Linux is Confusing. These Articles Should Help

Kill Linux Processes Easier with pkill

One of the best features in Linux is the way you can control processes from the command line, so if you have an application that locks up your GUI, you can always SSH over from another machine and just kill the offending proc...

Lowell Heddings Dec 7th, 2007

Get the Linux Alt+Window Drag Functionality in Windows

One of my favorite features from Linux is the Alt + Window drag that allows you to move any window by holding down the Alt key and then just left-click dragging the window anywhere you’d like.

Lowell Heddings Nov 24th, 2007

Speed Up Amarok With Large Music Collections

Amarok is a wonderful application for managing and playing your music collection, but the default settings aren’t optimized for speed when it comes to large collections of music. The problems are especially noticeable w...

Lowell Heddings Nov 6th, 2007

Upgrade Ubuntu from Feisty to Gutsy

Ubuntu Gutsy is the latest major release of the most popular Linux distro, released on October 18, 2007. Like all Linux distributions you can upgrade easily even while the release is in beta, but now that it’s been rele...

Lowell Heddings Oct 27th, 2007

Monday’s Lazy Links Roundup From the How-To Geek Blogs

I’ve decided to use my laziness as an excuse to promote some of the good stuff that the bloggers on the How-To Geek Blogs have come up with over the last week or two.

Lowell Heddings Oct 21st, 2007

Installing Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu

If you are running Ubuntu and want to use the Tomcat servlet container, you should not use the version from the repositories as it just doesn’t work correctly. Instead you’ll need to use the manual installation pr...

Lowell Heddings Oct 11th, 2007

Connect to VMware Server Console Over SSH

Has this ever happened to you? I created a new virtual machine running Ubuntu on my VMware server before I left home, but forgot to install the ssh server… so I couldn’t get to that machine at all from my remote l...

Lowell Heddings Oct 10th, 2007

Show the List of Installed Packages on Ubuntu or Debian

While working on the instructions for compiling MonoDevelop from source, I relied heavily on the dpkg and apt-cache commands to tell me what was already installed vs what packages were available in the repository. After compl...

Lowell Heddings Oct 8th, 2007

Installing MonoDevelop from Source on Ubuntu

After reading a post from my friend Daniel about the new release of MonoDevelop, I decided to try and install it… which is when I realized that the installation from source is so painful I’d better figure it out a...

Lowell Heddings Oct 7th, 2007

Security Tip: Disable Root SSH Login on Linux

One of the biggest security holes you could open on your server is to allow directly logging in as root through ssh, because any cracker can attempt to brute force your root password and potentially get access to your system ...

Lowell Heddings Oct 5th, 2007

Enable "Ubuntu Style" Logons in Windows Vista

If you like the way Ubuntu requires you to enter your username and password instead of clicking on an icon, you can enable the same thing for Windows Vista in a somewhat similar style logon process. This is really most useful...

Lowell Heddings Sep 27th, 2007

Simplify Regular Expression Search/Replace with Regexxer on Linux

If you are tired of hacking together commands at the terminal or having to open a giant bloated IDE just to perform search and replace across a number of files, then Regexxer is the tool for you.

Lowell Heddings Sep 27th, 2007

Resolve "Warning: SSH version 1 possible allowed" from Plesk Watchdog

This tip won’t be useful for everybody, but for anybody with a dedicated server you’ll probably be familiar with this error message that gets sent weekly from the security scanner on your server....

Lowell Heddings Sep 25th, 2007

Great Geek Sites – Part Two

Every month or two, we come up with a list of the great geek sites that we read and share it with our readers. It’s also a great way for me to take a day off, since it only takes a few minutes to come up with…...

Lowell Heddings Sep 23rd, 2007

Speed Up Your Web Site With MySQL Query Caching

One of the best ways to speed up your web application is to enable query caching in your database, which caches commonly used SQL queries in memory for virtually instant access by the next page that makes the same request....

Lowell Heddings Sep 16th, 2007

Disable Syntax Highlighting in Vim

I’m the type of geek that always has an open ssh session connected to my servers, but ever since I switched to using a Mac running OS X, I noticed a huge annoyance in my terminal… the syntax highlighting makes it ...

Lowell Heddings Sep 9th, 2007

Prevent X.Org from Starting in Ubuntu

If you’ve got an Ubuntu machine that you initially installed with Ubuntu Desktop, but would like to run as a server, you can just disable the graphical environment from starting up in order to save resources. This is al...

Lowell Heddings Sep 7th, 2007

Clean Up Ubuntu Grub Boot Menu After Upgrades

One of the things in Ubuntu that has always driven me crazy is the addition of new items into the grub menu without removing the old entries that likely don’t even work anymore. I’m sure most experienced Ubuntu us...

Lowell Heddings Sep 6th, 2007

Linux Tip: How to Tell if Your Processor Supports VT

Virtualization Technology (VT) is a set of enhancements to newer processors that improve performance for running a virtual machine by offloading some of the work to the new cpu extensions. Both AMD and Intel have processors t...

Lowell Heddings Aug 27th, 2007

Change SSH Welcome Banner on Ubuntu

Every time I connect to my Ubuntu development server through my ssh client, I receive the same message and I’m getting tired of seeing it, so I decided to change the message to something else.

Lowell Heddings Aug 12th, 2007

Add Sudo to Your Last Bash Command With "!!" Syntax

How often have you typed in a command in your linux shell, and then realized that you forgot to type sudo, so you end up with an error or editing the dreaded read-only file? This happens to me much more than I’d like to...

Lowell Heddings Jul 30th, 2007

Make Grub Bootloader Wait Indefinitely for OS Selection

If you are doing a lot of testing of different builds, there’s nothing more annoying than rebooting and then having the system boot into the wrong choice on the grub menu before you have a chance to pick the one you wan...

Lowell Heddings Jul 25th, 2007

Disable ProFTP on CentOS

I realize this is probably only relevant to about 3 of the readers, but I’m posting this so I don’t forget how to do it myself! In my efforts to ban the completely insecure FTP protocol from my life entirely, I&#8...

Lowell Heddings Jul 23rd, 2007

Shell Geek: Rename Multiple Files At Once

Let’s say you have a directory with hundreds of files with the wrong file names, and you’d like to replace every filename containing test with prod. (this is a contrived example). We can easily do this with the &#...

Lowell Heddings Jul 17th, 2007

Fixing Problems with Slow Katapult Searching

If you’ve become addicted to using keyboard launchers like I have, you might have encountered the scenario where Katapult became extremely slow for no apparent reason. The problem is most likely because you’ve got...

Lowell Heddings Jul 11th, 2007