What's the coolest thing you've done in Linux?

arijit_2404 · 03-19-2008, 12:39 AM

Fully switched to Linux.
Now I am free from Microsoft prison.

pwalden · 03-20-2008, 11:14 AM

Lots and lots of cools stuff:

Converted an old laptop to a house entertainment media player
Integrated 2 internet cams into a motion detection house protection system
Make movies of the cam events and automatically generate calendar like DVDs of the movies
Download NASA and other need videos and make DVDs for friends and family

frieza · 03-22-2008, 11:49 AM

Code:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              36G   27G  7.0G  80% /
/dev/hda1              99M   23M   72M  24% /boot
tmpfs                 379M     0  379M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1              37G  8.7G   27G  25% /mnt/videos
192.168.2.5:/nfs      4.0G  2.6G  1.2G  68% /nfs
192.168.2.5:/home     5.0G  3.7G  1.1G  78% /home
/dev/fd1              349K   15K  316K   5% /mnt/floppy1

Code:

/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/videos type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
192.168.2.5:/nfs on /nfs type nfs (rw,addr=192.168.2.5)
192.168.2.5:/home on /home type nfs (rw,addr=192.168.2.5)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)
/dev/fd1 on /mnt/floppy1 type ext2 (rw)

Need i say more?

ncsuapex · 03-22-2008, 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lord-fu

The absolute coolest thing was be able to transform my "hobby" into a paying gig.

I start a new job on Monday as a SA for a small upstart software company. They are running various Linux and I can't WAIT! Been doing some tech support on *Nix and Windows in the past but I've learned more working with Linux at home than I have in previous jobs. I will learn A LOT in this new job.

frieza · 04-11-2008, 08:25 PM

created a dual-honed fedora 6 box with firestarter and smb to share internet access (via firestarter) and mp3s (via smb) to an MSDOS box
allowed smb connections only via the LAN connection defined by firestarter
mounted the samba share in MS-DOS 6.22 and ran an mp3 player for DOS (mpxplay) with the mp3s on the samba share

god i love computers

GushpinBob · 04-13-2008, 12:18 PM

Transferred my sister's data from a dying hard drive to a newer, larger hard drive using ntfsprogs.
Transferred my data from a small hard drive to a larger hard drive using rsync.
Playing Windows 95/98 era 3D games in Wine without a hitch while using compiz-fusion on AIGLX (on an ATI R500-based card

).
Creating and mounting my own disk images; I have yet to find a program that can mount disk images (I'm talking about hard drive images, not ISOs or floppy images)in Windows.

EDIT:

I almost forgot to mention that I can take an arbitrary video/audio file and convert it using ffmpeg (with the help of BASH scripting) to another arbitrary format. Very useful since I have a PSP and an iPod 5G.

theunixwizard · 04-19-2008, 09:02 PM

Running Linux on Hardware People will throw away and
Decoding the egmina VI

THE PENGUIN AND THE DEMON STANDS:
Against the EVIL WINDOW

frieza · 05-02-2008, 06:25 PM

using a fedora rescue cd to transfer a partition a harddrive and then dd to transfer an installed win98 system onto the new partition, formatting the rest for linux and using dd to make a backup of the win98hd onto that linux partition, then downloaded drivers onto the linux partition and copied them onto the win98 partition and was able to re-image the win98 install in case a driver install blew up since i was running win98 on a more modern machine where drivers for legacy oses like win98 are hard to come by for

mostlyharmless · 05-12-2008, 06:41 PM

Sure are a lot of slackers here.

I must be getting old, it did seem to be cooler once upon a time...

using gopher, archie and veronica from home! with my own computer!

found an old vt100 terminal, hooked it to serial port, now I had another "console"

patching the kernel for my specific hardware

repairing windows problems, getting lost data off "unreadable media"

access to all my memory for my programs on my old 386 (remember 640K and "extended" or "expanded" memory?)

doing the ridiculously impractical instead of getting any work done:
where is that 12-step program for software RAID?

Most of all, being part of the linux community and posting to this venerable thread.

pljvaldez · 05-12-2008, 07:13 PM

Getting my wife to do 99% of her computer usage on linux. The XP box mostly sits turned off except for her occasional need of Hallmark Card Studio.

DJOtaku · 05-12-2008, 09:42 PM

my new coolest thing is setting up Mythdora and getting free from the clutches of having to watch TV on the networks' time.

frieza · 05-13-2008, 03:26 PM

creating a shell script (posted here)
that converts sequentially numbered videos en masse and then assemble and burn video dvds with them
and used it to convert 278 half 20 minute videos onto 44 dvd+r discs in about 2 weeks instead of a month or so if i had to do them individually taking into consideration the fact that the script could be working while i was away and my mom was able to occasionally start the next batch while i was away
granted there are probably gui based tools that could do the same in windows but they most likely aren't free or aren't as powerful

KDHofAvalon · 05-19-2008, 06:54 PM

I haven't done a whole lot, but there are a few things that made people who saw me do it say "Wow!" or something similar.

1. Used DSLinux to download a file (that I forgot to bring) while at a friend's house.

2. Copied my grandpa's entire music collection, which I had ripped on my home PC in Kansas, to his computer in Arizona using a custom live cd with scp and ntfs-3g.

And ofcourse the obligatory saving of files from a drive the Windows has decided to stop reading from for whatever reasons is does.

mostlyharmless · 06-16-2008, 07:01 PM

Succeeded in using Grub to Dual Boot Windows XP SP3 and Slackware 12.1 with RAID 1+ 0 dmraid, mdadm, LUKS and LVM

Disclaimer: I make no claims about the sanity of this particular endeavor, and in fact have my doubts. To paraphrase others, I did it to see whether it was possible. Backup all of your data, regularly, particularly if you try any of this at home.

Overview: The system has a 320 G IDE drive and a Promise Fasttrack 2000 "fakeraid" board with 2 160 G IDE drives attached. The two 160 G drives are setup as a 320 G striped (RAID-0) array. The BIOS can boot from either the IDE drive or the Promise board by picking either HDD-0 or SCSI as the boot options. Grub is on both MBRs. When Windows boots, it boots off a RAID 1 array made of a partition on the IDE drive and an identical partition on the Promise RAID-0. When Slackware boots, it boots off a different RAID 1 array made on the IDE drive and on the Promise RAID-0. The root partition and swap are on a LUKS encrypted LVM partition also on a RAID 1 array made on the IDE drive and on the Promise RAID-0. To recap, the IDE disk and RAID-0 stripe are both partitioned in 3's with each partition mirrored in a corresponding RAID-1 array. Slackware can, of course, mount, read and write the Windows RAID 1 array.

soplin · 06-19-2008, 08:33 PM

The coolest thing was installing Linux, and wow was it refreshing compared to Windows.

Others:

Amaze people with Compiz, though I find it useless for work purposes.
Make people think that my Linux box was a Mac, or Windows PC.
Setup a file and print server.
Finally figure out how to get Shockwave to work on it.
Learn BASH, VI and Emacs.
Run Linux on old computers.
Donate to open source software and Linux because it's worth the money!