Often someone will write to a Linux help list asking for help with a particular device they want to get working under Linux, and a standard reply is "check the output of the dmesg command". This leaves a lot of new users befuddled, and this document is here to hopefully help them.

First you need a box of some form running a GNU/Linux flavor of some sort. You also should have a basic understanding of how to use a UNIX shell, and you have superuser access to the machine. Everything in this example can be done remotely via ssh or telnet as well as locally from the machine console.

If you're using a recent DMA, UDMA-33 or even UDMA-66 IDE drive and motherboard and feel that under Linux, disk access seems slow compared to Windows, you may be right. In some situations, Linux doesn't automatically enable DMA for IDE hard drives.

Linux makes it easy for you to maintain periodic backups of your important files. With hard drive sizes now routinely exceeding 20 gigabytes, many users find themselves with lots of unused free space, some of which can be put to good use as backup storage.

Security specialists often construct systems that appear vulnerable to attack, but actually offer no access to valuable data, administrative controls, or other computers. These machines, known as "honeypots," are intended to be attacked, and have no legitimate users or traffic, leaving a foiled intruder exposed and relatively easy to monitor.

Many of the text processing GNU tools include a powerful pattern matching mechanism called Regular Expressions. A more or less complete implementation is supported by a utility called egrep.