One of the less intuitive networking tasks often performed on Linux boxes is the connection sharing process. Here is a short clip to show you how iptables works.

Tips

• Use iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.1/24 -j MASQUERADE to set up a dynamic masquerade (the most popular way of sharing the connection where your internet IP is likely to change)
• Remember to replace 192.168.0.1/24 with your local area network IP and mask in the above example

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Using iptables to share your internet connection (0.3MB)

Like I promised, here is the video that shows you how to record your own movies using Istanbul.

If the package is not available, you can build it yourself.

Tips

• Recording can be quite expensive in terms of CPU power, so make sure you select an area small enough for your computer to handle

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Recording a clip with Istanbul (1.1MB)

This time you can see how easy it is to build your own packages on PLD Linux. While PLD is a binary rpm distribution, you can use the builder script to build new packages just like you use emerge on Gentoo.

Unfortunately the quality on this clip is somewhat low so keep your eyes peeled not to miss a single detail.

Tips

• Use builder --init-rpm-dir once to prepare your home directory for the package building goodness
• Use builder -bb to build binary rpm packages you can install later
• poldek -n home will use the locally available packages instead of the ones that come from the distribution
• Never use your root account for building packages

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Preparing the package building environment on PLD Linux (1MB)

To get things started, here is the first screencast - playing around with poldek.

poldek is the program responsible for package management in PLD Linux. While it internally makes use of rpm it also has a big set of unique features and offers an interactive shell as opposed to most similar command line tools.

Things shown in the screencast

• Updating the repository cache
• Starting the interactive shell
• Switching between repositories and the locally installed packages
• Searching for packages using their names, description fields, searching for particular files and provided capabilities
• Reading package descriptions
• Upgrading packages
• The builtin grep command
• Launching external command using the exclamation mark prefix

Download and watch:

Fun with poldek (3.2MB)