cron-apt is a tool run by a cron job at regular interval that will check for package updates and optionally do some actions.

cron-apt will by default download the packages without installing them.

This tutorial will explain how to set up cron-apt in order to have it send an email to a specified address when updates are ready to be installed.

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3. Customizing our future live CD

3.1. Removing packages

First of all, we are going to remove non-english language pack, and in order to free some more space, we are going to remove gnome-games packages.

# apt-get remove –purge gnome-games*
# apt-get remove –purge `dpkg-query -W –showformat=’${Package}\n’ | grep language-pack | egrep -v ‘\-en’`

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Live CD are great, they let you try out a distribution without installing it. They allow you to run your favorite distribution on any computer and on the top of this, they become handy to recover a system.

Ubuntu live CD is already packed up with some pretty nifty software that allow you to do pretty much everything with the Live CD, but still, they might be some software you don’t need that are include with it or, some software you need might be missing.

Another Pro for this is that by customizing your image, you will be able to install

This tutorial will show the steps to follow in order to customize an Ubuntu Live CD to your need by removing some component and adding some others.

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A standard Linux system has an incredible amount of files installed. Looking for a file location can be a painful task to do though a file browser.

Fortunately, there is a nifty command line available by default on any Linux distribution: find.

find can virtually find anything on your computer and comes with a lot of options. This tutorial will introduce a basic use of it and show how you can search your filesystem for file names matching a name pattern.

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Filesystems are usually created on a partition. When all your hard drive is already partitioned, creating a new partition can become a pain and creating a new filesystem within another filesystem file can save you a lot of hassles.

This tutorial will show the few steps required to have a new filesystem layout set within another filesystem.

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This tutorial will explain how to create a self-signed certificate that you will be able to use with apache in order to provide ssl support.

A self signed certificate won’t provide as much security guarantees than a CA-signed certificate, but at least you will be able to use encrypted connection to your server.

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This tutorial will show how-to connect to a Cisco VPN Concentrator using vpnc.

vpnc is a VPN client compatible with cisco3000 VPN Concentrator which runs in userspace and uses the tun kernel module.

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LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is a great piece of software which allow you to deal with Logical Volumes. Using LVM along with ext3 filesystem, you are allowed to extend the size of your logical drives which is pretty handy when running out of space.

Distributions like Fedora, Suse and Debian have a LVM aware installer. Unfortunately, at the time this article was written, Ubuntu does not offer such settings with the Desktop Install CD.

This article will cover how to create LVM partitions and how-to generate your partitions from this LVM volume.

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Linux services can be started, stopped and reloaded with the use of scripts stocked in /etc/init.d/.

However, during start up or when changing runlevel, those scripts are searched in /etc/rcX.d/ where X is the runlevel number.

This tutorial will explain how one can activate, deactivate or modify a service start up.

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5. Preseed: Installation automation:

Like Red Hat’s kickstart file, Debian based distribution can use a preseed file. The preseed file will contain the different information that the installer will require in order to proceed with the installation.

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