Where to find Linux jobs online

You know Linux, and you believe in open source, but you still want someone to pay you to work for them. Where do you go online to find Linux jobs?

Start your search with the big jobs portals. Monster.com, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Dice.com, and your local newspaper’s help wanted page all have plenty of jobs that require Linux experience.

There are a few job boards specifically for Linux, including Mojolin, BestLinuxJobs.com, HotLinuxJobs.com, and LinuxWebJobs. OpenSourceJobs.org is another place to try.
If you know embedded Linux, turn to the listings on LinuxDevices.com.

Some online job sites focus on Linux for specific countries. For instance, Germans can turn to DELinuxJobs.com, Italians to Linux Lavoro, and Australians to Linux Australia’s job board.

Don’t overlook your local LUG. Not all have job postings online, but they’re an excellent place to start networking.

If your job search fails to bear fruit, don’t despair. Keep your day job, but get involved with one of the thousands of projects on SourceForge. No, you won’t get paid, but you’ll gain valuable experience, make good contacts, and contribute something back to the open source community.

Making USB storage devices work seamlessly under Linux

What do you do when your ISP tells you the reason your Windows box can’t connect to the network is because its network drivers got corrupted? You download new drivers using your Linux client and use Sneakernet to move them to Windows. USB storage devices like M-Systems’ DiskOnKey are extremely useful for ad hoc chores like this, and I was lucky to have one on hand. But how to make Linux mount the device as seamlessly as Windows does?

You turn to the Web, of course, and find that someone has solved the problem for you. In this case, “someone” was Konstantin Riabitsev of Duke University. In a posting last summer to a Red Hat mailing list, Riabitsev shared a shell script that made my life easier. You put his script in the location he specifies, copy a few lines from your system’s usb.distmap file and paste them into usb.usermap, changing one string, and you’re done. When you insert a USB storage device into one of your system’s USB ports, an icon for SDA appears on the desktop.

If you have a USB storage device, copy this utility and install it on your computer now, before you need it.

As for me, I’ve accelerated my timetable for migrating all my applications off my Windows client and onto Linux. About the only thing holding me back is the lack of a good graphical backup client for the Linux desktop. Alas, in this case, a search of the Web failed to turn up a good application.