Free Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference

Ubuntu neophytes and gurus alike have cause to rejoice. Here is a gem of a deal - a free ebook on Ubuntu authored by none other than Kier Thomas. The book is divided into seven chapters spanning 170 pages. And it contain a wealth of information right from an introduction to Ubuntu, to installing and configuring it on your machine, coming to grips with the desktop, a lucid explanation of the various system administration tasks you should carry out to maintain your system, and of course the security aspects of Ubuntu which is dealt with in the seventh chapter of this book.

This is a wonderful book which is sure to be a ready pocket reference to all Linux users running Ubuntu on their machine. And true to Keir's class, the language is lucid and to the point. The sapient advice he belts out in this book to many of the common problems faced by Ubuntu users puts this book on a singular level of its own.

While the author has been gracious in providing the ebook as a free download, the real value of this book lies in buying a print edition of the book. As owing to its pocket size (8 x 5.2 x 0.4), it is ideal to carry the book where ever you go without much hassle. You can order a print copy of this book from Amazon for a nominal price of $9.94.

Linus Torvalds ditches KDE 4 for GNOME

Linus Torvalds says he has ditched KDE for good and is now sleeping with its arch rival GNOME. Oh well, rhetoric apart, he says the move over to GNOME happened because in KDE 4, he found it quite bothersome that he couldn't get his Right mouse button to access the right menu he wanted. In short, he ran into usability issues while using KDE 4.0.

In an interview given to Rodney Gedda of "Computer World" - Australia, he had this to say, and I quote :

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.

I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.

I am sure the GNOME camp must be rejoicing in having won over a high profile Linux user to their side. This when a few years back, Linus Torvalds had gone on record severely criticizing GNOME for over simplifying the user interface.

Linus Torvalds was in Australia to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. While he was rather critical of KDE 4 in its current form, he did say it was a good thing for Nokia to release Qt as LGPL. Among other things, he also gives his views on Microsoft Windows 7 advising Microsoft to release sooner and decouple the operating system from the applications. A really interesting interview.

New features in OpenOffice.org 3.1

OpenOffice.org rocks! Big time. The OpenOffice.org office suite which comes bundled with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex which I am running on my machine, is version 2.4 even though version 3.0 has been released for some time now. But supposedly big things are happening in the yet to be officially released OpenOffice.org 3.1.

Some of the visual enhancements being - Antialiasing of images making them smooth, improvements in charts, grammar checking and hyperlinks management, just to name a few. Will OpenOffice.org 3.1 be a Microsoft Office 2007 killer ? May be not. But it is closing the gap by leaps and bounds passing each (minor) version release. More over, it can be obtained by one and all at an unbeatable price - Free.

Learn more about the new features being introduced in OpenOffice.org 3.1 which is due to be officially released 63 days hence.

Linux Commands - 10 Useful tricks for Admins

I have heard a saying - the one thing which sets apart a Linux administrator Guru from a Novice is how much more the former is able to accomplish with so few keystrokes. I do not know the veracity of that saying. But IBM Developerworks has - as usual, put together a collection of tricks which will help raise the efficiency of any system administrator by a notch or two. I am no Guru, nor am I a novice. I guess I fall somewhere in the grey areas between the two extremes, which makes reading the tricks really informative for me.

Among the tricks described are Linux commands which we seldom use such as - fuser, reset, screen, as well as invaluable tips like - resetting the root password, SSH back door entry, using VNC to SSH tunnel to a remote machine, checking your bandwidth, a couple of command line tricks, spying on the console and finally Random system information collection.

Read the article to learn more.

Google portable device runs Debian Linux

The portable device I am talking about is the T-Mobile G1 Android cellphone. Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an Operating System, Middleware and key applications. Presumably, the T-Mobile G1 contains an ARM EABI architecture which is supported by Debian.

So a group of people (hackers) set out to install Debian on their T-Mobile G1 Android phone. The end result, at the least, is quite interesting. They have succeeded in running a full fledged Debian OS on their G1 Android cellphone at the same time, retain all the features which allow it to function as a cellphone such as receiving and making calls.

Read a detailed writeup on the steps needed to install Debian on a TMobile G1 Phone at the following website. AndroidFanatic.com has released a Debian installer script for your Android cellphone which you can download here.

Also watch the following video which shows Debian running on the Android G1 cellphone.

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Linux Screen Command Revisited

Screen is a command line tool which allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same window. Put in simpler terms, screen command allows you to have the same functionality of tabs - but in a console. Red Hat magazine is running a very useful and informative article to installing and using GNU screen on Linux. The article is written by Steve ‘Ashcrow’ Milner and Anderson Silva. Read the article.