Much like the Hints and Tips, these Articles cover the installation, configuration and use of Linux systems, services and applications. However, these are longer, much wordier, and (sometimes) more detailed expositions than the Hints and Tips are.
VoiceOver stems from my increasing use of CMU Flite (http://www.festvox.org/flite/) as a system and application tool. As I incorporated flite into various utilities, I found no easy way to ensure that the generated speech from one tool would not "speak over" the speech from another tool. Additionally, when I wanted more than one tool to speak with the same voice parameters, I would have to manually duplicate those parameters into the code or configuration files.
"My main server is a 2U rackmount server and it hosts my email server and my web server. My backup server is a desktop, not a server, and it normally runs my database server."
Confusing? You bet. There are servers and servers and servers, and they are all different.
In my blog article "Websites in Minutes", I talk about the steps I used to put together a memorial website for a recently-passed friend. I volunteered to create that site in part because I knew that I could construct it and eventually release it to the internet in minutes. Such is the power of an internet-exposed Linux system running an Apache webserver.
But, to build and release the site took some preparation and configuration of that system. I'd like to tell you how I did it.
I get a lot of email; mostly spam. Fortunately, my email setup includes procmail and SpamAssassin, so I don't actually see any of that spam email. In conjunction with SpamAssassin, my procmail rules move all emails that fit the criteria for spam, and other abusive messages into a "Spam" mbox file, and I never have to see them. These captured messages are later fed into SpamAssassin's sa-learn to reinforce the Baysean spam filtering system, and then are discarded, unread.
When we last met1, we had freed our prisoner of Windows so that all the commandline and GUI facilities of a remote Linux system were available to him. But, while our prisoner of Windows is now free to wander the Linux world, he is still bothered by a discontinuity; our Windows user still has the headache of having to manually enter his userid and password into every Linux box he has access to, and he must log directly on to his Linux system to run Linux-based applications.
We who use Linux desktops sometimes forget that most of our peers do not have our luxuries. At times, we find ourselves forced to devolve, and use a Windows desktop to do our work. When we do, we pine for the vast variety of tools we had under Linux and curse the clumsiness of the software prison that we are locked into.
