Updates, Aliases, and Network No-Nos

Long time no post (at least it feels like that). My work on the graphics card upgrade was moving along quite nicely, but I've hit a brick wall after compiling the latest nouveau drivers/modules, libdrm, and mesa libraries.  On the G5, I simply get an error regarding a GPU lockup, and a botched graphics glitch on the G4 with the updated kernel.  Because of that, I've decided two things: 1) I'm going to work on the CPU upgrade next on the G4 and 2) I'm going to table the nouveau drivers project for just a bit and go with a Radeon 9800 Pro for an upgraded graphics card.

Right now, I feel like I'll have a better chance of getting 3D acceleration working with the nVidia Quadro card on the G5, so look for updates on that over on the PowerPCLiberation blog.

On an unrelated note, I want to take a few minutes to discuss command aliases you can setup for your bash shell environment. I've been meaning to do this on my Debian installs for some time as I've set them up on all the Linux machines at my full-time job. Basically you can create aliases to make shortened versions of longer commands you run on a regular basis. For example instead of typing the following:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

You can shorten this command to simply the word update, which when ran will actually run the command above.  To get started with aliases, you'll want to change directories into your home directory.  Create/open a new file you'll call .bash_aliases.  The syntax for setting up a new alias is as follows:
alias [alias_name]='[full command you are aliasing]'

So for the example I provided above, I would set it up like so:
alias update='sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Upon saving the changes, you should immediately be able to make use of the new alias.  To test it out type update and watch as this short one word command runs both the update and upgrade commands!

Here are just a couple of others I usually implement on each of my installs.
alias cdh='cd /home/[username]'
alias cde='cd /etc'
alias cdv='cd /var'
alias ls='ls -alh'

They may not do a whole lot, but the small amount of time these aliases can save does add up over time in the same way the utility kupfer does.  I'd encourage you to come up with your own.  Feel free to share them in the comments below as they may be helpful for the rest of us.

Also, if you happen to run a really long command and say forgot to add sudo to the beginning of it or need to move towards the beginning of the command to retype or add additional commands, simply hit Command + a (or Control + a if you haven't swapped out the Command and Control keys).  This moves your cursor to the beginning of the command.  I happen to use this quite a bit.

One last thing I've learned recently when working with Debian I thought might be helpful to share. If you are using the well-known NetworkManager, don't manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces file with network interface configurations or vice versa.  The two separate configurations will conflict with each other and produce unusual, unpredictable, and unusable results.  For some time now, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't just plug in an ethernet cable to any of my PPC machines and receive an IP via DHCP without restarting network services or rebooting with the cable already plugged into the machine. Such a simple concept, but it took me awhile to figure out.

Oh yeah, and if you'd like to use the GUI wrapper for NetworkManager, simply type  nm-connection-editor. That right there might be an excellent candidate for creating an alias in order to shorten it up.  Of course you can also tab to auto-complete the command, but the choice is yours.

So nothing too exciting.  Just a few helpful tips for growing and expanding your Linux experience and expertise. Look for the CPU upgrade soon!  I'm also running into issues with that as well, but I'm more hopeful I'll be able to resolve those quicker than the nouveau drivers. Not only that, the CPU is such a sloth, that an upgrade should help move the rest of my posts on the upgrades along much faster.