http://ntt2k.info

I remember being confused for a very long time about the trailing garbage in commands I saw in Unix systems, especially while watching compilers do their work. Nobody I asked could tell me what the funny greater-thans, ampersands and numbers after the commands meant, and search engines never turned up anything but examples of it being used without explanation. In this article I’ll explain those weird commands.

Here’s an example command:

 command > /dev/null 2>&1 

Continue reading

DNALinux Virtual Desktop Py4Bio is ready!. This edition is called Py4Bio because is the Linux distribution included in the book Python for Bioinformatics.

Common desktop programs used in Bioinformatics are included in DNALinux. Using VMWare you can run Linux and Windows programs side by side.

DNALinux is also a webserver. You don’t have to set up an Apache web server and install CGI programs since DNALinux has them pre-installed and ready to run. With a server you can make a BLAST from your host computer.

Continue reading

François Dupoux has released SystemRescueCd 1.3.5, a Gentoo-based live CD containing a variety of disk and data management utilities. Here is the summary of changes since the previous release: “updated the standard kernels to Linux 2.6.31.12 with btrfs update from 2.6.32; updated FSArchiver to 0.6.5 (bug fixes, progress info, ‘–exclude’ option); Updated GParted to version 0.5.1 (with workaround for partition resizing problems); added missing codepages (especially CP850) required by mtools / syslinux; implemented boot option ‘dhcphostname’ which is used by the DHCP client; updated LVM to 2.02.56 (Logical Volume Manager version 2); downgraded mtools to version 3.9.11 to fix problems; updated NTFS-3G to 2010.01.16 (bug fix release).” See the full changelog for further details. Download: systemrescuecd-x86-1.3.5.iso (242MB, MD5).