Why does ncurses support only eight colors? If you've looked into the color palette available in curses, you may wonder why curses supports only eight colors. The curses.h include file defines these color macros: COLOR_BLACK COLOR_RED COLOR_GREEN COLOR_YELLOW COLOR_BLUE COLOR_MAGENTA COLOR_CYAN COLOR_WHITE But why only eight colors, and why these particular colors? At least with the Linux console, if you're running on a PC, the color range's origins are with the PC hardware.

Testing functions isn't hard, but how do you test user input and output? In my last article, I started looking at "pytest", a framework for testing Python programs that's really changed the way I look at testing. For the first time, I really feel like testing is something I can and should do on a regular basis; pytest makes things so easy and straightforward.

This series covers sysadmin basics. The first article explains how to approach alerting and on-call rotations as a sysadmin. In the second article, I discuss how to automate yourself out of a job, and in the third, I explain why and how you should use tickets. The fourth article covers some of the fundamentals of patch management under Linux, and the fifth and final article describes the overall sysadmin career path and the attributes that might make you a "senior sysadmin" instead of a "sysadmin" or "junior sysadmin", along with some tips on how to level up.

I have long held the opinion that one of the biggest problems holding back Linux-based systems from dominating (market-share-wise) in the desktop computing space...is marketing. Our lack of attention-grabbing, hearts-and-minds-winning marketing is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Free and Open Source Software world. But, in a way, me saying that really isn't fair.

  With apologies to Arnold and the Terminator franchise for the title, let's look one more time at removing duplicates from the PATH variable. This take on doing it was prompted by a comment from a reader named Shaun on the previous post that asked "if you're willing to use a non-bash solution (AWK) to solve the problem, why not use Perl?" Shaun was kind enough to provide a Perl version of the code, which was good, since I'd have been hard-pressed to come up with one. It's a short piece of code, shorter than the AWK version, so it seemed like it ought to be fairly easy to pick it apart. In the end, I'm not sure I'd call it easy, but it was interesting, and I thought other non-Perl programmers might find it interesting too.

Why open source was actually invented in 1665.