Every current disk includes a built-in monitoring feature known as SMART that keeps track of faults. On Linux, there is a software package called smartmontools that may be used to query the SMART status of the disk to see if it will fail soon. Installation apt-get install smartmontools Usage First we need to know the ... Read more
Maybe you have had this problem: you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux and a software package you would like to install is only available in RPM format. The solution is the handy tool called alien, which converts .rpm files to .deb files. Install alien: apt-get install alien Converting an rpm package to Debian format: ... Read more
It is important to keep your Linux server up to date with security updates. Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Debian release updates on a daily basis, so keeping the system up-to-date can become a tedious task. Fortunately, there is an option to install security updates automatically. Here are the steps to enable automatic security updates ... Read more
Sometimes you might have to work with the Spamassin Bayes Token database. This is the database that is used by the SpamAssassin Self Learning (Bayesian) Classifier to store the ham and spam tokens. This tutorial will show you how to make a backup of that database. E.g. when you want to move it to a ... Read more
FFmpeg has been removed from Ubuntu 14.04 and was replaced by Libav. This decision has been reversed so that FFmpeg is available now in Ubuntu 15.04 again, but there is still no official package for 14.04. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install FFmpeg from mc3man ppa. Add the mc3man ppa: sudo ... Read more
With Steam support for Linux, there will most likely be a whole lot more games coming out for Ubuntu and its consorts. While the database of games with Linux support still grows, many titles are already available. To install Steam on Ubuntu or Linux Mint, open a Terminal and enter the following commands: sudo apt-key ... Read more
Surely you have witnessed this feature on a Linux system before: with a simple key combination the user is able to switch between multiple instances of the same desktop to reduce the clutter that you get when you open everything on just one desktop. That way, you can have your mail client open on one ... Read more
Just as in Windows you have the option to rotate your screen into any direction in Linux, too. While in Windows you only need to press some keys, a key combination is not configured in Linux by default. But as you may have figured out, there are some terminal commands that let you do the ... Read more
Screen brightness is an attribute that is reset automatically upon rebooting your machine on Ubuntu and all its fellow distributions. Lucky you if you find the settings okay, but on notebooks and similar machines, you might want to lower the brightness, you it doesn't suck your batteries dry. To do that, open the following file ... Read more
It may occur that by default your computer won't connect to wireless networks after starting up the system. A way to solve this might be to install the WICD network manager which is available in the Ubuntu repositories. Just fire up Synaptic Package Manager and search for WICD. During installation, you will be asked to ... Read more