Understanding Linux file permissions

They’re funny things Linux file permissions – the moment you think you understand them, you discover some subtle piece of functionality that means you were wrong all-along…

In this three-part article, I give a brief introduction to file and directory permissions, as well as some of the common gotchas. This part shows you how to interpret permissions on the command line and explains what they mean.

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Step by step: Moving code between Subversion repositories

As many coders will tell you, there reaches a point where you realise that you absolutely, positively must keep your code in a a revision control system. In my working life, I’ve used Microsoft’s ageing SourceSafe and more recently the vastly superior SubVersion (SVN).

There’s many powerful GUIs out there which you can use to interact with SVN, and make the checking out and checking in very easy. If you primarily use a desktop GUI (like me), then chances are you use a SVN client GUI to interact with SVN on a day-to-day basis.

But what happens when you need to move code between repositories?

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Novell client on OpenSuse 10.3

The latest (10.3) version of OpenSuse was released a few days ago. As I use Suse as my main development environment at work, I eagerly downloaded it as soon as I could, and installed it on a virtual machine.

First impressions are very good – very quick startup time, easy 1-click installs and a bright and cheery colour scheme.

Unfortunately, I can’t switch for real as the Novell Client doesn’t work yet, and I need to client to access my shared drives at work. (Although I could use WebDAV, it doesn’t work so well). Attempting to install the Beta 2.0 version yields a single dependency error (wrong version of binutils). Satisfying the dependency results in the Novell Client loading – but not connecting at all. Seemingly, the public Beta 2.0 of the client is no longer available for download.

There was quite a wait on Suse 10.2 for a working Novell Client – which was released in beta form a couple of months ago (and it works very nicely too). I’ll eagerly await and hope that Novell release a new client soon, then I will more than happily switch to the new version.

UPDATE 29th Nov 2007

I”ve just spotted that Novell have posted a way to run the 10.2 client on 10.3, over at coolsolutions.

It has a simple step-by-step guide that just involves entering a few commands into the shell.