Showing headlines posted by ardchoille

I was showing a friend how to be more productive while working in a terminal and she asked me about the keys I was pressing during the demonstration. I explained some of the keyboard shortcuts I use and she asked if I could write them down for her.Since this was the third person to ask me for a copy of the keyboard shortcuts I use, I thought I'd post them here in the hopes that they can help others too.

By default, the root account password is locked in Ubuntu - Canonical neither supports nor advocates enabling the root account. This means that you cannot login as root directly or use the su command to become the root user. However, since the root account physically exists it is still possible to run programs with root-level privileges. This is where sudo comes in - it allows authorized users (normally "Administrative" users) to run certain programs as root without having to know the root password.

You can change the owner and group of a file or a directory with the chown command. Please, keep in mind you can do this only if you are the root user or the owner of the file.

Set the file's owner:
$ chown username somefile
After giving this command, the new owner of a file called somefile will be the user username. The file's group owner will not change. Instead of a user name, you can also give the user's numeric ID here if you want.

If you can't access some of the files on your very own Linux system, it's usually because of misconfigured file access permissions. If you are the only user on your Linux box, you may be wondering what's the point of having all these permissions (or lack thereof) that restrict your access to your own files. However, before pulling your hair off, you must keep in mind Linux is designed to be a multi-user environment. In an environment with more than one user, it is crucial to have a secure system for deciding which files are yours and who can fiddle with them.

Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in Gtk2-Perl. It aims to bring the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.

A friend of mine suggested that I should include as boilerplate in my security stories, a line like: "Of course, if you were running desktop Linux or using a Mac, you wouldn't have this problem." She's got a point. Windows is now, always has been, and always will be insecure. Here's why.

Write yourself some bash scripts that will automate much of the work for you. This way you won't have to spend so much time in front of the computer. I usually install the system, go watch a movie, then run some bash scripts and grab a bite to eat while the scripts do the work for me.

Many computer users realize how invaluable a backup scheme can be and most linux distros already include the required software for a simple backup scheme. I am going to show you how to write a simple bash script that will archive specified files in your home directory and add the date/time to the filename of the archive.

Suppose you have a directory full of files with filenames such as oldfile, my-new-file, some_document. Suppose you would like to rename these files to File1, File2, file3.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, konqueror, and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.

Let cron handle your repetitive tasks - an introduction to crontab. A crontab is a simple text file that holds a list of commands that are to be run at specified times. These commands, and their related run times, are controlled by the cron daemon and are executed in the system's background. More information can be found by viewing the crontab man page. We will run through a simple crontab example later.

KDE used to be a very nice desktop environment for Linux, I remember using it over the years in CentOS, Fedora Core, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS. I used KDE 3.5.x in Kubuntu and thought it was the best desktop environment available for the Linux operating system. But what would a new Linux user feel about Linux if KDE 4 were the first environment they attempted to run?

We all have them; snippets of code, half-written tutorials, cooking recipes, photo galleries, blogs, information about a project or event, and the list goes on. Information can take many forms. Writing a book? Have a document you want the world to be able to access? Wouldn't it be nice to have a central location for all of these things and have them all conform to a common appearance? Or, better yet, a central location where several authors can collaborate on these items?