The BBC has hosted an astronomy night which resulted in the discovery of another exoplanet around a distant star. This is good news in the search for interstellar life. The Universe would have to be trillions of light-years across by now, the edges travelling faster than the speed of light, due to the initial acceleration … Read more
I wish someone would bring an open-source Nvidia driver to the Linux operating system. I hate having to use a binary installer you have to download and run to install the drivers when you could just have the driver code in the kernel. I know it is not hard to install as long as you … Read more
This is a very useful C++ code snippet for reading a line of text into STDIN. Hopefully, this will be useful to someone. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 #include <iostream> #include <string.h> #include <sstream> using namespace std; … Read more
The Enlightenment E17 window manager is very, very good. This is a nice alternative to the bloated Gnome desktop interface. It has its own file manager and utilities such as a sound mixer. There are multiple desktops by default as well as desktop gadgets and looks very nice indeed. Below is a screenshot of the … Read more
The Radio Shack TRS-80 computer shown here is the first computer I ever used. It has a massive 4K of RAM, upgradeable to 16K, a cassette tape drive using standard audio cassettes with programs on them such as games and utilities as well as a monochrome monitor and of course a very good keyboard. It … Read more
Use the Gnome favorites barUse a blue light filter for GnomeSet GTK 3.0 theme with command line Use the Gnome favorites bar To add applications to the favorites bar on the left of the screen in Gnome 3, just right click on any application icon in the applications menu and select add to favorites. Then … Read more
If you want to be able to use the sudo command in Debian to do superuser tasks as your normal user, then you need to edit the /etc/sudoers file to be able to perform administrator tasks as a normal user with sudo. Add the user lovecraft to the sudoers file like this. lovecraft ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALLlovecraft … Read more
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In 1968, December 9, Douglas C. Englebart and the group of 17 researchers working with him demonstrated a system they named NLS, something they had worked on since 1962. The public presentation demonstrated the computer mouse for the first time, but the day also revealed hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking as well as … Read more
To re-install the grub2 bootloader in Debian 6.0 , you need to be chrooted into the filesystem, this can be done from the installation DVD or an Ubuntu Live CD. Once you are sitting at a root prompt on the Debian system, you need to type: debian ~ # grub-install /dev/sdadebian ~ # grub-install /dev/sda … Read more
Checking the /var/log files is very important. This can show you a lot of information about what is happening with your Linux system. The below command shows how to get a list of previously installed programs on a Debian based system. jason@Yog-Sothoth » ~ » $ grep install /var/log/apt/history.log Commandline: apt install nethogs Commandline: apt … Read more
Using wild-cards to display various files in a folder with ls. I recently needed to check whether certain files were in the /usr/lib folder and I used the ls command to do this. to find all files related to the Perl programming language in the /usr/lib directory. ubuntu ~ $ ls /usr/lib/*perl* /usr/lib/libperl.so.5.18 /usr/lib/libperl.so.5.18.2 … Read more
Setting a larger console font on Ubuntu Linux 12.04. To do this first get to a text console by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 and login with your username ↦ password, then type this command to set a larger font. setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat7-TerminusBold28x14.psf.gzsetfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat7-TerminusBold28x14.psf.gz This is a nice large font and is more readable if you are on a … Read more
I’m sure most everyone has had the following scenario happen once or twice during there lifetime of owning a computer, or an email for that matter. You log-in to your email account to catch up on work, personal emails, etc. The first email you see is from your mom. The subject line is a little weird but … Read more
Using the vmstat command to see which hard disk partitions are the busiest is very easy. Use the vmstat -p /dev/sda1 command and your hard disk information will be printed showing the number of reads and writes for each partition. On my Ubuntu system, the /dev/sda1 partition is the busiest. john@deep-thought ~ $ vmstat -p … Read more
This is very easy to do. Simply open a terminal and type: sudo apt-get install kbd-compat console-terminussudo apt-get install kbd-compat console-terminus This will install the setfont utility and a nice terminus console font. To set the desired font, type this command. The fonts will be in /usr/share/consolefonts. setfont Uni2-TerminusBold24x12.psf.gzsetfont Uni2-TerminusBold24x12.psf.gz If you want the changes … Read more
The KDE desktop has come a long way since the early KDE 2.0 desktop I was using on my old Pentium II Dell Optiplex running Debian 3.0. Nowadays the KDE desktop has changed quite a bit. I do not like the fact that the awesome KDE World Clock application that was once a separate application … Read more
The Linux Mint distribution that was quite famous for not including the Unity desktop that Ubuntu 11.04 came out with is now going back to a simpler Linux desktop. They are further modifying the Gnome Shell desktop and it will include a desktop that has just the bottom panel, as seen with the Linux Mint … Read more