Well after some missteps in trying to acquire a new ThinkPad X200 (they quit making it while my order was pending, and I couldn’t establish complete Linux support for the X201s) I am now back in business with a ThinkPad X60. It isn’t a new computer but functionally it’s just like my old X40 and I already knew it would run Linux without any surprises that would require expert assistance.
I tried one of them thar fancy laptops with all the doodads and whimmydiddles and whatnot, and it ran Linux real good but it was just too dadgum big and fragile.
Many people would find a ThinkPad X to be too small but for some reason I find it easier to type on than a regular keyboard. Maybe this is because lateral movement is painful for my hands, I don’t know. The X keyboard is only 3% smaller than a regular one (though a very compact design) so you wouldn’t think it’d make that much difference. I wore my old X40 to a frazzle; most o f the keys are shiny, there’s a noticeable dip worn into the spacebar, and the hard drive is going.
The Lenovo guy was a bit freaked out when I canceled the order. He said; “I don’t understand, the 201 is virtually identical except for a faster processor.” But I went to an Intel briefing: the i5 has a different internal architecture from the old Pentium dual-core, and it uses a tweakier front-end bus. So maybe it would work, or maybe it needs work. I’ll leave that up to the geniuses at Canonical and maybe get one a year from now when I can verify it. Also I am not anxious to buy the first example of any production run, not even from Lenovo.
Meanwhile I’m trying to remember how the hell to set permissions on /var/www so I can work with the Apache installation. Right now it’s root/root. I added myself to the web-data group and would like to make that folder rwxrwxr_x with ownership by root/web-data. But I’m rusty: anyone know if that’ll work? Or what will?
NOTES:
- I sold the ACER that I bought last November, to a whippersnapper who seems to enjoy all them doodads.
- Picture not by me; I stole it from ThinkWiki.
Set ownership with chown:
$ sudo chown -R root:web-data /var/www
Set permissions with chmod:
$ sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www
I think those would be the commands.
David, that did just what I needed. THANK YOU!
George, would it be possible to walk into a store
with a copy of Knoppix (Linux on a CD) and try to boot from the CD, in order to test if the HW is Linux -capable? How reliable a test would this be?
Yes, and that also works with Ubuntu. And you can boot from a jump drive too. Though it is important to look at all the hardware to see if there are any unsupported internal devices. Alas, I had no actual machine I could test it on. If I could have gotten my hands on an X201s and performed that test, that would have definitively answered the compatibility question.
I would like Intel to make the i5 processor for a few months before I buy one, though, and let the Linux community experiment with it. I am just not expert enough to blaze new ground between OS and hardware.
The X60 is working fine though, and let me get going on my project. In a year I’ll sell it and probably buy an X201s.
I had my old X40 set up just the way I wanted so long ago that I forgot all the commands – thanks again, David. This time I’m documenting every step, along with notes on the logic thereof, so I can easily reproduce it on the next machine.
I’d be careful with that chmod command. Using it on everything in the directory will make everything executable. In most cases, you don’t want that. You also may want to limit what files can be written by the system user/group (“apache”, “www”, “web-data”?) so that people can’t trick the web server into rewriting things. You’ll mainly need those special permissions with CGI scripts, and maybe some dynamic content, and some subdirectories that contain that content.
NIST publishes a security checklist for Apache. You may have to search for it from the list here.
Thanks, I will study that. Then when our server/network administrator talks about security I can understand him better. He is the person who actually sets up and runs our servers.
Also as I get deeper into the project I’ll need to reproduce the level of permissions in the Apache installation on my laptop that he uses on our web server. I have a lot to learn.
Ya know, you took Greek in college as a language credit.
All this stuff here now seems like Greek to me
Well let’s see if I can figure out what David’s instructions actually mean. I’m always swimming out of my depth so corrections are welcome!
sudo means “Make me a sandwich”.
chown means to change the owner of a file, and in this case it changes it to root and the web-data group.
chmod means to change the permissions on a file. -R means “and the horse you rode in on”. 77 means that root and anyone in the web-data group can read, write, and execute or visit the file. And 5 means that “others” can read and execute, but not write. However as Cujo359 says, not necessarily the most desirable setting for a web server’s wwwroot.
So 775 is numeric shorthand for rwxrwxr-x.
How’d I do? Let me know because this time around I’d like to understand what I’m doing instead of just following recipes. I do read books but you know what they say ‘bout them city slickers with all their book-larnin’.
Whenever I use sudo I’m reminded of the first few experiences with my in-laws. Dad, a former Navy non-commissioned officer, used to bark orders at Mom that had the form “Get me xyzw, dozo!” My first inclination was to think he was calling her an idiot, but no, apparently “dozo” is a please/thank-you word in Japanese and he picked this up while they were stationed in Japan. Whenever I see “sudo” I hear my father-in-law’s voice barking “sudo! chmod 755 thisfile!” or some such, in his best NCO manner.
This is extremely funny, because at heart he’s a darn cuddly critter.
If by “and the horse you rode in on” you mean a recursive mode change to all the contents of a directory, you’ve got it right.
sudo, which I think of as meaning “su to do this”, where su is the command to become the superuser (root) and this is a command of some sort, is actually a wonderful tool. I used it to make an ordinary user able to run specific bits of network software without having to become root. It was handier and safer to let an ordinary user (a specific one, mind you), analyze network data without having to be root. Its use in Ubuntu has always struck me as a bit odd, but given Ubuntu’s single-user nature, it’s not misapplied there.
The file mode (permission) is expressed in octal, of course. I think that’s just because it’s a handy way of describing it.
Yup, that’s what I meant. Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to spend most of the weekend studying and it helps to have feedback.
On my t-40 right now. Still humming along