Processes

htop

Besides the built-in top which we can use for monitoring current processes’ status, we have a much better tool htop. User can see how much workload each of your cpu is doing, you can sort the list in every column and you can press t for tree view for main and forked/sub processes relationships. There are a few things htop doesn’t show on default screen, such as used buffer size and cache size etc, but you can always use free -k or top as supplements.

File systems

du and df

There are a few tools I need to take this note down. The default built-in df and du utility are great tools. Man page is always helpful in detail.

iostat

This comes with the package sysstat in RPM based Linux distributions (CentOS/Fedora/etc), available at their main repositories. Not so sure for the deb people. I always use the command

iostat -dmx /dev/sda 3

to check sda’s usage every 3 seconds.

iotop

iotop is a simple I/O monitor, this package is written by Python 2.x and it requires root privilege to run. It is really simple but it does the job. Check out --help for a bit more functionality.

ftop

ftop shows processes of open files and file systems. This software is now 5 years old and hasn’t been updated, but it does the job, and I like this better than iotop. For CentOS people, this package comes from rpmforge, you’ll have to add the repository first to your box.

Networking monitoring

Networking is another very important thing that needs to be mornitored. netstat does a fairly good job for a fixed point of time’s status, don’t we need a bit more than that?

iftop

iftop can show current port and ip of the host and the destination, provided this you can use netstat to find out what process is behind a typical service. This can also show in bars how heavily a service is using the network.

It needs root privilege to run, it also has a .iftoprc file available for configuring defaults.

nload

nload doesn’t need root privilege to run, so the functionality is even simpler. Just monitoring the load on network. Press F2 for its configuration.

nload is available in rpmforge for CentOS.

Overall, these are the basic level system monitoring tools, and there are many more like those. For enterprise environment monitoring, there are much more sophisticated tools available.

In recent releases of GNOME, KDE and maybe others, they provide a GUI based system monitoring tools too. See what fits you the most.

The thing is, when using a SSH tunnel as a proxy allowing FTPRush to download from FTP servers has always been very fast. I don’t know why it is as fast as being under Windows, regarding this issue, the quick solution is to setup a SSH proxy that takes the bandwidth to interface lo.

So, under FTPRush, first setup a proxy connection. Press F6 to open up the “options”, under Proxy Server, add a proxy and name it with whatever you like, proxy type SOCKS5, HOST is 127.0.0.1, port can be anything above 1027, let’s say, 8088.

Secondly, setup an FTP site with proxy set to the one just set.

Since we are using Linux, open up a terminal and type

ssh -D 127.0.0.1:8088 -p 22 localhost

to create a ssh tunnel and bind it to local 8088 port. Don’t exit the terminal, go back to FTPRush and start the connection with the FTP site.

Happy downloading!

Firstly, boot into Win 8, using disk utility to shrink volumns [to as small as you want if you can], because my version of Y510p has an optical drive, I took the advantage and burned a Fedora 19 DVD disc, I did not use LiveCD, don’t ask me why.

If you intend to use USB to install, use liveusb-creator rather than unetbootin.

In BIOS, I turned on Legacy support with UEFI first. <-- This is important. Left the burnt DVD inside the tray, reboot and kept pressing F12 until a boot selection screen came up. Choose the DVD drive. By default, the kernel in the DVD doesn't provide a working graphics driver, so I'd have to install under command line. The Anaconda command-line was simple enough to use, the problems came next. I could successful boot using UEFI Win8 mode into Fedora, but I couldn't reach a desktop environment. Switched to tty2 using root. I tried startx but it didn't work, and the Ethernet card provided by Athores did not work either! Wifi could work, but I was at school and they used WPA2 Enterprise encryption so I couldn't do anything from this laptop! If you experience black screen on booting, add nomodeset to your grub2 kernel booting options behind linux. You can manually add this parameter to /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg.

I knew this was gonna happen, so I brought my sweet old HP 6531s alongside with me. I figured that if I update some of the packages, it might work, epsecially kernel and graphics related packages. On the Internet some people say using alx driver could install the driver for my Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet, it was a no-go for me.

I downloaded the required latest packages from http://pkgs.org, listed below:

binutils-2.23.52.0.1-8.fc19.x86_64.rpm
cpp-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-libelf-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-libs-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
gcc-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
gdb-7.6-30.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-common-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-devel-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-headers-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-devel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-headers-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
libmpc-1.0.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
linux-firmware-20130724-29.git31f6b30.fc19.noarch.rpm
mpfr-3.1.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm
patch-2.7.1-6.fc19.x86_64.rpm
pkgconfig-0.27.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm

Using USB sticks to copy from old computer to Y510p, trying to resolve the dependency list was a great pain.

I recon the most important package is kernel-3.11* then reboot. And voila! Y510p successfully booted into my MATE Desktop Environment! Atheros ethernet was also working fantastically.

The 5400rpm hdd is noticeably slow, the booting process nearly made me think that I failed again. The brightness cannot be adjusted under MATE and I don’t know why (see the follow-up)

Proprietary GPU drive from nVidia doesn’t compile on my machine at all.

Overall, this is a success attempt installation, and it made my day!

It so happens that Linus Torvalds on Oct 17, 2013 made a comment to Fedora Project complaining on their installing DVD/CD that never gets updated after their first current-version release. I agree with him. Otherwise Fedora is great!

Update:

1. You don’t need a xorg-x11-drv-nouveau to be able to display.

2. The nVidia proprietary driver from rpmfusion won’t work yet.

It is nearly a year that I haven’t used Windows as my in-production OS, instead I’ve used either RedHat sponsored Linux distro (Fedora) or a RHEL-copy CentOS.

sudo yum install mutt

Now it is the fun part.

By default, your mutt will read info from ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc. Since I have several email addresses needed to be setup, I use the second one.

mkdir -p ~/.muttrc/accounts

Which creates requested folders.

Go to ~/.mutt/accounts/ and create your email account file (you may name it as your like, but keep track of the file name) like the following way:

# Uni Email Setting, file name: university
set from = "abcdef@esp.tld"
set realname = "Your Name Here"
# IMAP settings here
set imap_user = "abcdef"
set imap_pass = ""       # Password is empty here so you'll key-in passwords everytime you wish to access your email account
set folder = "imaps://imap.mail.tld:993"
set spoolfile = "imaps://imap.mail.tld:993/Inbox"   # For gmail users, you need to set your spoolfiles to "+INBOX"
set imap_check_subscribed
set mime_forward=yes
set mime_forward_rest=yes

#SMTP settings
set smtp_url = "smtp://abcdef@smtp.esp.tld:587/"
set smtp_pass = ""

set mail_check = 120
set timeout = 300
set imap_keepalive = 300
# You can set the postponed/record to "+Drafts" or "Sent" correspondently below.
set postponed = "imaps://imap.mail.tld:993/Inbox.Drafts"
set record = "imaps://imap.mail.tld:993/Inbox.Sent"
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers

You can also put your GnuPG keys under your account if you have multiple keys for multiple emails for some reason. You need to copy the content over under each of your account setting. Remember to substitute your public key identifier in the config files.

You can create similar ones with gmail, assume that you have read the comments above.

Now we put some general information into our muttrc:

vim ~/.mutt/muttrc

set editor = "vim"
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set move = no
set include
set sort = 'threads'
set sort_aux = 'reverse-last-date-received'
set auto_tag = yes
ignore "Authentication-Results:"
ignore "DomainKey-Signature:"
ignore "DKIM-Signature:"
alternative_order text/plain text/html *
auto_view text/html
bind editor  complete-query
bind editor ^T complete
bind editor  noop
set hostname = desktop.luxing.im
set sig_on_top = yes

# Create a statusbar shows the information in localtime.
set pager_format="%4C %Z %[!%b %e at %I:%M %p]  %.20n -- %s%* -- (%P)"

# Accounts and Shortcuts
source ~/.mutt/accounts/acadia
macro index  'source ~/.mutt/accounts/yeah!'
macro index  'source ~/.mutt/accounts/126!'


# move spam to Spam/ from: http://chrisjrob.com/2011/03/23/configuring-mutt-for-spam/
macro index S "unset resolveNset resolve=INBOX.Spam" "file as Spam"
macro pager S "=INBOX.Spam" "file as Spam"

macro index H "unset resolveNset resolve=INBOX" "file as Ham"
macro pager H "=INBOX" "file as Ham"

# return to inbox by pressing .
macro index . "=INBOX" "Inbox"

set pager_format="%4C %Z %[!%b %e at %I:%M %p]  %.20n  %s%* -- (%P)" # show the corresponding local time of the email.
set pgp_use_gpg_agent = yes

You need to adjust your accounts corresponding to your settings.

If you put sensitive information like your passwords into your account, remember to chmod 600 for security concern.