Archive : Linux

The USP of Linux has always been the strong security and stability it offers. Per user/group permissions and ACLs (access control lists) take care of almost all the security needs of a home users as well as an enterprise customer. If there is a need for even more fine grained control, there are various...

How many times have you come across a movie or a video clip and wished that you could put it on your iPod and watch it on the go ? Or came across a DivX encoded video and wished that you could burn it to a DVD and play it on an old style DVD player ? With the increasingly fast broadband connections that...

Youtube is by far the most popular site for sharing videos. The only problem with uploading your videos to youtube is that there really is no easy way to download those videos back to your computer. Your only option than is to view them online. There are also times when you watch a video so hilarious/interesting...

Picture this – You’re out on the road for work or pleasure and have this sudden urge to listen to that one song from your collection which is stored on your desktop back at home. Or you’re a freelancer and need access the draft proposal you made for a client which is again on your desktop...

Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does. The problem with cron is the cryptic syntax which tends to scare away most new users and the fact that a user has to use the terminal to create a new job. In this tutorial we will...

Ellisa is an open source media center that can play DVDs, VCDs, video files and even display your photos. The support for video files is extensive and the player can handle almost any video that you might throw at it. Elisa is extensible and is based on a very neat plugin architecture, which means that...

Who said open source developers were a boring bunch of people. I’m quite sure that person hasn’t met the developers of Calc. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock until now, Calc is the Spreadsheet part of the OpenOffice.org suite and today we are going to unearth a very...

Ubuntu (and all Debian based) distributions use the .deb format for application packages and these days most developers writing applications for Linux provide a .deb package. But, even then there might be times when you want to install an application which is available only in the .rpm format. If you...

I’m a big GNOME fan and have been using it ever since it was first released. Ofcourse, like all software, not all is good with the GNOME project also and some of the decisions made by the developers are just plain absurd to me. One such decision was making the Spatial mode on Nautilus as the default. Nautilus,...

How many times have you had to reinstall the OS on your computer and then had to install all your favorite pieces of software by hand. I’m sure it’s quite painful. And even more so when you forget to install a couple of software and then have to install them in a crunch when you need them...