LordGeek and the Penguin Army

SYNOPSIS

dmesg (Diagnostic message)  [ -c ] [ -n level ] [ -s bufsize ]

DESCRIPTION

dmesg is used to examine or control the kernel ring buffer or in other words it prints the message resulting from the most recent system boot to standard output (which by default is the display screen).

dmesg is used in Linux or Unix-like operating systems and obtains its data by reading the kernel ring buffer. A buffer is a portion of a computer’s memory that is set aside as a temporary holding place for data that is being sent to or received from an external device, such as a hard disk drive (HDD), printer or keyboard.

dmesg is usually piped to tail ( dmesg | tail ) or less ( dmesg | less ) due to the amount of  lines being outputted to the display screen all at once.

dmesg can be very useful when troubleshooting or just trying to obtain information about the hardware on a system.

OPTIONS

[ -c ]  Clear the ring buffer contents after printing.

[ -n level ]

Set the level at which logging of message is done to the console.For example. -n 1 prevents all messages, expect panic messages, from appearing on the console. All levels of messages are still written to /proc/kmsg, so syslogd  (8 ) (Linux system logging utilities) can still be used to control exactly where kernel messages appear. When the -n option is used , dmesg will not print or clear the kernel ring buffer.

[ -s bufsize ]

Use a buffer of size bufsize to query the kernel ring buffer. This is 16392 by default. (The default kernel syslog buffer size was 4096 at first, 8192 since 1.3.54, 16384 since 2.1.113.)

If you have set the kernel buffer to be larger than the default then this potion can be used to view the entire buffer.

SEE ALSO

syslogd ( 8 )

More Information can be found at dmesg man page or How to use the dmesg command.

Regards, LordGeek and the Army.

Originally this blog was names “The Chronicles of Foss and Linux” and it can know be found on my website at http://scottjohnston.id.au/blog. Hence the name change to LordGeek and the Penguin Army and with a new direction in posts.The posts will now focus on man pages and command line tips designed for newbies to intermediate users.This blog will also be a resource for myself and others I hope. I hope you find the post informative and thought provocative  and I look forward to your comments.

Regards,  LordGeek

Ashlee Vance, Dave Rosenburg and Matt Asay of the Register Open Season have recently released episode 4 of there podcast.

They were lucky enough to track down Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame at his Canonical’s UK office to conduct this interesting and informative interview.

Many varied and topical subjects are covered,including Compiz,Google,Open Office and much more.

The podcast can either be downloaded in low bandwidth mp3 audio or ogg formats and to subsribe to the RSS feed, click here.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Regards, Scott

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename Etch the latest stable version has just announced the first point release that corrects a few issues and include security updates and important problem fixes.

As reported in Desktop Linux the Etch point release includes the following changes:

• The installer has been updated. The kernels used in the installer have been updated to ABI 2.6.18-5
• The mirror list for Debian ISO’s, source code, and downloads has been updated.
• Debian now includes support added for more USB CD drives.
• An incorrect setup of GKSu was fixed. Before this repair if users chose to install Debian with the root account disabled, they would have been unable to run some administrative tasks while using the GNOME desktop.
• Debian has also been given more than 38 security updates.

More information can be found on the Preparation of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r1 webpage.

Many Debian users will not have to worry about this first point release if they have there updates set to automatic as the changes will be downloaded and installed in the background without a worry in the world.

Regards, Scott

In a press release dated July 16 2007 14:46 UTC, Moshe Bar founder and project leader of the openMosix project has announced plans to end the project effective March 1 2008.

“Citing that the increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core  processors is  rapidly making single-system image (SSi) Clustering less of a factor in computing.

The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.”

OpenMosix is a free cluster management system that is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image (SSi) clustering that allows building a cluster from ordinary networked computers.

Moshe Bar stated that ” I wish to thank all the users and developers who enthusiastically supported openMosix  and made the project such a success.”

We wish you well in your future endeavours and if the openMosix project is any indication, you will succeed in anything you put your hand too.

Regards, Scott

Hi Freedom Lovers,

just received my latest book shipment from Amazon.

Patrick Norton on his Vid-cast DL.TV actually recommended the first book from O’Reilly Publishing entitled “Backup & Recovery” by W Curtis Preston and is about everything you would want to know about backup and recovery of data.

The second book was actually recommended by Amazon as another book people buy after purchasing “Backup & Recovery”.

The book is entitled “SANs and NAS” and is also by W Curtis Preston and is about storage area networks and network attached storage.

Both come with good reviews, from me and many more qualified experts.

There is also a website that supplements the backup and recovery industry.

So if these titles interest you I would suggest you give them a go, I don’t think you’ll look back, I haven’t.

Regards, Scott

One of the most annoying processes when moving from Windows to Linux and saying good-bye, see ya, asta la vista baby is the ability to read/write NTFS (Windows File System) on Linux.

Well after 12 years of development comes the latest stable driver for NTFS-3G Read/Write which has undergone a stringent test criteria and was released on June 17, 2007.

The full download can be found here and the Installation and Usage can be found on there website at http://www.ntfs-3g.org/.

I have taken the liberty to copy the Installation and Usage information for ease.

Thanks must go to the original authors.

Installation

Make sure that the basic Linux development tools and the full FUSE package is already installed correctly on the computer. Please note, FUSE 2.6.0 or later is required to guarantee full data safety.

Then type:

./configure

make

make install # or ’sudo make install’ if you aren’t root.

Usage

If there was no error during installation then the NTFS volume can be mounted in read-write mode for everybody as follows. Unmount the volume if it had already been mounted, replace /dev/hda1 and /mnt/windows, if needed. Then type:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

You may also need to set the ‘locale’ option to make all file names with national characters visible. Replace the below hu_HU.utf8 with the appropriate setting. Then type:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -o locale=hu_HU.utf8

Please see the ntfs-3g manual page for more options and examples.

You can also make NTFS to be mounted during boot by adding the following line to the end of the /ect/fstab file.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g default 0 0

Hi Freedom Lovers,

Found some interesting information I’d like to share with you.Firstly Linus’s views on GPLv3.the BSD licence,Tivo,Free Software Foundation and much more from Kernel Trap and secondly the great debate GPLv2 V’s GPLv3 from itmanagement. I hope you enjoy.

Regards,Scott