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Ubuntu is already pretty speedy compared to some bloated OSes out there, but here’s a way to make it a bit faster.
chage changes the number of days between password changes and the date of the last password change. This information is used by the system to determine when a user must change her password. The chage command is restricted to the root user, except for the -l option, which may be used by an unprivileged user to determine when her password or account is due to expire.
GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. Do not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play). Want to send an email to mom? Simply type “email mom.” Want to listen to some music? Simply type “play beatles.” Do provides instantaneous, action-oriented desktop search results that adapt to reflect your habits and preferences. For example, if you use Firefox web browser often, typing “f” in Do will launch it. Or, if you visit The New York Times webpage often, Do will open it if you simply type “nyt.” Unlike other search tools that present search results as flat, homogeneous lists, Do provides familiar graphical depictions of search results that assure you that your intent is being realized correctly; searching for “mom” will show a picture of mom, and searching for “beatles” will show a Beatles album cover. Do has many more powerful and exciting capabilities that must be seen to be appreciated.
TimeVault is a simple front-end for making snapshots of a set of directories. Snapshots are a copy of a directory structure or file at a certain point in time. Restore functionality is integrated into Nautilus - previous versions of a file or directory that has a snapshot can be accessed by examining the properties and selecting the ‘Previous Versions’ tab.
Snapshots are protected from accidental deletion or modification since they are read-only by default. The super-user can delete intermediate snapshots to save space, but files and directories that existed before or after the deletion will still be accessible.
A snapshot is a copy of a directory at a certain point in time. Snapshots don’t use space for the files that haven’t changed but instead simply increment the link count for them. On Linux, when a file is deleted, the link count is decremented, but it isn’t actually removed until the link count hits zero.
Only files are hard-linked this way. Directories have to be recreated for technical reasons (since a hard-link is actually the file it points to, you would find yourself in a completely different path if directories were hard-linked).
In Firefox 3, the Location Bar received a number of improvements. Among those improvements was the move to a XUL richlistbox widget for the auto-complete dropdown. This allowed styled URL/title information, favicons, and highlighted match information. This preference determines how many entries should appear (at most) in the dropdown. Many find Firefox 3’s “awesome bar” quite annoying. Luckily this is easy to disable.
First, in the address bar type: “about:config” (without the quotes).
In the about:config search bar type: Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
The default value is set to 12. If you set this interger to 0, nothing will display in the “awesome bar” any longer.
I prefer a clean desktop with no icons cluttering it up, but by default most Gnome based distros adds icons to the desktop for every single removable drive that you attach to your system.
Want to avoid throttling? Hide your location from peers connected to the same torrent? Block Comcast’s TCP packet resets? Or use PeerGuardian blocklists in your torrent client? Then read on.
A while back I wrote a piece about how to Secure the hell out of your Linux box, and I thought I’d follow up with the same but for the Windows world. Yes yes, this is a Linux blog and this kind of post won’t happen all that often, or possibly never again, but security I feel is far more important than technological allegiances.
