Madhav Kobal (You cannot afford to ignore Linux)

The browser wars are heating up again. Microsoft's touting the improved performance and security of Internet Explorer 8 , dozens of new Firefox extensions are released every day, and, according to Apple, Safari 4 will be even faster than its speedy predecessor. Meanwhile, Opera just keeps chugging along at version 9.64, with version 10 beta 3 now available. Just a few weeks ago, Google announced its plans to create an operating system based on Chrome . Considering that the browser itself is barely a year old, such plans may be premature. Then again, maybe not. But for right now, I'll keep looking for ways to make the Chrome browser more useful. Last June, I described ways to change Chrome's default settings . Here's a look at ways to revamp the browser's interface and access some of its useful hidden features. Themes perk up Chrome's drab interface Google is famous for its no-frills look, which describes the default Chrome interface as well. You can spiff th

Just use the default GNU tools tar, split and cat. There is absolutely no need for any fancy gui tools or software that you have to run in Wine! Just type the following in a console window: tar cvzf - filename.iso | split -d -b 700m - filename.iso.tar.gz . This wil produce the following files: filename.iso.tar.gz.1 filename.iso.tar.gz.2 filename.iso.tar.gz.3 ... Burn to CD with your favorite burner, one file per disk. Then later if you want to restore the iso, first copy all the parts in one directory, and then type cat filename.iso.tar.gz.* | tar xvzf - That will give you back your original ISO. I needed this a few days ago for a >10G backup that I wanted to put on a FAT32 external drive (maximum file size: 2G). Worked like a charm! If you are concerned with space, replace the 'z' option in tar with 'j', and replace 'gz' in the filenames with 'bz2'. Bz2 compression is usually a bit better than gz compression, but it's slower. And if you really wa

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, gnome-commander, konqueror, kommander, dolphin 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. From the find man page: GNU find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence until the outcome is known at which point find moves on to the next file name. Find empty directories: find /path -depth -type d -empty Find empty files: find /path -depth -type f -empty Find a file with a specific name: find /path -name name_of_file Find a files with specific extensions: find /path -name "*.given_extension" Find files with specific permissions which have a ".txt. file extension: find /path -name '*.txt' -perm 644 Find files

Consider this scenario. I am connected to the internet using a cable modem. And my ISP dynamically allocates the IP address to my machine. But they also store the MAC address of my ethernet card and associate it with the IP address they provide. Suppose I change my NIC(or my machine), I will not be able to log on to the net because my ethernet card has a different MAC address than the one stored in thedatabase of the ISP. The immediate short fall of this is that, I have to contact my ISP through telephone and request them to reset the MAC address table (or what ever) in their database to point to my new MAC address. So if I knew my old MAC address, I could easily fool the ISP to think that I am using the original machine by setting the MAC address of my new machine to the old value. And I could save myself a telephone call. # ifconfig eth0 down # ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:80:48:BA:d1:20 # ifconfig eth0 up # ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr

Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures Automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages based on which address you are sending from. Supports up to four signatures for each address you have set up. Works for Compose Message and Reply/Forward. This extension for Firefox automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages based on which address you are sending from. Works for Compose Message and Reply/Forward. Features: Works for Compose Mail, Reply, and Forward Support for single or multiple email addresses Create a different signature for each email address you use in your Gmail account Supports up to four signatures per address Real-time signature preview while editing signature HTML Signature automatically inserted into message above (or optionally below) quoted text Support for special characters Easy setup and configuration interface

This comes in very handy if your trying to track back when you had last run something. To enable it just simply add export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%h/%d - %H:%M:%S " to your .bashrc file echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%h/%d - %H:%M:%S "' >> ~/.bashrc Then reload your .bashrc source ~/.bashrc Now when you run history you should get a output similar to the one below 502 Aug/12 - 13:48:31 tail -f /home/duffy/log/access.log 503 Aug/12 - 13:49:01 echo hello 504 Aug/12 - 13:49:24 more /var/log/syslog Some other bash history tips The best way of finding something quickly in your bash history is simply by pressing ctrl+r and then typing out the start of the command it will auto complete it with any matches found in your bash history If you don't want to save duplicate commands in your bash history simply add export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth to your .bashrc echo 'export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth' >> ~/.bashrc If you want to change the leng