Ceci n'est pas une pipe

How long is it? They are a good twenty years now. Those few of my generation who did not just throw the load of video games, but they were busy to animate sprites or to format the search for science with the first rudimentary word processor - no, no windows! - Found themselves inside the blue box the same atmosphere of wargames . To be sure of my box was a different color: for questioini budget had a green phosphor monitor Fenner. The almost mystical sense of the finding in a little 'fatigue and a little' butt, working for hours in long sequences of strings from the meaning necessarily obscure. Internet was a secret weapon we did not know the existence: even if we knew the operation of your modem, we were far from imagining that one day all this would happen. There was very few computer magazines. It was all a try raffinava try to prove that the instinct of the future problem solvers. I found the same spirit until many years later, with the discovery of Linux and the infinite possibilities that seemed to portend. But basically the way we gained on the C64 is left inside: the desire to get deeper and deeper exploration of architecture, the effort to find new uses for applications originally intended for other things, the ability to always wonder and the desire to share with every discovery that someone had the same passion. The desire to know. A spice so rare, especially among my people of that time. This extends to something much bigger. After all, the touchstone of which was the C64, then we measured the scope of our aspirations. Something almost mystical. As the music of Frank Sinatra.

There are tutorials as simple as evergreen, ever green real good at the computer that is taking its first steps into the magical world of system administration. The following are simple instructions that allow you to reset the date, time and timezone on a Linux server. I put them available to a client who has asked me just this morning. Pride of Place: the originals of these elementary but very useful tutorial can be found here and here .

Reset the date

To reset only the date on a Linux server just go to the command line as root and type the following:

# date +%Y%m%d -s "20090217"

Reset time

Only to reset the time on a Linux server just go to the command line as root and type the following:

# date +%T -s "11:12:00"

Reset date and time

To reset the date and time on a Linux server just go to the command line as root and type the following:

# date -s "16 FEB 2009 11:12:00"

Resetting the Time Zone (solution A)

If you are using Fedora, RHEL or CentOS Linux, type the following:

# redhat-config-date

Or run 'setup' and choose "Timezone configuration":

Resetting the Time Zone (solution B)

If you use another distribution or whether - regardless of your distribution - you feel self-confident enough with Linux to play around with the configuration file, proceed as follows:

1) 'to / etc /

# cd /etc

2) create a symbolic link to the file that contains the desired timezone

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/CET localtime

Resetting the Time Zone (solution C)

You can always use these variables to get the change of the timezone:

$ export TZ=Europe/Rome


In this case, the settings will be valid throughout the session but will be lost in the first reboot, unless you add the same statement in the configuration file that gestitsono custom environment variables, but is not a choice that I feel to advise , better at that point using the solution A or solution B.

Full report here a very interesting announcement appeared on the mailing list of Linux User Group in Verona :

The amateur radio, CB, and fans of the radio listening to the mailing list "Ham" - hosted at lists.linux.it - have begun to exchange opinions and suggestions on GNU / Linux software, are pleased to announce the birth of the website http: / / ham.linux.it where, in the form of a wiki will be replicated articles, documents and links to open source material dedicated to the world of radio communications. E 'can contribute to the site after registration. They are allowed only in content GFDL and Creative Commons.

It is useless to spend too many words about the much anticipated event as happy, because this morning will be discussed on blogs across the world: with a delay of about three months than heralding the rumors of well-informed, Saturday morning has been released Debian 5.0 ( codenamed "Lenny"). As everyone knows, Debian GNU / Linux is a free operating system for excellence, supports twelve processor architectures and includes the desktop environments KDE , GNOME , Xfce , and LXDE . Debian, the absolute champion of stability, efficiency, portability and security - as well as the official Linux distro on which I build all my project so far - runs fine on:

• Sun SPARC (sparc)
• HP Alpha (alpha)
• Motorola / IBM PowerPC (powerpc)
• Intel IA-32 (i386)
• IA-64 (ia64)
• HP PA-RISC (hppa)
• MIPS (mips, mipsel)
• ARM (arm, armel)
• IBM S/390 (s390)
• AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64)

Moving and symptomatic of a climate of cooperation inspired by a very humane and fraternal spirit is the dedication of this extraordinary release:

Debian GNU / Linux 5.0 Lenny dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who died December 26, 2008 in a tragic car accident. Thiemo was involved in Debian in many ways: He has maintained several packages and was the main supporter of the Debian port to the MIPS architectures. He was also a member of our kernel team, as well as the Debian Installer team. His contributions reached far beyond the Debian project has also worked on the MIPS port of the Linux kernel, the MIPS emulation of qemu, and many smaller projects, too numerous to mention here.

His work, his dedication, broad technical knowledge and ability to share will be missed. The contributions of Thiemo will not be forgotten. The high quality of his work make it hard to pick.

What else can I say? For more information you can as always see the release announcement and release notes . Run to download the ISO image for your architecture right from the download page or official identified the nearest mirror . If you have a decent DSL even, I highly recommend installing a Debian ISO's "netinst", the ISO for i386 and x86_64 are available here: debian-500-i386-netinst.iso (150MB, MD5 , torrent ), debian-500-amd64-netinst.iso (131MB, MD5 , torrent ). Have fun!

Absolutely not. I have no intention to join the chorus cannibal who feigns pity or disdain for the epilogue of a story so tragically human. The clamor shamed by certain politicians, certain priests, some journalists and every other mercenary views, I prefer the restorative care of poetry. I'll be back sometime between the things rgod , right in between those things and now I have found the right words to greet each other on which I hope will finally drop the veil of the modest silence. Enjoy your trip, sister for a moment have distracted us from our distractions. Read the rest »

Saturday night I made ​​up for the experience cathartic " Sect souls "with a movie light, very light, almost demented. But very funny, in the older sense of the term. (I like sentences without a predicate). A couple of hours a carefree so healthy that you have to think about. (I also like the periods with no parent). Anyone who knows me knows I am, despite myself, a controfiocchi with yes men. In less edifying way imaginable, of course. I am one of those who can not say no to anyone, but just to anyone, especially when it comes to doing something I would have absolutely no time or inclination to do. (The previous sentence is circosritta to my own work, make no mistake ...). How many of those who do my job, there are days when you are so full of things to do not even have time to breathe. Yet, if during one of these days I called Mr. Anyone asking me to quickly realize the most outlandish ideas, I'm 16 and do it in a way to accommodate him. Of course, I do not like certain pro bono lawyers of American serials, God forbid. But, in this way, end up to spend most of my time in a sort of continuous change of course. And this, believe me, it really leads nowhere. For this reason, it seems particularly clear that the real significance of the new Jim Carrey comedy (is the best seller by Danny Wallace) is not "learn to say yes to life," but rather "learning to say no to everything what keeps you away from life. " Truism, is not it?

This morning I stumbled upon by accident in the news of the death of Hans Beck , the German inventor who invented the legendary seventies in Playmobil . But what we played with those from small plastic simulacra reassuring smile and minimalist mobility that is essential to define a great euphemism? I have a deep and indelible memory even almost smell vaguely that shone with the material they are made when you put them in you mouth. So I was not sure to ask if rilasciassero phthalates. Those were good times. Maybe you were happily immersed up to their necks in the derivatives of the chemical industry, yet you lived peacefully because we do not know anything. Blissful innocence. Beige trousers flared and the line in the hair in the manner of De André. Then, I remember it well, arrived Seveso, and the extreme ecologismi ecoterrorism media. Dioxin has started to do more afraid of the BR. So we syrupy - like it onolenti - dumb hedonism of the eighties, we were taught what was important to do gymnastics, often changing his clothes, combing hair and not live in Chernobyl. Health consciousness to the pure and absolute was reached only in the nineties. Stop smoking and give themselves to the Mediterranean diet. Do not hurt it, but to my 4 or 5 cigarettes a day still can not give up. And now we find ourselves doing calculations on how far they could push the limit of our lifetimes if consumassimo daily liters of kefir in the Caucasus. But that conversation ... I could almost, I suck a Playmobil.