Open Source Week 2009

Posted by Brian R Cline | Experience,Programming,Ubuntu,linux | Thursday 1 October 2009 1:09 pm

I am so excited to say that I finally booked everything I need to attend the Toronto Open Source Week. In a couple of weeks time, I will be spending a couple of days in Toronto while attending the many conferences, workshops and presentations on open source software (GNU Linux, PHP, etc.)

I am hoping to do some serious networking for my consulting business, along with getting more experience with web programming and the rest of the LAMP stack which seem to be creating an IT revolution.

I hope to see you at some of the events!

Becoming a Super User In Ubuntu

Posted by Brian R Cline | Ubuntu,Uncategorized,linux | Friday 10 July 2009 12:16 pm

I frequently answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and have noticied that there’s consistantly new Ubuntu (Linux) users asking how they become the super user to run some certain command. Of course, finding the answer to this question should be extremely easy with Google and it is.

In Ubuntu, by default, the root user’s password is locked. This means that we don’t know it and we can’t always sign in as root or unfortunately use the normal linux su command either. Locking the root user’s password forces users to use the lowest needed acccess which reduces some of the ways a system can be attacked or “rooted.”

The command in ubuntu is sudo which allows programs (or commands) to run with root-level privileges.The syntax is very simple:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

In this example, I just restarted apache.

For more information, please check out the sudo man page