Lost all passwords?

You wake up after second successful installation of Linux and remember only three packs of beer and no passwords at all?

If your computer boots, you can set new passwords. When in LILO type

boot: init=/sbin/init -s
or
boot: init=/sbin/init -1

It will pass option to the kernel and the system will boot into single user mode or else called maintaince mode and give you root privileges without asking any passwords. Type

# passwd root

and set new password for the root user (you'll set other passwords later). Then type

# reboot

and wait while your system reboots. Do not do anything else in single mode - you can seriously damage your system in this mode. When booted, login as root and using the same command

# passwd user_name_here

change passwords for the other users you've created. A list of them can be retrieved by typing:

#cat /etc/passwd

Continue working/exploring/playing.

Linux does not have amnesia ;)

Office words wars part 0.5 (preface)
The most popular computer program nowadays is a word-processor.
The most popular word-processor is of course Microsoft Word.
Unfortunately/luckily Microsoft does not produce a linux version of this famous program.

So there are many programs trying to be "best MS Word for Linux".

The zeroth one is TextMaker from SoftMaker.com. Zeroth, because it's the only proprietary software, and don't all those hiding things. I'm not a Stallman's fan, but I prefer programs, that i can patch easily, w/o dissassembling it first ;)

So, TextMaker at a glance looks like Word, feels like Word, but is less functional than Word.
The good(probably the best) thing is that it's really fast. Flashy, so to say. Design is so-so, basic features are where we expect them to be. Unfortunately, TextMaker does not support Cyrillic and other non-standard symbols in plain texts. MS documents are opened easily, with some formatting mistakes.
The good thing is that SoftMaker guys have PocketPC version of their product, so if you want to make your own mobile office, it's a good idea to use it.
Output formats lack their number - tmd(own format), psw, html, doc, rtf and that's all.
"Help" option crashed my poor Ghostscript :(

Counts: Poor, very poor but very fast word-processor. Use it if you don't need much.

About a month ago I've installed Linux on a friend of mine's computer. He's a musician, so music is probably the biggest part of his life. So the most frequent question was not "Which kernel?", but "What player?". He's running KDE, but Noatun and Kaboodle made him sick. I understand, 'cause these are IMHO the worst players I've ever seen.

So we've stopped on three programs. Two of them are very famous and the third one is pretty new, but most featureful and very teethy ;)

As I promised, they are divided into three sections. It doesn't mean, that you can't use console progams in KDE, or QT-built programs in Gnome.

1. Console - mpg123 - http://www.mpg123.de/
Probably the oldest console mp3-player. Supports mp3. Plays it good ;) Nothing more to say, except that it's console-based and has minimal level of interaction. It's good, 'cause mpg123 can be used in various shell scripts and crontabs. E.g. on my machine it's used be an alarm. Metallica at 6 a.m. is a good thing to wake a block of flats, not even a room ;)

2. GNOME/GTK - XMMS(X MultiMedia System) - http://www.xmms.org/
XMMS is a unix-clone of a famous WinAMP. It was previously known as X11Amp. Well, it's a Winamp it self. Skins, plugins, visualisation - nothing special. Supports many sound outputs - driver itself(OSS and ALSA), esound, arts, raw disk output, and, of course, /dev/null. Nobody knows, why is necessary, but almost every *nix-program makes use of this famous device. I've used it for many years, until I've found our third -

3. KDE/QT - AmaroK - http://amarok.kde.org
First impression - It's GREAT! This player is more ergonomic than iTunes. It has more features than Winamp. It's pretty young (comparing with others), but I think will gain it's popularity very fast. First, it supports two behavours. It can act like Winamp (many windows) or like iTunes or Foobar2000 (one window). Playlists, media library, visualisation and so on and so forth. It also implements some of iTunes features (intellectual playlists, preferred songs and many more). But for me the main feature is that amarok is ONLINE player. Of course, you can use it on a standalone machine, but if you are connected to the Internet...
Other players implement CDDB information, AmaroK does. But not only that. It's integrated with last.fm, Wikipedia and lyrics finder. You can read the lyrics of the playing song (and if it is not found, you'll get a choice of similar e.g. same song by another singer), or read about the singer/group in Wikipedia.
Another good thing is AmaroK's OSD(On-Screen-Display). It shows song, started to be played, playlist changes etc. In concatination with hotkeys (KDE-globals or local) it becomes a powerful controlling tool.
Supported engines are xine, aRts, Gstreamer and of course /dev/null (remember kids?).

Well, now AmaroK is my desktop player. Wish you th same.

This blog was started, because i got tired of many newbie questions like "How do you {something} in Linux?". Of course there is a pack of resources containing comparing tables with many(really many) rows. But these rows contain only names of programs not explaining the difference between them. But programs are different and it's very important sometimes.

The biggest Linux(and overall UNIXes) advantage is a suggestion that everything can be done in several ways. And it is one of it's biggest problems. Everyone goes his own way and very often doesn't accept other variants. The aim of these notes is not point at one software product, but to show a wide range of programs, comparing them and referencing with "designed-for-W*ndows" soft.

Besides, there is a plenty of tricks and programs, which make your life easier. Some of them are impossible to implement in Windows world. Some of them are very useful, some are just beautifiers.

Everyone around nowadays says that Linux is powerful, flexible, stable(huh? ;), secure(huhuh ;) system. It's true.

But practically noone mentions that Linux is a fantastically comfortable system.

I'll try to show it.