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Oooo Shiny!

So after struggling to watch a small 480i video on YouTube I decided to upgrade from the stock Xorg drivers to the closed source NVIDIA drivers.  I give much respek to the Open Source community, but I am not a techno-vegan.  Sometimes I gotta get me some of that closed source meat.  :D  So I hit up NVIDIA's site and find their glorious linux drivers. Side note...ahem..ATI/AMD I love you, but really would it fucking kill you to lock some code monkeys in a room for a week and have them bang out a functional open/closed source driver or three? Anyhoo, I download the biglongNVIDIAdriver.run and couldn't get the fucker to run.  So after asking my *NIX guru buddy Andy just what the hell a .RUN extn was I was able to run the install (btw... .RUN is a shell script and you run it from a terminal with the syntax (if not root) sudo sh sillyfile.RUN).  So I run it and it says I don't have my kernel straight...so no install for me.  Well fuck you then...TO THE GOOGLE!  Oh! Did I mention that after running the NVIDIA driver script I decided to bypass the "suggested" settings and I kinda jacked up my display drivers so I had to find this article via the LINKS browser (a command line only browser with frames support). Below are the exact steps I followed... from http://nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72490

"Debian GNU/Linux or [K]Ubuntu with Xorg 7.x

If you wish to install the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver on a Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu system that ships with Xorg 7.x, please ensure that your system meets the following requirements:

* development tools like make and gcc are installed
* the linux-headers package matching the installed Linux kernel is installed **for the linux-headers bit you will need to know your kernel version you can find this out by typing  uname -r at the command prompt.  
* the pkg-config and xserver-xorg-dev packages are installed"

I then re-ran  the NVIDIA script and voila! It worked!  Rebooted my computer and I was greeted with a fully armed and operational PCI Express Slot! \o/

o7

Getting Started with Debian - Basic Install and SSH

Let me start by saying I am not an expert programmer, nor am I a Linux guru, instead you can call me a technology explorer.  I am always trying to push the limits of what I can do with the technology around me.  I have flirted with Linux numerous times in the past (more on that in a later post), but each time I never really had a use or a need for it.  Well now both Linux and myself are a little bit older, and a little bit wiser so the time has come to take the plunge.

A friend of mine got an old computer from work and he gave it to me.  Dell Precision 670 to be exact.  It had all you could want from a server...2 Xeon procs, 4 gigs of ram and a TB hard drive.  After messing with Ubuntu for a bit and finally getting sick of not having full root access, I went and got me a Debian ISO file from here... http://www.debian.org/CD/live/ .

So...enough of the histroy lesson...first browse the page and you will see numerous options to choose from.  Choose the basic live cd (just command line) and make sure to get the one that matches your computer's processor (i.e. i386 for intel).  Save the iso file to disk. Use an appropriate iso burning program (I use http://infrarecorder.org it is open source and free \o/) and burn the disk.  Next power up your server and pop in the disk, then reboot.

You should now have some options to choose from...text or a graphical install.  I would go with the graphical install.  It will walk you though the basics, what is your region, what is the root password, time zone, etc. After all of this is done it will ask you to eject the disk and restart. (FYI - this isn't going to be a one stop shop for all answers in the Linux universe...that would be very bad for all parties.  This is more of a help for me to remember what to do when I setup a server at home for testing...cabbienot emperor or whatever those dead poets say. :D )

If this worked you should be sitting at a bash command prompt.  Now comes the fun part, picking packages you want to install on your new server! For starters we will install open SSH (so you can putty from the potty into your computer from any other machine)

So to install SSH type the following...

user@yourcomputer:~$ su
Password: yourpasswordhere
root@yourcomputer:/home/username# apt-get install ssh

After a bit it may ask you to install y or n.  So yeah...pick y :D

Congrats! You can now sit on your couch with your windows laptop and log in with putty!  \o/ I just helped your marriage!

Next Post: Customize your new home server!

Hello from the commmand line!

Hello and welcome to my blog! From here I will post about my strange and wonderful journey into the dark and colorful depths of the Linux command line! First things first, a little about me.  I do tech support for Windoze based machines all day and at night I configure my baby...my dual 3ghz Xeon Debian server! :D  More coming soon...

Next post...how to install and configure Debian from a live cd!

pssst...this post was made on the command line using GoogleCL (more on that another day)! :D