If you’re at all like me, your desktop can become rather cluttered with files over time. One way to at least have files stored in your /home folder rather than your /home/Desktop folder is to set your /home folder as your actual Desktop. This is particularly helpful if you use a separate larger drive as your /home folder.

This article shows how to run a file- and print-server for small and medium enterprises (SME) on one single Ubuntu 8.04 server. It is very easy to set up, and management is done with an easy-to-use web interface called eBox so once the system is set up, you can forget about the command line. eBox was developed to administrate advanced services for corporate networks.

When you are using Linux command line frequently, using the history effectively can be a major productivity boost. In fact, once you have mastered the 15 examples that I’ve provided here, you’ll find using command line more enjoyable and fun.

I purchased a Logitech V470 Bluetooth mouse for use with a laptop with an internal Bluetooth radio. Setting up Bluetooth input devices in Ubuntu 8.04 is easy (there’s no command line or config files), but not entirely straightforward.

Use Terminator: Terminator is a nice way to free your valuable screen space from multiple terminal windows. Instead of using one terminal window for each task, divide an existing window horizontally or vertically each time you need a new terminal window. So if you find yourself using 8 terminal windows, you can use Terminator and pack your terminals into 2 windows.

If you have a huge collection of music and would like to build a media streaming server to manage your collection, then Jinzora is the right one for you. Jinzora is a Web based media streaming and management system. It is supported in various platforms and it allows you to access your music collection from any devices over the Internet.

The bookmark tagging feature introduced in Firefox 3 is not particularly difficult in use: when bookmarking a Web page, enter the tags you like into the Tags field of the bookmarking dialog window and you are pretty much done. Tagging provides a more flexible way of keeping track of bookmarks than traditional folders. The folder-based system provides an "either/or"-solution to filing bookmarks. For example, you could place a bookmark for an article about installing OpenOffice.org on Puppy Linux in either a Linux or OpenOffice.org folder, but not in both. With tags, you don't have this problem: you can assign as many tags as you like, so the bookmark becomes filed under several categories at the same time.

USB drives support two basic formats: floppy drive and hard drive. A USB floppy drive consists of one large formatted drive. In contrast USB hard drives contain partition tables and one or more formatted partitions. If you purchased a thumb drive and never formatted it, then it is most likely configured as a USB hard drive with one large partition.

Package managers make life on Linux a whole lot easier. Instead of managing bits of software by yourself and sorting out the inevitable dependency hell, where one package depends upon another and that depends upon yet another and so on, you can have a clever bit of software do all the work.

Despite the slightly higher resolution (800 vs 768) vertical space is always a bit constrained on widescreens. This is even more noticeable with Gnome which has two panels, at the top and at the bottom, that use at minimum size 50 pixels both. Some other 20 px get wasted in the application titlebar, around 15 px in its statusbar, countless in horizonal scrollbars, menu bars, toolbars and whatsoever.

The Master view in Impress is the equivalent of page styles in Writer. It's the view where you can set elements of design that appear throughout your presentation, such as the slide background and foreground colors, any reoccurring elements, and the fonts. By creating the master slides you need before you add content, you can automate your work and free yourself to focus on content.

Elisa is an open source cross-platform media center connecting the Internet to an all-in-one media player. This overview will walk you through the steps to install Elisa in Ubuntu, and highlight some of the features.

Periodic schedulers come in many shapes and sizes but one constant is cron, the scheduling daemon that will run programs and scripts at arbitrary times or intervals. A number of different cron implementations exist: although vixie-cron may be the most popular, there are other similar programs such as dcron, fcron, anacron, and others. Each cron implementation typically adheres to the same standards of defining cron jobs by using a configuration file called a crontab with a certain layout:

Iwspy is used to set a list of addresses to monitor in a wireless network interface and to read back quality of link information for each of those. This information is the same as the one available in /proc/net/wireless : quality of the link, signal strength and noise level.This information is updated each time a new packet is received, so each address of the list adds some overhead in the driver.

Have suspicions about what goes on on your own computer when you are away? Think someone might be cheating? Do you often see that the history has been deleted out of the browser? Maybe you just want to keep tabs on what your kids are looking at when you aren’t right there watching.

Hopefully, today's title didn't give anyone the wrong impression. If you've gone and thrown your monitor off the balcony in a fit of rage, this post can't help you, except to offer the following advice: Go to the store and buy a buy a new one (they're much cheaper now than when you may have bought yours, which will help offset the counseling, therapy and court-ordered community service expenses ;)

The setup described here enables you to store all your email (and email for other people) on a single machine, which might be a home server, a remotely hosted server, or even a desktop, and then access it from anywhere.

Traditionally, I’ve never had the same wallpaper on any computer for more than a half hour at a time.  I like my wallpapers to rotate, since I’m surrounded by 3-4 computers at any given time and usually only working on 1 or 2 of them.  This way I can have nice pictures flying by to keep my perhipheral vision entertained and people walking past my window can marvel at the 3D art I have displayed.

I love the command line. However, most people can’t just live on the command line, GUI’s can be pretty  useful :P. I find myself spawning GUI programs from the command line a lot, and here are two tips which make doing that a pleasant experience:

Mozilla Corp. today announced the winners of its third “Extend Firefox” contest, an annual competition that recognizes the year’s best Firefox add-ons.