Linux

If you store important information on your Linux server and want to make sure it is for your eyes only you need to password protect these files. Let’s see how you can do this with Linux. [click to continue...]

From the Qimo home page:

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

Qimo needs a minimum of 256MB of memory to run from the CD, or 192MB to install. At least 6 GB of hard drive space is recommended, and a 400MHz or faster CPU. Because of its very minimal system requirements, it’s a fantastic OS to install on that old PC sitting in your closet and put in your childs room.

This tutorial will guide you through installing Qimo, and give a brief overview of the apps that are included, as well as instructions on removing some of the ones you may not want your child to access. [click to continue...]

Ubuntu Linux ships with the tool sudo all setup for you to use to perform any administrative tasks instead of giving you root user privileges. If you have used other flavors of Linux and performed any administrative tasks on them you will quite likely feel a bit constrained by sudo, even though you can do just about anything you can as root with sudo. In such cases you can enable the root user account which has been disabled by Ubuntu by default. Note: this could pose a security risk and is not recommended for beginners. [click to continue...]

If you use Ubuntu Linux it is quite likely that at some point or another you may have been frustrated at its asking for your password when trying to perform an administrative tasks, such as installing programs or changing system settings. Ubuntu uses the sudo tool to manage administrative rights rather than letting users easily log in as the root user. This is actually a good security measure. However, if you need to perform administrative tasks frequently it can get rather annoying. Here’s how you can set Ubuntu to not prompt for your password when using sudo. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through installing new Desktop Themes in Ubuntu Linux - and provide a couple of resources to find themes. [click to continue...]

Sometimes when you want to store your backup or any other large set of files online or want to share them someone else you need to find a way to compress and split the files into chunks of 100 or more Megabytes. I felt the need for this as well recently when I wanted to store my backups online and the online storage service had a cap of 100 MB per file. I found a really neat solution based on the tar command. Using this method I split my backup of about 1 GB into 10 chunks of 100 MB each with incremental filenames. [click to continue...]

I have to often make changes to configuration files such as httpd.conf and squid.conf. These files have a large number of lines that are commented out, mostly comments and some possible configuration directives that have been commented out as they are not required by default. A problem I face while editing such files is that there are so many lines commented out that I need to scroll down many lines before I can find the next active configuration directive. I found a fine solution to help me out with this. [click to continue...]

This brief tutorial will guide you through changing the Ubuntu login screen, and provide a few resources so that you can download some additional themes. [click to continue...]

YUM is a very cool software installation and management tool for Red Hat Linux based systems. It makes installing new packages or updating existing ones a breeze by taking care of installing all the dependancies. Let’s look at how to set it up on a Fedora Linux machine and then how to use it. [click to continue...]

Symlinks or symbolic links are the Linux equivalent of shortcuts in Windows. Creating symlinks of files or folders can be quite useful in Linux, as you can shorten a path such as /var/www/html/application/configuration/images/config.php to something easier to remember and manage such as /var/www/html/image-config.php. Let’s see how this can be done. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) using Parallels Desktop 4.0 (Build 4.0.3810) for OS X. [click to continue...]

RPM or Red Hat Package Manager is the default package management solution for Linux distributions based on Red Hat Linux. It’s a pretty useful way to easily install, upgrade, and un-install packages on Linux machines. I remember the days when every Linux package had to be compiled. Let’s see how to perform some basic tasks with RPM. [click to continue...]

The other day I needed to migrate a directory containing a lot of files from one location on my Linux server to another. There are a number of ways I could do this. Using a simple cp command could have done the trick. However, as the data I was copying was a database and I wanted to make sure that the copying was done perfectly, I looked on the Internet and found a brilliant one line bash solution for this. [click to continue...]

Have multiple browsers installed on your Ubuntu machine? Sometimes it can be a bit confusing if you want to change the the default web browser from one to another. Here’s a simple way you can make the switch using the Linux command line. [click to continue...]