Latest FOSSCasts screencasts

Zsh is a great alternative to Bash and other Unix shells. It has programmable completion, paging, and many other great features. We'll take a good look at paging and the completion that Zsh offers in this episode and explore more in the next episode. As mentioned in the episode, the... Watch this screencast

Most Linux/Unix users are familiar with Grep, but for many situations Ack does a better and faster job. Ack is smart enough to skip version control files and directories, temp files, can exclude or include certain file types, and use powerful regular expression when searching. Watch this screencast

Keeping incremental backups is easy with rdiff-backup. In this episode, learn how to set up a simple cron job that will keep an incremental backup of a remote directory. Watch this screencast

This week we take a peek at GNU Screen - a terminal multiplexer. GNU Screen allows you to open multiple terminal sessions and easily switch between them from one terminal window. You can also disconnect from GNU Screen and your terminal sessions will stay in the background waiting for you... Watch this screencast

Iptables is the de-facto firewall solution for Linux. In this episode, we'll setup basic rules to only allow certain traffic and even deny certain IP addresses from connecting. NOTE: I did catch one minor error in the screencast after encoding - I mention iptables in conjunction with both Linux and... Watch this screencast

Expect is a great automation tool. It is especially good at scripting SCP, FTP, and other interactive programs. In this episode we'll create a bash script using expect to automatically SCP a log file from a server. The script could be easily extended as a cron job and modified for... Watch this screencast

In the second part of our introduction to the Sysstat utilities, we'll look at Mpstat and Sar. Mpstat is a great little utility to view information about our CPU or CPUs/Cores. Sar is an extremely versatile utilities that, when paired with the sadc daemon, provides extensive system logging and realtime... Watch this screencast

Sysstat provides some smaller utilities that can be used to monitor performance and troubleshoot an under preforming Linux/Unix based system. In this episode we'll get introduced to two of those utilities - vmstat and iostat and how they can help us keep things running at peak performance. Next week we'll... Watch this screencast

The Bash command prompt can be fairly dull by default. In this episode we add some color to help differentiate between files, executables, symlinks, and directories. We'll also change the format of the command prompt with the current time and better formatting. Watch this screencast

GNU Nano is one of my favorite "little" text editors. While Nano is small, it does support some fairly advanced features like syntax highlighting, killing and yanking (copy and pasting), buffer support (think tabs), spell checking, and others. In this episode we'll configure a good initial Nano setup, show how... Watch this screencast