Linux.com

Choosing a virtualization solution isn’t always easy. The good news is you have many choices to pick from. The bad news is, well, pretty much the same thing. You’ll find tons of options for Linux, most of which break down to hypervisor or container-based virtualization. Not sure which is which? We’ll break it down. Unfortunately, the various vendors that offer virtualization (say that five times fast) don’t always agree on terminology....

If you’re hoping to get sponsorship funds for your event, it’s better to ask early than to ask often. And even better to ask professionally… For larger companies ( i.e., the ones that actually do have a fair amount of cash for sponsorships) it is vitally important to ask early about sponsorships. Especially for events that are not yet established. Annual events like LinuxTag fall more easily into budget planning because you can establish a baseline for funding those events and plan year to year whether it’s worth attending and how much it actually costs....

One of the more humorous ad series today is the Geico “caveman” commercials, featuring a caveman complaining about the stereotype of something being “so easy a caveman could do it.” Since we don’t have to worry about offending cavemen (or cavewomen), companies can safely poke humor at that demographic group and not worry about alienating anyone. However, you might want to think twice about saying “it’s so easy your mom can do it....

Vim’s flexibility and countless features are a major asset for experienced users, but a challenge for newbies. If you’ve always wanted to try Vim but were put off by your first attempts, you can start off gradually by getting to know Vim’s GUI and easy mode. This article is a primer for those who haven’t used Vim much and want to wade in gradually. If you’re new to Vim and vi-like editors, the Vim GUI is probably the best way to get started....

Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn’t very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now have the option of using tabs within Vim. With Vim’s tab features you can consolidate all your sessions into one window and move between files more easily.

Mutt is a great mail client, in large part because it is extremely customizable. You can tweak Mutt’s behavior and have it do tricks that are nearly impossible to do with other mail clients – but it can be a bit daunting to get started with. Let’s take Mutt on a short trip to mail client obedience school and see how easy it can be to make Mutt handle mail just the way you want it to.

Vim is a powerful editing tool, but there are some things it just can’t do. However, Vim lets you access shell commands and utilities without leaving Vim, and that lets you perform some amazing tricks. If you run :shell or just :sh while you’re in the editor, Vim (or Gvim, if you’re partial to Vim’s GUI) will place you in an interactive shell. You can run whatever commands you want, and resume your Vim session by exiting the shell....

Vim ships with a lot of useful functions that make life easier when you’re editing text, but Vim is also an extremely extensible editor. If you find yourself typing the same long commands or strings of text over and over again, it’s time you learned how to set mappings and abbreviations in Vim, to save valuable keystrokes for your code or prose. Just as you can set shortcuts in KDE, you can map keystrokes to actions in Vim....

The problem with writing and editing on a computer, versus having words on paper, is that it’s usually hard to compare text from different sections of a document when they don’t fit on the screen together. One way to do it is to use Vim’s viewports feature. Another is to “fold” the text. Using Vim’s folding features, you can tuck away portions of a file’s text so that they’re out of sight until you want to work with them again. Here’s how.

Editing in Vim can be a breeze, if you know how to make use of its more advanced features. Moving around files can feel like a slog if you’re stuck with the basic movement keys, but editing is effortless when you have command of marks and jumps. Basically, a mark is a bookmark or placeholder that allows you to return to a spot in the file where you were editing. This can be handy when you’re working on longer projects, whether you’re writing a long paper, making changes to your Apache configuration, or writing code....