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Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has made considerable strides in increasing its presence in the open source world lately. RIT's Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture minor is the first of its kind in academia. For example, its open source programs office, Open @ RIT, has begun helping RIT faculty and staff fellows build and maintain communities for their open source projects.

This is one of those more open-ended posts in that I don’t have any good answers, but I’ve got a bunch of questions. I’d love to have feedback, comments, and thoughts if you have any.

Regardless of how organized I resolve to be, it seems there are always times when I just can't locate a file. Sometimes it's because I can't remember the name of the file in the first place. Other times, I know the name, but I can't recall where I decided to save it. There are even times when I need a file that I didn't create in the first place. No matter what the quandary, though, I know that on a POSIX system, I always have the find command.

Many IT projects are late, over budget, and subject to dramatic changes during development. This makes invoicing for them one of the most taxing activities in IT. It's stressful—it involves dealing with ambiguities, conflicting interests, and human error. Worse, every single decision made during the project affects how much you can bill for. When a sales guy brags—incorrectly—that your software "includes this feature," you can't invoice for the time to build it. When a support guy admits something is a bug rather than an imprecise spec, you won't be able to charge money for it.

Have you ever needed to migrate a WordPress website to a new host? I have done it several times and found the process to be quite easy. Of course, I don't use the recommended methods for doing most things, and this is no exception–I use the easy way, and that is what I recommend.

This migration is non-destructive, so it is simple to revert to the original server if that should be necessary for any reason.

Sometimes when managing a website, things can get messed up. You might remove some stale content and replace it with a redirect to other pages. Later, after making other changes, you find some web pages become entirely inaccessible. You might see an error in your browser that "The page isn't redirecting properly" with a suggestion to check your cookies.

When you're running Linux on a desktop or server, sometimes you need to identify the hardware in that system. One command used for this is lspci. It works by showing all devices attached to the PCI bus. It's provided by the pciutils package and is available for a wide range of Linux and BSD-based operating systems.

It's easy to take Linux commands for granted. They come bundled with the system when you install Linux, and we often don't question why they're there. Some of the basic commands, such as cd, kill, and echo aren't always independent applications but are actually built into your shell.

I like history, and I like computers, so I enjoy hearing stories about computing before computers were an everyday household appliance, much less a personal accessory. One tale I hear often is about how the computers of long ago (in computer years, anyway) were pleasantly basic. They were so basic, in fact, that it was relatively trivial for a curious user to figure out how to program one.

ImageMagick is a handy multipurpose command-line tool for all your image needs. ImageMagick supports a variety of image types, including JPG photos and PNG graphics.

ImageMagick is the "Swiss Army knife" of manipulating images on the command line. While you could use a desktop graphics program like GIMP or GLIMPSE to adjust or combine photos and graphics, sometimes it's just easier to use one of the almost dozen tools from ImageMagick.

For example, I frequently find myself creating image montages to share on social media. Let's say I wanted to share a montage or "image grid" of several screenshots. To do that, I use the ImageMagick montage command. 

Monitoring IT assets is an essential task for any IT department. Still, due to the growing number of devices in corporate networks, it is getting more and more challenging to find an approach that is flexible enough to monitor the wide range of available systems properly. It's essential to have a monitoring tool that is flexible, scalable, and easy to use.

Printing on Linux is easy, but sometimes it feels like a lot of work to launch an application, open a file, find the Print selection in the menu, click a confirmation button, and so on. When you're a Linux terminal user, you often want to perform complex actions with simple triggers. Printing is complex, and there's little as simple as the lpr command.

To print a file from your terminal, use the lpr command:

In previous articles, I have written about container images and runtimes. In this article, I look at how containers are made possible by a foundation of some special Linux technologies, including namespaces and control groups.

One of the reasons so many DOS applications sported a text user interface (or TUI) is because it was so easy to do. The standard way to control console input and output (conio) was with the conio library for many C programmers. This is a de-facto standard library on DOS, which gained popularity as implemented by Borland's proprietary C compiler as conio.h.

Typing commands into a darkened terminal window may seem antiquated to some, but for many computer users, it's the most efficient, most accessible, and clearest way to accomplish nearly any task a computer is capable of performing. These days, thanks to all the projects that bring open source commands to non-open platforms like macOS and Windows, terminal commands are relevant to everybody, not just Linux and BSD users.

Wouldn't it be nice to control the general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs) of the Raspberry Pi remotely with your smartphone? If you can answer the question in the affirmative, I would like to introduce you to a simple way to implement this. Writing this article, I have no specific application in mind, but I can think of combining it with lawn irrigation, any illumination, or a garage door opener.

In my examination of container images, I discussed container fundamentals, but now it's time to delve deeper into container runtimes so you can understand how container environments are built. The information in this article is in part extracted from the official documentation of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), the open standard for containers, so this information is relevant regardless of your container engine.

Containers are a critical part of today's IT operations. A container image contains a packaged application, along with its dependencies, and information on what processes it runs when launched.

You create container images by providing a set of specially formatted instructions, either as commits to a registry or as a Dockerfile. For example, this Dockerfile creates a container for a PHP web application: