The colonization of the planet Mars will not be a quick process despite movies like Red Planet that displayed a terraforming method that used algae to create oxygen in the atmosphere. That could work, but it would not be a very fast process. With the recent announcement of plans for asteroid mining sometime in the … Read more
I recently had to add a printer to my Debian System and the System Settings -> printers dialog in the Gnome 3 System Settings application would not detect my Canon MP150 printer. Therefore, I started the CUPS interface by visiting: http://localhost:631 in my web browser and I was then able to add my printer. This … Read more
Listing hardware on a Linux system. This is easy when using the Linux command-line. In the olden days, you would use the cat /proc/pci command to list hardware installed on the PCI bus, but this /proc file is deprecated and does not exist on modern Linux systems. The lspci command is the modern way to … Read more
Burning a ISO image to a CD or DVD with GNU/Linux is very easy indeed. The wodim command that replaced the old cdrecord software that used to be shipped with Linux is the standard application for performing these tasks. The -speed parameter sets the speed that the ISO image will be written to the DVD … Read more
The Linux command-line has many powerful tools for viewing and managing running processes on your UNIX/Linux machine. The lsof command is a very useful command, it will display a list of all open files owned by active processes running on your system. Below is an excerpt from the output this command will give you. root@deusexmachina:/home/neo# … Read more
The Gnome Shell desktop on Debian Testing is working very well now, I managed to get the HDMI sound working with the audacious music player using the alsa output. Below is my /etc/asound.conf file containing the settings I am using to listen to my music. Gnome 3 is actually a good desktop environment, I was … Read more
Installing Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy and the Gnome 3 desktop. How to install the Debian Wheezy distribution with the Gnome Shell desktop using the Debian 6.0 installation media. This is how to install the Debian Wheezy distribution alongside Windows and have a nice dual boot system for experimenting with Linux.
The awesome theme that the Elive Linux distribution used is now available for the latest E17 build. I am currently using it on Debian Testing and it is the best looking theme yet. Just download the theme and import it into your theme manager and it will work out of the box with no need … Read more
Compiling a vanilla kernel tarball from kernel.org on Debian Stable/Testing. Firstly you need to download a vanilla kernel tarball from the kernel.org website. Once you have the tarball downloaded, type tar -jxvf linux-3.3.tar.bz2 and then follow the sequence below. This sequence of commands will build a pair of Debian *.deb packages in your home folder … Read more
The Debian distribution I am using is working very well compared to the Ubuntu and Linux Mint distributions that I was using before. I have installed a 3.3 kernel with the Debian kernel packaging commands and built a kernel tarball and a headers tarball that I was then able to install with the dpkg -i … Read more
Setting the system time with Debian Linux is very simple, using the date command, you may display the current date/time, then copy this to the date -s “” command and then edit it to the proper value. This is the easiest technique to set the Linux system time. This is the existing date. root@deusexmachina:/home/neo# date … Read more
The enlightenment E17 desktop window manager is now available for the Debian testing distribution, now all of those complex steps that were formerly required to install this window manager are a thing of the past. I have installed the enlightened window manager as it is a nice complement to the Debian testing distribution. I used … Read more
I recently had to move some folders to my home directory on my Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 installation as the root user and I then had to change the ownership of the folders and the files within to my current user. For example, I copied the ~/.themes folder to my home folder and I had to … Read more
While running Linux, if you want to list the contents of a folder in a vertical list format, just use the ls command with these switches. ls -hula –color=autols -hula –color=auto then you get the directory listing with human readable file sizes instead of being listed in bytes. To list the partitions on a disk, … Read more
I just bought a 7 port USB hub that plugs into a USB port and gives you 7 USB ports, and I can use it perfectly on Fedora Core 13 and Gentoo, but it will not work at all on Windows XP service pack 3.? I am thinking that if I re-plug it in Windows, … Read more
I have just installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope once more, and I will see how I go with this, I have just installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package and I should be able to play just about any format I want to. My Windows XP installation is playing up so I sacrificed the disk space occupied by Windows … Read more