Tux Training

You more than likely already have alsamixer installed on your computer, even if you just don’t know it’s there. Simply type “alsamixer” on the command line and you will be presented with:

It does everything most graphical volume controls do and does it just as good. It handles setting the volume, controlling 3D switches, CD audio volume and line-in ports just like the graphical versions you are normally accustomed to. Key controls are a simple combination of left and right arrow keys, up and down keys and the M button to mute a channel. Simple, right?

The great part of alsamixer is that you don’t have to mess with the amixer terminal commands to set the volume on your rig. And it runs on a fraction of the space, with no need for a particular desktop environment to work. It’s a natural born utility

We’ve already covered how to make that Windows Key useful in KDE and Xfce, but what about Gnome? Well these instructions should help you out getting the Windows Key to open up the Gnome Panel Menu.

Continue reading ‘Make the Windows Key Open the Gnome Panel Menu’ »

The system utility fsck (for “file system check” or “file system consistency check”) is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in the Unix system and clones thereof.

Generally, fsck is run automatically at boot time when the system detects that a file system is in an inconsistent state, indicating a non-graceful shutdown, such as a crash or power loss. Typically, fsck utilities provide options for either interactively repairing damaged file systems (the user must decide how to fix specific problems), automatically deciding how to fix specific problems (so the user doesn’t have to answer any questions), or reviewing the problems that need to be resolved on a file system without actually fixing them.

Fsck can also be run manually by the root account if there is believed to be a problem with the file system. However, running fsck on a mounted file system can potentially cause severe data corruption/loss.

Continue reading ‘File System Checking with fsck’ »

Antiword is a neat little application that can convert Word documents to plain text, PostScript, and PDF. According to the developer, conversion to DocBook XML is still experimental and doesn’t always work well.

Antiword is can read and convert files created with Word versions 2.0 to 2003, and you can run it on multitude of OSes, including Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and OpenVMS. On top of that, you can set the paper size for documents converted to PostScript or PDF, include any text that was removed from the file (but which Word notoriously keeps a record of), and display any hidden text.

Continue reading ‘View MS Word files in the Commandline with AntiWord’ »

Oleo features a curses based interface (character mode), but also a LessTif (Motif) based graphical user interface. If you feel a small jump of joy and say, “Hey, that’s VisiCalc!” … then Oleo is for you. Or at least you won’t be intimidated by it, which is the important part.  One thing Oleo has going for it is extremely detailed documentation, which is a huge boost, considering it is a fairly complex application with a bit of a learning curve.

I found Oleo in the Ubuntu repositories, but I had to build it from source for openSuse.  I was unable to check it’s availability in Fedora.

Continue reading ‘Oleo: a commandline spreadsheet’ »

Conky doesn’t display properly with a transparent background in KDE, this is a rather quick fix. Type the following in the command line:

feh –bg-scale `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`

If you use a centered wallpaper, use –bg-center instead.

Also see: Make Conky Transparent and movable

This allows you to bind your ‘windows’ key to the desktop right-click menu or middle-click menu, for example.

By default, the windows key is considered Super_L, a modifier key. Therefore you’d have to bind a command to windows+[some_key], which is not what we want. So what you want to do is re-map your windows key so that it’s not a modifier. The easiest way to do this is to use xmodmap like so:

xmodmap -e “keycode 227 = Menu” &

(on older versions of xfce it will be xmodmap -e “keycode 115 = Menu” & )

“Menu” above specifies that when you press the windows key, it will pop-up the app’s menu. We will later overwrite this to pop-up an Xfce menu. The 115 above is the keycode for the windows key. It should work for most people, but you can verify what it is for you with xev.

Now that you’ve changed your windows key to Menu, you can use it with one of the following shortcuts:

xfdesktop -menu <– pops up the right-click menu

xfdesktop -windowlist <– pops up the middle-click window list

If this all works out for you, you may wish to put the xmodmap command in your .xinitrc or .xsession file so that it will execute on startup.

If you remember computers as far back as the late 1980s, you might remember how Peter Norton came to prominence with the three-floppy (was it three?) Norton Utilities suite. There were a lot of cool tools in that pack, especially Norton Commander, which suddenly made file management a breeze.

Midnight Commander (or just mc) is the GNU version of that utility, with an identical layout and similar color scheme. mc should be available in most linux distribution’s repo’s.

Continue reading ‘File Management in the Terminal with Midnight Commander’ »

To run a process in the background, simply append a space and an ampersand (&) at the end of the commandline. At any time, you can then run the ‘jobs’ command. This shows you what processes have been run in the background. They are listed numerically. When you are ready to resume a process in the foreground, you type in ‘fg %[INSERT PROCESS NUMBER HERE]‘. You get the process number from the ‘jobs’ command we ran before.

As an example, let’s try this with top. First, we run it in the background:

[1100][tux@training:~]$ top &

[1] 11746

[1100][tux@training:~]$

Next, let’s take a look at the jobs we have running in the background:

[1100][tux@training:~]$ jobs

[1]+ Stopped top

[1102][tux@training:~]$

We can see that top has a [1] in front of it. We are going to use the ‘1′ to bring that job back to the foreground:

[1102][tux@training:~]$ fg %1

You will then see the output of top as you normally would expect.

In Unix environments there are two ways to link a file. The first being hard-linking. Hardlinking is different than symlinks in the fact that if you remove the original file that the hardlink points to, the link itself can still show you the content of the original file. Where as a symlink is useless without the original file (think “shortcuts” in Windows). Also, you cannot hardlink a directory, only symlink it. All this might seem hard to grasp, but let´s explain:

Continue reading ‘Hardlinks and Symlinks’ »