Links

NLUG

• Maillist – subscribe/settings – Open to all, please join!
• Maillist archives: Notts GNU/Linux on Archive Orange, and nlug archives on mailman.lug.org.uk – Past discussions and a wealth of fixes and comment
• The Wikipedia description of a Linux User Group (note that Planet NottsLUG is no longer maintained)

Various external links

Other Groups Nearby

• Nottinghack – Nottingham Hackspace (online forum)
• GeekUp – grassroot geekery in the UK
• Skeptics in the Pub Nottingham
• PubhD – Can you explain your PhD in the pub? Three PhD students, for any subject, explain their work in exchange for a pint or two. The talks are at “pub level” so as to understand the talks. (See: Nottingham next event.)
• Linux User Groups in the East Midlands
• Newark Linux User Group
• Leicester Linux Users Group
• Sheffield Linux Users Group
• Coventry Linux User Group
• UK Linux User Groups – for Free/Libre Software and Open Source Software user groups in the UK
• Linux Bier Wanderung – … in the form of a traditional German “Bier Wanderung” for Linux folks… ‘Somewhere in Europe’ 🙂

Linux Related Groups and Organisations

• FSF: Free Software Foundation – See “Where in the world is Richard Stallman?” for his next talks
• fsfe: Free Software Foundation Europe
• The GNU Project – software which respects your freedom.
• FLOSS UK is the new name for the UK’s oldest Open Systems User Group, UKUUG
• The Linux Foundation – dedicated to the growth of Linux. (They sponsor Linus Torvalds)

Linux

• Google: Linux Screenshots – Examples of what people do with their open source desktops
• Linux Distribution Chooser – Lost for choice?
• Best Linux distros of 2019 – TechRadar: Favorite distributions for beginners, connoisseurs and veterans alike
• DistroWatch: Put the fun back into computing
• DistroWatch – Top Ten Distributions: An overview of today’s top distributions
• Free GNU/Linux distributions: Distributions with uncompromised, untainted, complete freedom
• TuxRadar Distro Picker – for those already familiar with Linux to search for what features they want in a distro
• GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline – GLDT is a cladogram of GNU/Linux distributions, placed on a timeline. Also, timeline blog
• Interactive Map of GNU/Linux OS and F[L]OSS (and a later non-interactive version)
• Linux Kernel Structure Map – There’s an awful lot underneath a GNU!
• Wikipedia portal page to Linux – an encyclopedic portal to all of GNU/Linux

Linux – The Beginning

• The GNU Manifesto – One of the parts of a great beginning…
• “… I’m doing a (free) operating system …” “(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)…”
• Wikipedia: Linux distribution
• Wikipedia: Linux – All about “Linux”
• Wikipedia: GNU/Linux naming controversy – All about what might describe what…
• Wikipedia: The Cathedral and the Bazaar – an essay by Eric S. Raymond on the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design
• ‘Proprietary software keeps users helpless’ – TechRadar Interview: Richard Matthew Stallman on the importance of free software
• Ten Reasons Why You Can’t Use GNU/Linux – a very practical summary for using GNU/Linux by Jon “maddog” Hall
• History of Tux the Linux Penguin
• The LWN Penguin Gallery
• Tux 3d cutout from cubeecraft.com
• The History of Linux: how time has shaped the penguin – A nostalgic look back at Linux, its distros and its colourful history
• The Legacy of Linus Torvalds: Linux, Git, and One Giant Flamethrower – “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
• The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond is a must-read account of Unix before Linux came into being and the continuing influences, philosophy and art that makes *nix work so well.

Software and Hardware Freedom

• FLOSS Naming
• Why FLOSS [Website now offline?] – A little dated but a good easy introduction to Free/Libre Open Source Software
  • The Benefits of Free/Libre/Open-Source Software – A brief practical description of one group’s reasons for FLOSS
  • Video clip: Free/Libre, Open Source Software – Short excerpt from BBC TV’s “CodeBreakers”
  • What is Free/Libre, Open Source Software? – for a more gentle introduction to source code freedom
• A Quick Guide to GPLv3: Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have…
• GNU General Public License (See at the end of that page for using the GPLv3)

FLOSS News

• DistroWatch Weekly – A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the world of GNU/Linux distributions
• The H Open Source: News and Features – Very sadly: The H is closing down. For German readers, there continues heise online
• LWN.net – Linux Weekly News
• Phoronix – enriching the Linux experience
• linux/. – Slashdot
• reddit linux – reddit reading linux
• Linux Kernel Newbies – A normal-human readable website explaining present Linux kernel developments
• Linux Counter for how many are using Linux… Wikipedia: Linux Counter. (Including the explosive numbers using “Android” Linux?)

Linux Publications/Magazines

(In no particular order. Let me know please for any I’ve missed!)

• Linux Format – a very readable magazine for the Linux world (and the UK’s first Linux-specific magazine)
• Linux Magazine
• Linux Journal – 08/08/2019: “Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now“
• LinuxUser & Developer
• Linux Voice – a very different kind of Linux magazine (and a ‘fork‘ of Linux Format? 😉 )
• Full Circle – The independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community

Linux Games

• • News, Netcasts and Blogs

    • linuxgamecast – Linux gameplaycasts, news, reviews and whatever else we come up with
    • linuxgames – news blog and podcasts
    • Linux Gaming News – Unique News [blog] About GNU/Linux Games
    • linuX-gamers.net – linux gaming online resource blog
    • Gaming on Linux – News blog and comment
    • Happy Penguin – The Linux Game Tome blog

• Catalogues, To Buy, and Free of Cost

  • LGDB – Linux Games Database and reviews
  • Penguspy – Free & paid open & closed source Linux games
  • Tux Games – Welcome to Tux Games, the online store for Linux Games (Also sometimes seen in person live at our meetings… 🙂 )
  • Linux Game Publishing aims to bring top quality Linux games to market
  • Linux Gaming World – High-quality and commercially-supported Linux game titles
  • Desura – a community driven digital distribution service for gamers… Linux client released 17/11/2011.

Linux Systems Suppliers

• Linux Pre-Loaded – GNU/Linux working out-of-the-box: This is a list of vendors selling hardware pre-installed with software that’s free as in freedom
• System76 – System76 has manufactured Ubuntu preinstalled laptops, desktops, servers … with leading support and customer service … since 2005
• pcspecialist offers custom spec PCs and laptops with the option of no OS installed at all

Internet Infrastructure

• Your IP Address is… whatsmyip.org
• “down for everyone or just me?” – Web page to remotely check whether a website is up or not
• Simple IPv4/IPv6 Test
• The ICSI Netalyzr gives a detailed report of your internet performance & security. Works on any computer with a Java runtime and on Android devices. This utility is also part of an internet performance measurement study by ICSI. See the FAQ and blog.
• Qualys SSL Labs – SSL Server Test
• Secure Secure Shell – (2015-01-04) crypto, NSA, and ssh config…
• DNS HowTo – for serving the Internet Domain Name System
• Understanding DNSSEC – Setting up DNS records so that any system using an authenticating DNS resolver can automatically verify if the DNSSEC supported records looked up are valid
• Publishing PGP Keys in the DNS – publish your public PGP key in the DNS
• HTTP/1.1 standard (RFC 2616) status/error codes: Wikipedia list and W3 list
• (Please) Stop Using Unsafe Characters in URLs
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) – “UTF-8” vs all others… “Behold! … The same as it was stored in ASCII, and ANSI, and every OEM character set on the planet. Now, if you are so bold as to use accented letters or Greek letters or Klingon letters, you’ll have to use several bytes to store a single code point, but the Americans will never notice. (UTF-8 also has the nice property that ignorant old string-processing code that wants to use a single 0 byte as a null-terminator will not truncate strings).”
• What is Unicode?
• UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux – See also Wikipedia for UTF-8 and Unicode. In brief, best is to specify Unicode and check that the platform then encodes that as the expected UTF-8 (or check carefully if you see something different such as UTF-16 or whatever else for the platform)

Website utilities and examples

• PNG transparency test
• WebAIM Colour Contrast Checker – web page content accessibility checker. Try also their WAVE report tool to run through a range of checks listing how accessible or not your web page is for those with disabilities
• PHP Security PhpSecInfo Test – a simple-to-use security audit for the PHP environment, with a look and feel similar to phpinfo()
• SSL/TLS server configuration for maximum security: TLS 1.2 only, however pretty much all present browsers cannot access it! Hence, there is also the same page unsecured
• CSS3 Delight – No Images. No JS. Just CSS. Logos vector artwork demonstrated using HTML5 CSS3.
• HTML5 Rocks – This site, the HTML5 Playground, Studio, and Presentation slides are all open source projects. Tweak the code or contribute new guides!
• CSS London Tube Map by John Galantni – created using HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery and absolutely no images. All of the symbols have been recreated using HTML entities, styled and arranged by CSS
• Apache2 – mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet

General Programming and Development

• “Hello world” is a greeting, and a system test for something new, and likely the most famous bit of programming in the computer world…
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide – An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting (tldp.org). Also see the more recent format Wikibooks Computing wiki-in-progress: Bash Shell Scripting
• Bash shell-scripting libraries
• Bit Twiddling Hacks – A stupendous collection of bit twiddling routines for all programming needs and for good geekie fun
• The Aggregate Magic Algorithms – Coding ‘tricks’ for obscure low-level things very efficiently done
• The Assembly Gems Page – x86 and MC68k coding gems
• Paul Hsieh’s Assembly Language Lab – to see why it is often very beneficial to use a direct assembly implementation over that of pure C
• Implementing a web server in a single printf() call
• File Capabilities (permissions) In Linux – File capabilities offer a secure alternative to SUID executables (see also: “SUID: What you need to know“)

General Utilities and Shortcuts

• Mastering The Linux Shell – Bash Shortcuts Explained
• Getting to Grips with Bash – An introduction to the *nix command line
• Master the Linux bash command line with these 10 shortcuts
• txt|2|re – headache relief for programmers: a regular expression generator (see also: Perl Regular Expression Syntax)
• mtftar translates MTF (“.bkf”) backup streams to TAR archives. See also mtf – A Linux reader for the Microsoft Tape Format
• To convert Outlook “.pst” email files to mbox files, use any of readpst, libpst or Outport
• HowTo: Convert DOS Newlines (CR-LF) to Unix/Linux Format. See also the dos2unix / unix2dos commands
• HowTo: type keyboard diacritical marks and international text
• HowTo: type keyboard text symbols

Sysadmin and Configs

• The Magic SysRq key – see Linux Magic System Request Key (sysrq.c) – Press the key combo ‘ALT-SysRq-‘ for ALT-SysRq-reisub
• “ntpq -p” output – See what NTP is doing to your time
• “free -m” – No memory left?! What does it mean that linux is using all my system memory?
• NFS: Overview and Gotchas
• DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux)
• UNetbootin (or Sourceforge UNetbootin page) to create bootable “Live” USB drives for Linux distributions and Windows instead of burning a CD/DVD/Blu-ray disk
• Ultimate Boot CD – A consolidation of PC diagnostic & repair tools into one bootable CD. Also runs from a bootable USB memory stick
• Unlock the Inbox – The ultimate resource and tools site for ensuring email delivery
• GPG Signing: Traditional vs. PGP/Mime summary, and more complete PDF presentation including Application/PGP and S/Mime
• Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (pdf) – Google Research, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso, 2007
• DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study (pdf) – Google Research, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, 2009
• The systemd Linux init system – A variety of distributions now let systemd, rather than sysvinit, take care of bringing the system up…
• Enabling, disabling and checking NCQ – all seamlessly automatic in the Linux kernel unless you really want to know all about SATA Native Command Queuing…
• btrfs disk usage calculator – calculates file and metadata storage available vs disk space for the btrfs style of RAID

Let me know for anything else of use to be added!

-Martin

“Linux” is commonly understood to describe the GNU operating system running on the Linux kernel. In everyday common language, “Linux” can also describe the entire software system of applications, GNU operating system and Linux kernel, which is all described also as a “Linux distribution” or a “distro” for short. On this site, all references to the single term “Linux” describes the “GNU/Linux” system pair. References to the Linux kernel are often just abbreviated to just “kernel”.