I am a long time UNIX system administrator and open source advocate. In recent years my primary focus as been on Linux & FreeBSD systems administration, networking, telecom, and SAN/storage management. I love building infrastructure, tying systems together, creating processes, and bringing people together in support of their technical efforts.
When I can, I try to contribute back to the open source projects either with patches, or by helping others in technical support forums.
Authored Comments
Long time ago I standardized on:
alias l="ls -CF"
shortening the process to 1 character. I think many default ls implementations default to columnar format these days.
One annoyance to note is "ls" different sorting behavior based on locale, and the differences between "en_US.UTF-8" and the old school "C". I never looked at why, but the en_US.UTF-8 locale seems to ignore the '.' character in file names produced with 'ls -a' and sorts them interleaved with visible files, and also groups capitals & lowercase together. I prefer the C style output which sorts capital separate from lowercase, and sorts the hidden files in 1 group at the top (bash: export LANG=C)
Always nice to refresh on even the most basic utilities, thanks!
One crucial upgrade I find essential is SSD. You can get a 120g SSD for $20 or less these days. The difference between a budget SSD and decade old spinning drive can be enormous.
Another thing to consider is the processor architecture. Most Linux distributions these days are focusing on 64bit, and a whole host of older machines might require (or run better) with 32bit. I found Debian to be a very good 32bit modern install.
I would agree 2g is minimum. Where possible I try to push the max 3 or 4g if possible .... usually the upgrade is minimal cost.
If you are adventurous, I'd also recommend trying to upgrade to the fastest processor your machine can take. Most CPU upgrade on ebay can be surprisingly low cost. This is easier done on a desktop, but not impossible on a laptop.