linux aol dialer

Yesterday I was able to dial into aol using Fedora (C4) and Ubuntu distributions. I used the program penggy (penggy-0.2.1-2.mh.0.i386.rpm) which I downloaded from http://rpm.pbone.net (I searched for penggy and the program I selected was labled redhat - other distributions).

I used rpm to install the program in Fedora and I first used alien and then dpkg to install the program in ubuntu. FOr both I was in root and I needed to be in root to actually run the program.

For both distros, I created a symbolic link to the modem (ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/modem); edited the /etc/penggy/penggy.cfg file to add my screen name; and then edited /etc/penggy/aol_secretes (for screen name & password and /etc/penggy/phones for the phone number). Everything worked like a charm.

great script book

Clasic Scripting Tools, published by O'Reily press si a very good book. It provides a lot of good advice on how to develop scripts, but in addition it gives a good understanding of the underlying technologies of working with the Unix/Linux shell. This book is worth having in one's library.

I have noticed that there are a lot of very good books on working in the comand line interface enviornment, but there are relatively few books on how to work in the GUI environment. Books on how to use CLI tools such as sed, awk, CVS, LEX, YACC, Expect, etc. abound, but other than a few books on KDE and GNOME there are nearly no books on the GUI (I have not seen any books on how to use fvwn or other window managers for instance). There are a few books on OpenOffice.org, but only one book on Blender and little else on GUI oriented applications.