Using webcams and microphones for surveillance and monitoring is not a new concept, we have looked at several solutions in the past. Grabmotion comes to mind for instance. The open source solution iSpy on the other hand takes the concept to a new level. Here is how it works.The surveillance software can be installed on [...]

On which CD was that backup again? On which DVD did I burn last year’s holiday photos? If you work a lot with media on optical disks you may want to have the means on the computer to browse and search through all of your disks right on the computer. Azzul is a free program [...]

The Japanese term “byobu” means a decorative, multi-paneled screen that serves as a room divider. You’ve probably seen them all over the place. When it comes to Linux, byobu is a small software that can be used on top of your standard terminal window to add extra functionality. What byobu really is is a wrapper [...]

Printer sharing was once a big challenge for Linux. It almost always involved manually configuring Samba to share out your printers. That is not so now. With the latest releases of the GNOME desktop, printer sharing is as easy as it is in any other operating system. So longer will you need to open up [...]

If you’ve come across an application or a process that just won’t die, and you’re thinking that you might want to reboot your machine – STOP! There is no need for rebooting in Linux (unless you’ve just upgraded your kernel). There are plenty of ways to get rid of an application that refuses to listen [...]

Have you ever wanted to start a program at a very specific time, but didn’t really know how to manage that task? Maybe you want your email client to start up only before you wake up in the morning. Or maybe you want to schedule a print job to start at a certain time, or [...]

Linux, being a multi-user system, begs for you to configure it such that all users initially experience exactly what you want them to experience. One option you have, which is very easy to do, is to create specific desktop launchers that are added to all new users upon first login. Naturally those users can then [...]

I have been a fan of Enlightenment for a long, long time. It’s one of the most elegant desktops available today. But not only is it elegant looking, it’s a joy to use, more flexible than most desktops, and lighter weight than the “big 2″ Linux desktops. The only problem with E17 is the installation. [...]

If you are a Linux user who frequents the command line, you will most likely have heard of the bash history. This is a special system that keeps a history of all commands run from bash. This has many pros and only a few cons. One of the cons is that, if you are logged [...]

The Linux command line is one of the most versatile tools you will ever use. It can do just about anything you can image for a machine. With such a large scope of tasks you can imagine just how much there is to learn. So, it’s always good  to have an arsenal of tricks at your [...]

The GIMP is one of the most powerful of the free, open source image manipulation tools you will ever use. It seems the possibilities are nearly limitless. But for some users, the barrier to entry on The GIMP is too challenging to get over. Although it may seem that way, it is not necessarily true. [...]

Do people still code HTML by hand? Of course they do. And when they do, what tools do they use? Some use a simple text editor like nano or vi. Some prefer a little more GUI-goodness like Gedit or Kate. Still, some others prefer an application dedicated to the task at hand. For those Linux [...]

I’ve had the pleasure of trying out plenty of netbook hardware. Just about every form factor and operating system combination available. These netbooks range from the hardly usable, to the might-as-well-be-a-laptop, and everything in between. It’s that “everything in between” space that appeals to the majority of users on the planet and that’s exactly where [...]

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu is dropping the GNOME desktop as the default and switching to it’s own, in-house desktop. That desktop is the Unity desktop which was designed for the netbook environment. Whether you like this move or not, it’s happening. But what is Unity? And how do you experience it now, instead [...]

The dictionary is a tool that any writer or student should have on their computer. And Linux users are not immune from this need. But if you look through the possibilities of Linux dictionary tools you find quite a large amount available. Which of these tools are the best or easiest to use? I have [...]

I do enjoy the terminal. Although it’s not necessary in modern Linux iterations, it’s always great to know that terminal is there when you need it. Terminal power users have TONS of options. You can use the multi-talented Guake (see my article “Guake: Hide-able terminal goodness“), you can opt for the standard Xterm, or the [...]

Your first question might be “Why bother changing your grub splash screen?” The answer? Why not! Well, actually there are plenty of reasons you might want to change your Grub splash screen. You could be in a company that wants its brand from top to bottom, or you just want your computer to be cool [...]

I just downloaded a very large text file with more than 70K lines of text, and had troubles loading it into a third party software getting an out of bounds error because of the size of the text file. The logical next step was to find a program to split the large text file into [...]

The desktop screensaver is one of those gray areas that does nothing for productivity but people always seem to want to tweak, change, and otherwise toil over. For some it’s just a way to save some power. For others, it’s a requirement (by law) that screens lock after a certain period of time. For some [...]

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Ubuntu 10.10 is officially out and officially hot. With plenty of features to make everything ooh and ahh as well as stability built upon the 10.04 release, which is one of the most stable, usable distributions to date. But why should you download it now and install it? What does [...]

There are many reasons why you would want to enable a text to speech feature on a computer. You could suffer from poor (or no) vision, you might need the feature for a science experiment, or maybe you just want to have your log files read to you. No matter the reason, text to speech [...]

According to Ubuntu >= 10.04, left is the new right. It’s old news by now, but I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who have battled to try to acclimate yourselves to the new “standard”. For some users, this is a no-brainer. But for other users, the paradigm of upper right window control [...]

You computer’s clock does more than just tell you the time. This clock also stamps your email with the correct time as well as documents and much more. So when your PC clock is off, your life is off (at least while you are working). So it is necessary to keep your machine time accurate. [...]

One of the easiest ways to increase a music collection is to record Internet radio streams. Just like recording conventional radio, recording Internet radio is legal in many countries. Putting legalities aside, it is also one of the fastest and most comfortable option. But it has its drawbacks as well. Since it is only possible [...]

You’ve probably already heard the news. OpenOffice has officially forked into LibreOffice. This fork is thanks to the way Oracle has botched nearly everything it has touched and the OpenOffice community wants to protect the flagship product. So now, there is a fully open office suite that, in my opinion, will actually be able to [...]

Two major announcements have been made yesterday, and I thought I pack them into one article for your convenience. First, the news that the popular bookmark synchronization service Xmarks will shut down on January 10, 2011. The very popular service allowed users to sync bookmarks between multiple browsers, for instance between Firefox, Chrome and Internet [...]

If you are currently using Ubuntu 10.04 and are interested in 10.10 you have choices – you can burn yourself an ISO and do a complete, fresh installation, OR you can upgrade using apt-get without having to bother with a re-installation. Of course I should warn you that, as of this writing, Ubuntu 10.10 is [...]

Recently I did an introductory “walk around” GNOME (see “A walk around the GNOME desktop“) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on [...]

Recently I had a reader request a bit of a “how to” on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply don’t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same [...]

Nautilus is one versatile file manager. The ability to add actions (with the help of Nautilus Actions) makes Nautils’ ability seemingly endless. I have covered adding actions to Nautilus before (see my article “Add actions to extend Nautilus functionality“). That article covered an earlier version of Nautilus Actions. Now that this tool has matured quite [...]

Say you have two PDF documents and you want to merge them into one. Or say you have one long PDF document and you want to split it into sections. Or what if you want to add a watermark What do you do? If you’re really up on your PDF Toolkit commands you could easily [...]

If you keep a journal you know that some times you just wish your note taking or journaling tool could be a little more free form. There are instances where you want to quickly sketch a drawing without having to open up The GIMP (or another drawing application) or you want to be able to [...]

A new European project, kick-started by 22 European companies and organisations aims to develop an application development environment that will work across all platforms by providing a web-based approach, according to the BBC. The move which is backed by €10M in funding, aims to create apps that would work on any device from Internet TVs to [...]

There are those of us who like to keep a daily journal. For those that do, the application used for this purpose must fit the bill. For some the daily journal can simply be a text document. For others, however, the journal must be a full-fledged application geared specifically for that purpose. One such tool [...]

If you are a Windows user you are probably accustomed to cleaning up your registry on a regular basis. Adding and removing software can leave behind unused or corrupt entries in the registry which, in turn, can cause system irregularities or, worse, cause a system to not run. GNOME has it’s own flavor of the [...]

Being an old-school Linux user, one of the things that bothers me is that in some of the new distributions the CTRL-ALT-Backspace key combination (the combination that would usually kill and restart the X server) has been disabled. This key combination was always helpful when/if a program seemed to take over X Windows and keep [...]

I want to preface this article by saying I am not, in any way advocating spying on your users. With that said, there are times (and reasons) why you might need to see what images are being viewed on your network. Whether it be an end user who is viewing content that goes against specific [...]

I recently covered a great LAN file sharing tool called Giver (see my article “Easily share files on LAN with fellow Ubuntu users using Giver“). I wanted to take that idea a little further and cover a similar tool that allows you to chat with fellow users on your LAN WITHOUT have to add them [...]

Have you ever just wanted to quickly hand a file off to a fellow user on a LAN without having to resort to using an email client or shared folder? Wouldn’t it be nice to just click on a username, send them a file, and have their desktop automatically notify them that the file has [...]

I thought I would re-visit one of my favorite topics of late, KDE 4.5. The SC has been out long enough now for some of the smaller issues to pop up and workarounds be revealed. Most of these smaller issues are, by no means, deal breakers, but some of them can be annoying. Not everyone [...]

Getting organized is, for some, a constant struggle. The PC is supposed to help us…does it? For some it does. For some it does not. For those that have trouble getting organized on the PC, a special tool is some times necessary. Getting Things GNOME is a GNOME tool that takes the task list to [...]

In my recent exploration of various file managers I realized that my favorite of the lot hadn’t received the attention it deserves. Here on Ghacks I have shown you how to do Bulk renaming in Thunar, and how to create Customized Action in Thunar. Outside of that, I’ve not really dealt with Thunar all that [...]

Internet users have more than just a few options to download free music from the web. Common solutions include recording Internet radio, downloading music from portals like Jamendo and ripping music from Youtube videos. Pymaxe is a free open source software for Linux and Windows that can be used to download music from various Internet [...]

Recently I have been covering some of the lighter weight file managers for the Linux operating system. We’ve seen PCMan File Manager and emelFM2 covered recently. I’ve also touched on Thunar numerous times. All of these file managers have two things in common: They are fast and they have GUIs. Today’s file manager shares the [...]

Today I’m going to take a look at another lightweight Linux (and UNIX-like) file manager (and this time I WON’T get the name wrong) called emelFM2. This particular file manager will pull at the heart-strings of old school Linux and UNIX users because it is based on the old Norton Commander file manager (which was [...]

Back in the old days, the compiling of a Linux kernel was often a necessity. If you wanted to get a particular piece of hardware working or if you wanted to prune some of the “fat” from the kernel you had to compile a kernel specific to your machine. It was never an easy process [...]

One of the first tasks after the installation of an operating system is the installation of security software to protect the computer from viruses and other forms of attack. Windows users can select programs from a huge available selection. They can install all-in-one solutions, often called security suites that combine antivirus, firewall and other security [...]

If you use Linux long enough, you are going to wind up getting to know (and using) the command line. And if you use the command line long enough, you are going to find yourself using the grep tool. Grep is one of the most useful linux utilities in that it will search WITHIN a [...]

Recently I’ve done a number of articles covering the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) which range from installation, adding entries, to full-blown GUI management tools (See LDAP content on Ghacks for more information). If you’re in the dark about LDAP is an application protocol that allows the querying and modifying of directory services data implemented on IP networks. Basically [...]

Okay, so we’ve been dealing with LDAP a bit here on Ghacks, but mostly we’ve look at GUI tools (check out LDAP content on Ghacks). All of the GUI tools are good, but nothing beats the command line for pure control and power. And what’s best, once you have LDAP installed, you have all the [...]