There are 2 files available on a Linux system which will give a user a wealth of information about a system. These files, /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo are written by the Linux kernel and tell you important details about your cpu and memory. Both files are read-only and can be viewed with any text editor. This information may be overkill for most users but there are a variety of important fields to look for. The cpuinfo file provides important stats including model name, cpu cores, cpu MHz, cache size, and flags which show what instruction sets are available on the processor.…
Author: Ryan
Use the Keyboard Shortcuts tool in GNOME to customize the default keyboard shortcuts for your system. If you have a laptop that has special media buttons you can configure them here as well. In some distributions such as Ubuntu these media buttons may be automatically configured but you may still need to fine tune them to suit your needs. To access this menu in from the GNOME desktop open the following menu: System -> Preferences -> System Shortcuts There are 3 groups of shortcuts you can customize: Sound, Desktop, and Window Management. These groups break down in the following way.…
SSH allows secure (encrypted and authenticated) connections between two hosts. These connections include terminal sessions, file transfers, TCP port forwarding, as well as X window forwarding which I will be covering here. X forwarding is a form of tunneling that allows you to run a GUI application on a remote machine but let you view and interact with it on your local machine. To try this out you will need both X and SSH installed on your local and remote machines. Make sure that you are able to log into the the remote machine over SSH before you continue. Simple…
The end of a line in a UNIX text file is designated with the newline character. In Windows, a line ends with both newline and carriage return ASCII characters. If a file is saved in Windows and then moved to a Linux system these carriage returns can cause all sorts of problems. If the text file is a BASH script for example it will not run correctly since it doesn’t know how to interpret these characters. You can verify that a text file has these Windows carriage returns by running the cat command with the ‘-v’ option which shows the…
gphoto2 allows you to directly connect a digital camera over USB and transfer the saved images and videos to your computer. This is very helpful when you don’t have access to a media card reader. Install the gphoto2 package on your system. In Gentoo: # emerge media-gfx/gphoto2 In Ubuntu: # aptitude install gphoto2 Start off by connecting your digital camera to your computer with a USB cable and turning on any transfer/playback mode that might exist. Run the following command to see if your camera is auto-detected by gphoto2. It will show you the camera model that detected and what…
This is the list of the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts. It is amazing how much more efficient you can be when your not always reaching for your mouse. Controlling Tabs New Tab – Ctrl+T Close Tab – Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4 Next Tab – Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PageDown Previous Tab – Ctrl+Shft+Tab or Ctrl+PageUp Select Tab [1 to 9] – Ctrl+[1 to 9] Searching Text Find in This Page – Ctrl+F Find Again – Ctrl+G or F3 Find Previous – Ctrl+Shft+G or Shft+F3 Other Commands Full Screen – F11 Reload – F5 or Ctrl+R Reload (override cache) – Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+Shft+R…
You might need to reinstall the boot loader to the master boot record (MBR) if it becomes corrupted or erased. This can occur for example if Windows is installed on another partition which overwrites the MBR. There are two ways to reinstall grub, automatically using grub-install, and manually through grub itself. grub-install is a script which calls grub underneath and in most cases it is your best solution. Sometimes the manual approach is better if you have a complex setup or the first option fails. The GRUB naming scheme for hard drives and partitions is a bit confusing at first.…
As a security measure the ext3 file system reserves 5% of device space for administrative processes. This protects the system by allowing root processes to continue using the disk if a user process runs wild and fills it up. With today’s larger disk capacities, 5% equates into gigabytes of arguably wasted space. Thankfully with the tune2fs command you can reduce this percentage and free most if not all of the reserved space. The tune2fs command utility operates exclusively on ext2/ext3 file systems. To run these commands you must run the command as root or use sudo. You can run tune2fs…
To give a specific user access to sudo without having to enter a password you have to edit the /etc/sudoers configuration file. For security reasons you should only edit the file using the visudo command. $ sudo visudo In Ubuntu the following lines are placed at the bottom of /etc/sudoers by default. This gives your default user access to sudo as well as any other user in the admin group. # Members of the admin group may gain root privileges %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL If you want to allow sudo access without passwords for all users in the admin group you…
In Firefox 3 it is easy to edit the MIME settings. These settings are used to control what program is used by default to open each file type you encounter while browsing. To edit these settings in Firefox 3 navigate these menus: Edit -> Preferences -> Applications For each file type on the left you can designate a program to open that file type on the right. You can also avoid opening a specific file type and choose to save it to disk by default instead.