Madhav Kobal (You cannot afford to ignore Linux)

Xfe (X File Explorer) is a wonderful, fast and lightweight file manager for Linux built using the FOX toolkit with a customisable interface which can resemble the twin-panel style of Midnight Commander if needed. Xfe 0.19.2 running in Debian Lenny Why is Xfe different? First of all, it's very lightweight due to the library it uses for its interface. It's true that it may not integrate very well in neither KDE or GNOME, but it supports colour schemes which can change its appearance. Some of the themes included are KDE3, Xfce4, GNOME2 or iMac. Aside from themes, Xfe also allows you to change its default font (Helvetica) so it will match the fonts used by your desktop environment. The default look of Xfe features a directory tree view on the left and the files and folders panel occupying the rest of the space, but it comes with four view modes: - a single panel (Ctrl+F1) - the default tree view with panel (Ctrl+F2) - twin-panel mode (Ctrl+F3) - twin-panel and tree view (Ctrl+F4) ...

Mountain View has the builders in over at Google Docs, where the company is working on a new interface for the online office app. While the work is taking place, Google is warning users that ongoing tweaks might be noticeable during the “next few weeks” while it applies the facelift to Docs. It’s hardly surprising to see Google spin out an announcement about changes to its web-based Microsoft Word and Excel rival, especially given all the noise coming out of the Redmond camp in the past week about its own set of online office apps. Office 2010 was released for testing on Monday, but a technical preview of its web-based brother, which will be made freely available to individuals and organisations, hasn’t landed yet. Despite that, a pushy Google is keen to make a play into the Office arena, where Microsoft sits pretty with a huge 90 per cent chunk of the global market share. So what can Docs users expect to see change in the coming weeks? Google plans to remove the “Shared wi...

Do you want to remove that Windows or Apple logo from your Linux-powered netbook or laptop? If you do then you may as well replace it with some cool graphics that would stand out. To spare you from the hassles of creating you own or searching the web, I recommend that you download the Free Software Sticker Book first. There you will find tons of ready-made stickers (in ODG format) that is related to Linux and Free and Open Source software. But before I'll give you the download link, here are some teasers: Some distro-specific stickers... You can't go wrong with GNU... How about showing some love to FOSS heroes... BSD ready... Linux inside... Tux colors... Pythonic sticker... You will find these stickers and a lot more if you download the Free Software Sticker Book at openstickers.com .

Btrfs, the designated "next generation file system" for Linux, offers a range of features that are not available in other Linux file systems – and it's nearly ready for production use. If the numerous articles published about this topic in the past few months are to be believed, Btrfs is the file system of the future for Linux and the file system developers agree: Btrfs is to be the "next generation file system" for Linux . The general consensus (not so much among developers, but among the general supporters of Btrfs) is that Btrfs is the ZFS for Linux (for example, according to Linux Magazine ). While this may be disputable at present since the ZFS , designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System, is already in production use, while Btrfs is still highly experimental, the two file systems do have a lot in common. With its integrated volume management, checksums for data integrity,Copy on Write and snapshots, Btrfs offers a range of features unriv...

1. Twitter update from terminal: curl -u YourUsername:YourPassword -d status="Your status message go here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml 2. Find removed (deleted) files still in use via /proc : find -L /proc/*/fd -links 0 2>/dev/null 3. Check if network cable is plugged in and working correctly : mii-tool eth0 4. Migrate existing Ext3 filesystems to Ext4 : tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/yourpartition Before doing this, back-up all data on any ext3 partitions that are to be converted to ext4. After running previous command you MUST run fsck, is needed to return the filesystem to a consistent state. fsck -pDf /dev/yourpartition Edit /etc/fstab and change the 'type' from ext3 to ext4 for any partitions that are converted to ext4. 5. On-the-fly unrar movie in .rar archive and play it, does also work on part archives: unrar p -inul foo.rar|mplayer - 6. List programs with open ports and connections: netstat -ntauple or netstat -lnp 7. Using ruby, se...

Taking a cue from Twitter and Facebook, Google is adding social features to its Reader software and tightening the link between Google profiles and its other services. Google ( Wednesday continued its move toward social computing with the addition of Twitter-flavored sharing features to Google Reader , the company's online feed aggregation service. The four new features aim to provide users with greater control over the content they share and to help users find content shared by others. There's a new people search feature in Reader that will look through Google profiles , the company's answer to Facebook profiles. Google introduced profile pages for users with a Google Account in April, when it began showing Google profile results at the bottom of search pages in the U.S. in response to searches for names. The goal of profiles, Google maintains, is to give people more control over how they're presented in Google search results. Profiles found through Reader search...

With an aim to kill Google Docs, Microsoft announces a free Web-based version of Office 2010. The technical preview version of Microsoft Office 2010, (codenamed Office 14) the successor of Microsoft Office 2007, has been released by the software major. Most interestingly, Microsoft has also announced a free Web-based version of its Office productivity suite, known as Office Web Applications. The radical move by Microsoft is a direct challenge to its arch rival Google and its online office productivity suite, Google Apps. Office Web will include free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote which will work in the three Web browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari). Giving a tough competition to Google Docs, Office Web Applications will enable multiple people to simultaneously work on the same document, whether it's in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote. It will also allow users to create, edit, access and share Office documents ...

Fotoxx is a free open source Linux program for editing digital photos. The goal of fotoxx is to meet most photo editing needs while remaining easy to use. Among Fotoxx features: -Navigate images using a pageable thumbnail window. -Change brightness and contrast, change color intensity, saturation, depth, make panoramas and HDR images, fix red-eyes, trim, rescale, rotate, warp, fix perspective, sharpen, blur, remove noise, add artistic effects. -Edit within mouse-selected area. -Import RAW files, edit 16 bits/color. -Add tags to images, search by tags, dates, and star-ratings. Fotoxx has enough features to make it a powerful image editor. It needs some more work in several areas, but overall, it is a nice, light alternative to other, more popular programs. Download Fotoxx: - for Ubuntu, Open Souce & Fedora - source files for other Linux distributions

Sometimes you may want to know which process is accessing a particular file or filesystem — for example, if you get a "device is busy" error message. fuser will provide this information. Basic usage is: fuser filename.txt , which will give you this output: /home/juliet/filename.txt: 13644 That number is the ID of the process that's accessing the file. Use fuser -u filename.txt to see which user owns the process: /home/juliet/filename.txt: 13644(juliet) For more information, use fuser -v filename.txt : USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /home/juliet/filename.txt: juliet 13644 f.... more This shows the user and PID, as well as information about how the file is being accessed (here, f , indicating an open file), and the command being used to access it (here, more ). The -m switch shows all process accessing the filesystem, which the file is on; or you can simply specify a filesystem rather than a file. So fuser -m ...

Enforcing password security with a multiple-user system can be a hassle — users all too often use inadequate passwords. john-the-ripper (also available via most distros) is a password-cracking tool that enables the identification of vulnerable passwords before someone with nefarious intentions finds the weakness. The first step is to extract the username/password information from the relevant files, using the provided unshadow tool: unshadow /etc/passwd /etc/shadow > /tmp/password.db After that, john has three cracking modes: Dictionary mode, which tests passwords based on dictionary words. You can use the provided dictionary or provide your own, and there's an option to enable "word mangling" rules. "Single crack" mode, which uses login names and various /etc/passwd values as password candidates, as well as applying word mangling rules. Incremental mode, which tries all possible character combinations and will obviously take a very, ...

less , the better-featured version of more , which among other things allows you to move backward through its output, is great for paging through text files. But it won't automatically deal with compressed text files. This can be a nuisance, particularly when many of the files in /usr/share/doc are gzipped. A straightforward alternative is zless , which will deal seamlessly with gzip, compress, or pack files, allowing you to page through them without having to unzip them. It also handles uncompressed files, and (contrary to the manpage) it appears to deal OK with input piped from stdin (e.g., ls | zless ). zless can't, however, handle files that have been tarred as well as zipped. Here's an alternative command line that will allow you to page through file.tar.gz without unpacking it beforehand and thus without leaving unzipped files lying around: tar --to-stdout -zxf file.tar.gz | less That's great, but it's a bit of a mouthful (or keyboardful) to remem...

Canonical, through Matthias Klose, announced on July 11th, 2009 that the Ubuntu Java development team had completed the certification of the OpenJDK 6 platform for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). This means that the OpenJDK 6 package included in Ubuntu 9.04 has passed the meticulous tests of the Java Standard Edition Test. Compatibility Kit and that it is now fully compatible with the Java Standard Edition 6 platform, on both i386 and amd64 architectures. What is OpenJDK? It is a 100% free and open-source implementation of Sun's popular Java Standard Edition 6 platform. On the other hand, Java TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) is a toolkit that provides tests, tools and documents intended to help developers determine if Java implementations are compliant or not.

You can change the color of your BASH prompt to red with this command: export PS1=”\e[0;31m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m” To make the change permanent, create a .bash_profile in your home directory (if one isn’t already present): touch ~/.bash_profile and paste the line directly into the file. Save and close. For other colors please see the attached list: Color Code Black 0;30 Blue 0;34 Green 0;32 Cyan 0;36 Red 0;31 Purple 0;35 Brown 0;33 Blue 0;34 Green 0;32 Cyan 0;36 Red 0;31 Purple 0;35 Brown 0;33 Light Color Code Light Black 1;30 Light Blue 1;34 Light Green 1;32 Light Cyan 1;36 Light Red 1;31 Light Purple 1;35 Light Brown 1;33 Light Blue 1;34 Light Green 1;32 Light Cyan 1;36 Light Red 1;31 Light Purple 1;35 Light Brown 1;33

This tutorial to install Back In Time in Ubuntu. Its a very useful software to backup and restore your Ubuntu encase if there’s any problem with your Ubuntu. Back In Time acts as a “user mode” backup system. This means that you can backup/restore only folders you have write access to (actually you can backup read-only folders, but you can’t restore them). And now, here are the steps to install Back In Time. 1. Edit your sources.list file by typing: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 2. Add this following command into your sources.list: deb http://le-web.org/repository stable main Then save and exit. 3. Add GPA key information from the terminal: wget http://le-web.org/repository/le-web.key sudo apt-key add le-web.key 4. Update your repositories by typing: sudo apt-get update 5. Install Back In Time! sudo apt-get install backintime-common backintime-gnome 6. And you’re set to go! You can found Back In Time in System Tools>Back In Time Screenshots:

Apache is one of the most popular server available. And most Apache installations are running on Linux servers. Anyone running Linux will tell you that the operating system (be it on a server or desktop) enjoys a level of security operating systems do not enjoy. But does that mean you can just install Apache and assume it 100% safe? No. There are always ways to improve your security on just about every level. In this article I will show you five simple ways to make your Linux Apache installation more secure. And of course you should always know that even with five new means of making your install more secure, that doesn’t mean it is perfectly safe from attack. Even after securing your installation, you should always keep watch over your server by checking log files and using standard security tools. With that said, let’s get our Apache security on! 1. Update, update, update! One of the biggest no nos Linux administrators make is to “set it and forget it”. This should not be your...

The very dynamics of how we access and relate to the Internet could alter dramatically once Google’s Chrome operating system is launched one year from now. This is especially because most of us have not seen any other operating system other than Microsoft’s Windows, which has a 90 per cent market share. Google shook up the tech community and the cyber world after posting an official blog recently. Google Chrome is a Web browser, nine month old, with a meagre penetration of below three per cent. “We are announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome ~ the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be”, the blog said. This year-end Google would release the code behind its operating system and the global tech community or the open source community would be free to alter or tweak the code till a full-fledged system falls in place. “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google operating system. We are ...

VLC 1.0 has about 6 million downloads since its launch a few days ago, and the number was climbing at over 11 per second at last count. I have had VLC for a few years, and you may be wondering what the big deal is. Start with the fact it breaks all the assumptions we’ve had about the proprietary video world. It reads anything , and ignores everything producers try to put in front of your video experience. On a Netflix DVD it will skip the previews, for instance. As Matt Asay notes, VLC records as well as plays video so you can hoard everything Anne Hathaway has ever done on your hard drive. It can be used as a server to stream video to others. Even while VLC may be a better player than what you have under Windows, its heritage is Linux, and open source. It’s licensed under the GPL V.2 and is compatible with the open source Ogg Theora codec. It supports many other codecs as well. The VLC team is aware they have something special. They have ditched their old logo, a roadside traff...

Amid the fanfare of last week's Chrome OS announcement , Google quietly released an open source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display. NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for “quite a while” and decided to develop Neatx as existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain. “The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues,” Google engineers wrote on the company's open source blog . NoMachine had released parts of the source code to its NX product under the GPL, but the NX server remained proprietary. There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX , but this did not appeal to Google. “FreeNX's primary target ...