My first foray into Linux was in 1997 when a cousin handed me a CD and said, "Go for it." Well, he didn't offer any help other than that, and being a Win95/3.1 user who had only begun to get into computers, that didn't fly. But after the release of Red Hat 6, I tried again. I got further in that, mostly because they were making an effort to make it installable for newbies who knew squat about Unix. Still, though, I quickly got discouraged by such lofty topics as printer setup and getting...

In the spirit of old hardware and minimalism I've set up my fave radio stations in a little bash script. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it works for me. Especially since I employ Debian Multimedia's mplayer-nogui package.

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This isn't a howto but rather a basic example on setting up "sudo".

Sudo is an excellent tool to aid your pursuit of security and unnecessary root usage. Regardless of what certain individuals will say, and unfortunately some of them even put distros together, using the root account all the time is begging for trouble. So...

Is it already installed on your Debian system? While you might be using aptitude or synaptic, my preference is for apt-get.
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Everybody has a different idea of how to get connected. More and more people only look for automagic network connections or fancy GUIs to accomplish their bidding, but that's not me. So, in the interests of old hardware and always knowing exactly where I'm getting a connection, here's my methodology.

This involves modifying /etc/network/interfaces and the use of some simple bash scripting. Pertinent info on the networking process can be found in the Debian Reference Manual, chapter...

First of all, credit where credit is due. I shamelessly mixed and matched from my Debian files, the ZSH wiki, and various other bits.

ZSH is a shell with incredible autocompletion. Here's a good intro. If you install ZSH, you'll no doubt want to make a test burn. Copy/paste the following files. Make a few changes; then open a terminal or switch to a console (and login as you normally would). Type: Once you discover that you've been working for the dark side......