you to update your bookmarks accordingly. Each document is still accessible individually - the only reason all the old links redirect to this page at the root of this mini-site is so that you are informed of the changes currently taking place.

Basically this mini-site is broken down into these main sections:

  1. Linux advocacy documents in which I try and explain in an objective manner the advantages of using an Open Software solution rather than closed, proprietary, "I've got you by the b@lls" software. I'll also talk about my own personal experience in this area and how I wound up where I am now.
  2. Linux 'howto' documents which give step-by-step explanations of how to accomplish various tasks using Linux. There are a few documents of my own, and I'll also be providing pointers to documents written by other people.
  3. Various odds and ends, including so far: a guide to online netiquette (and a French translation thereof), a command line tool called dumprdns for getting the reverse DNS of all the IP addresses in a given range, drivers for DXR3/Hollywood+ MPEG2 decompression cards in the form of kernel patches (2.6.5 up to 2.6.13.4), and a filter designed to strip unwanted MIME sections from an e-mail.
  4. Stuff related to Nokia mobile phones.
  5. A few silly pictures poking fun at particular software vendor located somewhere in the north-west of the USA.

Some time or other I'll also get round to writing a French mirror to this mini-site (and probably publish it at linuxfr.sgms-centre.com). This is not, however, a priority at the minute.


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