How-To Geek

With Ubuntu 10.10 (the Maverick Meerkat), users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications. Our multi-touch team has worked closely with the Linux ker...

Just like Windows 7 and OS X, Ubuntu has the ability to create a slideshow wallpaper thanks to GNOME 2.28. Here is how you can take control of your wallpaper slideshows with a simple to use GUI tool or a down and dirty text editor.

We all love to download stuff from the internet, and there are heaps of great download manager tools that we can use to schedule our downloads. It might just be easier to use a download manager, but there is no harm in exploring the tools that already comes with our Ubuntu and make the full use of it.

If you’ve bought a new computer recently, you probably have a 64-bit processor and installed the 64-bit version of your Linux distribution. What if your computer is a bit older and you don’t remember?

Have you ever needed to find all the PDF files on your drive, and organize them into one place? You could use the same technique to find all zip, tar.gz, or even MP3 files, and neatly organize them into folders.

Want to check out the latest version of Firefox, Chromium or VLC without dealing with enabling new software repositories? Try out Kompozer or Audacity without installing a bunch of dependencies? PortableLinuxApps to the rescue.

Sometimes only a video will do, whether it’s making step-by-step guide, capturing an epic game of solitaire, or recording an IM video stream. We’ll show you how to record video in Ubuntu using RecordMyDesktop.

Ever needed to make a quick adjustment to the php.ini file but you weren’t sure where it was? Here’s a quick command you can use:

Have you ever been on a system that has a whole bunch of aliases, like changing rm to rm -i, and you want it to work the way you’re used to?  There’s an easy way to do it.

Ever forgotten to run the last command with sudo at the beginning? Here’s how to re-run the command with sudo at the beginning, without re-typing the whole thing:

There’s lots of icon packs out there, many of them great, and many of them lousy, so when we run across one with nice icons, it’s worth a mention.

The new Windows Home Server Beta is available to the public for testing, and you might not have an extra machine to install it on. Here we take a look at using the free VMware Player to install it so you can test it out.

If you’ve switched into another folder with the cd command, and then want to get back to the previous one, you don’t have to remember the whole path. Just use the following command:

If you’re a Windows Home Server enthusiast, you’re more than likely aware of the new Beta code named “Vail”. If you want to test it out without worrying about having an extra machine, we can install and use it free in VMware Server.

You might want to reuse all of the arguments to a previous command in the shell if you realized you want to open the file with a different utility, but don’t feel like typing out the whole path again.

Ever thought about turning your Linux Box into your own personal karaoke machine ? Well OSD Lyrics has just made it possible for us Linux users to turn our Linux into a karaoke machine.

If you’re a Windows Home Server enthusiast you probably want to test out the new version code named Vail. You might not have an extra box to test it on, so here we take a look at installing it on VMware Workstation.

Have you ever typed out a really long command, realized it worked great, and then wanted to save it to a file? There’s an easy bash trick you can use to do just that.

If you’re working on a project, and you’ve copied in or created a whole bunch of new files, you might find it tedious to manually add each of them. Here’s the quick command you can use instead:

One of the new additions to Ubuntu 10.04 is the file syncing service Ubuntu One. If you already use a similar service like Dropbox, or you don’t want to sync files between computers, you might want to remove Ubuntu One – we’ll show you how.

If you rely on somebody else for managed hosting of your Linux servers, you might not always know exactly what type of server you’re actually running on. There’s a quick and easy way to figure this out, however.

There are lots of command-line utilities to kill unresponsive programs in Linux, but for the button-pushing-inclined, the Force Quit panel button lets you kill any app that you can click on without needing to remember anything.

If you want to quickly see what processes are wasting all of your memory, you can do so with a simple command line that filters the output from ps to sort by memory usage, and return only the ten biggest memory hogs.

If you’ve got a web application that uploads files to the server through a PHP script, you might have noticed that by default you can’t upload terribly large files. Here’s how to change it.

Gone are the days of finding a good FTP client and reading man pages trying to find out how the heck fuse works – mounting remote folders in Ubuntu nowadays is a breeze.