You are probably familiar with the notion of a text editor – Linux has lots of them, for both the terminal and the desktop. The command line choices include vi and nano, and while on the desktop, there are applications like gedit and Kate. But what if you need to edit a binary file? What … Read more
Taking screenshots is something that we do often, and one of the limitations we always face is the ability to take a full length image of a website. This feature is not included in most screen capture tools, and you often need a separate software for that. For Linux users who love the command line, … Read more
From VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet has been an essential application available on just about every desktop system since the Apple II. On Linux, there are various spreadsheets available including the ones built into OpenOffice and LibreOffice, plus there is a Linux version of Gnumeric. These are all graphical spreadsheets which are run from … Read more
When categorizing Linux distributions, it is often useful to specify which package management system the distribution uses. There are many different package management systems in use, but the two most popular are probably the .deb and .rpm formats. The first comes from Debian and is used by Ubuntu, while the second was developed by RedHat. … Read more
What is the usual thing you do right after a fresh install of Ubuntu? In most cases, it will be sourcing your favorite applications and installing them one by one to your system. This can be a hassle if you have hundreds of applications to install. What if there were a better way to automate … Read more
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a number of free tools available to help with the correct generation and processing of HTML and XML files. The HTML-XML package is a set of simple utilities for manipulating HTML and XML files from the command line. It is available for many of the different Linux distributions … Read more
Today’s gaming experience is quite different to that of the 1970s and 1980s! The current generation of PCs, consoles and mobile devices can handle sophisticated 3D games with shaders, anti-aliasing and more. But there was a time when the only games that could be played were text-based. If you are up for a bit of … Read more
You have probably heard of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has leaked documents about the NSA’s spying activities. He needs to keep his communications private and secure, so the question is, what operating system does he use? Linux, of course! He doesn’t use just any old Linux distribution, but one specially designed to … Read more
You are probably familiar with the various free web based email solutions that are available today. Services like Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com and Gmail are used by millions of people all over the world. Such services are great for personal email, but what about business emails? Many businesses have their own domain name, website and maybe … Read more
Modern Linux distributions try to shield users from the complexities of the command-line, but there are times when using a terminal is absolutely necessary. On Ubuntu, the default terminal is the GNOME terminal (“gnome-terminal“). To start it, tap the “Super” key (which is probably the Windows key on your keyboard), type “terminal” and then click … Read more