The Matrix effect

It has been a while since last time I wrote a blog post. I planned ahead of myself and wrote a bunch of posts in early July, which filled the whole of summer schedule very well.

I had a nice summer, by the way, and I am about to begin my new occupation (PhD) which I am sure will take a lot of my free time. I know I tend to be very optimist (or I used to) and I would tell myself: "I can keep my schedule, at the end it is just one post a week".
But, even if it does not seem like it, I noticed that it takes a lot of time to write a good, well documented and effective (targeting the right audience and being coherent in difficulty) Linux post. And, on a side note, I consider myself a perfectionist and I generally like to go deep into stuff, so that does not help when I try to cut back on the time.

I decided to be more realistic this time, and I am apologizing in advance if I will not respect my weekly schedule. I will keep sure to write at least every fortnight, also because I would miss it otherwise. I also have another blog to maintain (see in contacts), so I am trying to split the time spent on them equally.

I have a treat for you, now. Open up that terminal of yours and run this string:

echo -e "\e[1;40m" ; clear ; while :; do echo $LINES $COLUMNS $(( $RANDOM % $COLUMNS)) $(( $RANDOM % 72 )) ;sleep 0.05; done|gawk '{ letters="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789@#$%^&*()"; c=$4; letter=substr(letters,c,1);a[$3]=0;for (x in a) {o=a[x];a[x]=a[x]+1; printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[2;32m%s",o,x,letter; printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[1;37m%s\033[0;0H",a[x],x,letter;if (a[x] >= $1) { a[x]=0; } }}'

Cool uh? If it does not work, make sure you have gawk installed.
I will leave you with that and see you next time.

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Fedora -> Debian

After having used Fedora for the past 3 years, I finally decided to change distribution. And the decision pointed to Debian!

I wanted to move to a long-cycle release and more stable distribution and I found perfect ground in one of the oldest and most-established distributions based on the Linux kernel.

My following posts will naturally include more Debian-related problems, but I think that it is even better for my audience, as there are literally infinite sources of help for beginners for distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora (their forums would be enough already).
In the case of Debian (which is known to be a distribution for the intermediate-expert users) there is still an extensive source of help, but it usually requires some deeper knowledge of Linux topics.

Despite I would not recommend Debian as first distro, I can assure that - being a beginner myself - you can do pretty well on Debian even if you are relatively new to Linux, and I will try to help, writing here in easy jargon about it!

Welcome, Debian (Squeeze)!

Welcome!

Welcome to grep Linux!

This blog is one of the two daughter websites of the original Pepe Blog (now closed). I was writing about Science and Technology randomly, but over time, I switched my OS to Linux Fedora and got really into it. That resulted in a copious amount of blog posts about Linux and my experience using it.

That was getting readers confused and for this reason I decided to split the original blog into two blogs, one treating Linux in full and the other (Bad Scientist) about Science and various geek stuff.

I will post about cool news, tips and tricks on Linux, and various problems (with solutions) which I encountered in the perilous journey of working under a Linux OS. This blog is meant to be for beginners which have already some knowledge of a UNIX OS workings.

Thank you for reading,
Giulio