Links
I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary. The purpose of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience without sacrificing disk space. So why are there two kinds of links and how do they work? Symlinks (ln -s REALPATH LINK) work like this: LINK --> REALPATH --> DATA While hard links (ln PATH1 PATH2) work like this: PATH1 --&g

Karmic FAQ
Following tradition, here's my Karmic FAQ: How should I download? Torrents, to keep the strain off the servers. There are IPv6 torrent files available as well, as a test so Canonical can see how many Ubuntu users are on IPv6 and thus how much support to give it. They don't list KTorrent as one of the clients that can do the IPv6 torrents, but I'm using it right now. Or if you have a Beta or RC .iso sitting around zsync to the final I hav

Care Bears
Americans between ages 20 and 30 probably remember the Care Bears, a TV show where the Care Bears (which look like teddy bears), who are from Care-a-Lot fight off mean characters with the power of caring. Their attack is called the Care Bear Stare and their tummies have little icons that light up and shoot whatever their power is at the enemy. I'm not sure why, but one was Grumpy Bear. There was also Funshine Bear, Friend Bear, and a few others, including Cheer Bear. Cheer Bear's motto was "when in doubt, SMILE!" and had the power to make others happy. Where am I going with this? Yesterday,

HowTo: Gather Full Mail Headers
Say you want to find out where an email came from. Maybe it was threatening or phishing or spam. How do you gather evidence of what servers passed it to you to give to the authorities? You need the full headers. They contain all the routing information. Keep in mind, though, that it is possible the sender was making use of an open rrlay instead of their own mailserver. KMail: View -> Headers -> All Headers Evolution: View -> Message Source (or Ctrl+U) Thunderbird: View -> Headers -> All GMail: Hit the down arrow next t

Attention Folks
TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading. With all the discussion of sexism in FOSS this year, a certain individual calling himself MikeeUSA is back. I realize many people are not aware of this individual. He is notorious in certain circles for very good reasons. 2005 is the earliest record I know of him harassing women involved with Debian and LinuxChix. And last year, he