I recently helped a friend with a dead Dell recover his files with the help of Knoppix, a Linux distro that boots right off a CD. I shared this success story with some friends of mine, one of whom wittily commented:

thank you linux… thank you for booting our dead windows computers so we can reinstall windows. You’re a really great… friend.

I know.. i know.. don’t feel sad.. we’ll always be friends.. I just.. don’t like you that way. Ya know?

Linux is the nerd who did your homework for you in high school while you were dating the quarterback.

So true…

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m running OpenWRT firmware on my Linksys router. This enables the router to do more than just act as a firewall/router, so that it can do things that you’d normally need some pretty expensive kit to run. (e.g. A Linux box dedicated to the task or some pricey Cisco hardware.)

It works great, I’m happy to say. Package management is smooth and easy, and the basics of routing and firewalling are all taken care of. But there’s a few snags…

Firstly, the firewall. It all works off of iptables for netfilter, which is to say that I need to write some fairly hairy firewall rules. Added to this, I want to use video chat, which requires about sixteen thousand ports to be open in order to work. (Okay, 22 ports, but come ON!)

ss64.com hosts this awesome reference to every single command line program and option available in MacOS X, Linux (Bash), Windows and (ugh) Oracle.

Wonderful reference and a great companion to Apple’s shell scripting primer.