In the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect, light weight graphical file manager, I have gone through just about every one I can find. So far my favorite has been Thunar (see Thunar content on Ghacks for more information) which comes standard with a few distributions. PCMan File Manger can be found in the [...]

Many webmasters make use of a local test environment to test changes to their websites before they go live on the Internet. One part of the process is to transfer files to the ftp server whenever they have been modified and tested sufficiently. While it is possible to initiate those ftp transfers manually, it is [...]

So lately I’ve been covering some pretty sweet LDAP tools. You’ve seen “Manage your LDAP data with phpLDAPAdmin“, “Access and manage your LDAP data with Luma“, and “Set up an LDAP server on Fedora“. Although the last entry showed you how to get a server up and running with the 389 Directory Server GUI, none [...]

The search for the perfect LDAP management tool has brought me around to a tool that is very similar to that of phpMyAdmin (for coverage of this tool, see my article “Install phpmyadmin for easy MySQL administration“). Both of these tools are web-based administration tools for tasks that many find too complex to do via [...]

I have recently been dealing with LDAP and attempting to find easier solutions for this often daunting task. If you’ve ever had to try to set up and manage an LDAP server, you know exactly what I am talking about. Although installing and setting up an LDAP server is a challenging task, even more so [...]

You’ve probably seen the advertisements for Windows 7 and the tiling windows feature. Believe it or not the very first tiling window manager was Siemens’s RTL (created in 1988). After that came a UNIX version called tAP (The Andrew Project) for the X Windowing System. Fast-forward to now and Microsoft claims to have innovated a [...]

With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact?  Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot [...]

There are times when you need to delete a file…REALLY need to delete a file. Anyone who has been in the business of PCs long enough knows that when you simply delete a file it can be recovered. If someone is clever enough, and has the means, they could recover a file that had been [...]

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is one of the more complicated setups for a Linux machine. LDAP is to Linux what Active Directory is to Window. And if you have a lot of users on a network, which log into various machines, you will want something like LDAP in order to retain all of their [...]

In my last article I illustrated how to install Enlightenment by checking out the most recent code from the Enlightenment Subversion Server (see “Installing Enlightenment E17 using subversion“). After that article I thought it would be a good follow up to illustrate how to create your own subversion repository. Why? What can you use a [...]

If you’ve spent enough time around Linux you might have come across an installation process that requires the use of SVN. SVN is subversion which is a version control system based on CVS. What this means is that this tool manages files and directories and keeps track of the changes made to them. A lot [...]

Klipper is the KDE 4.5 clipboard and it is not your average clipboard tool. Unlike most operating system clipboards, Klippy gives the user quick and easy access to not just the last object copied, but multiple objects copied. Klipper is so powerful a clipboard tool,  you will wonder why other operating systems don’t mimic the [...]

So you’ve followed the latest series on KDE 4.5 (see Ghacks KDE 4.5 content) and you are now using the spectacular latest release from the KDE team. You want to use Compiz, but quickly realize that it is not necessary as KDE has it’s own built-in compositing effects. What you will find is that the [...]

Do you create or manage a LOT of files? Do you have image files taken from cameras that are all named IMG_XXX.JPG  (where XXX is a sequential number)? Do you stores of files you wish to change the names to reflect a date, a department, etc? If so, have you scoured the network trying to [...]

With KDE 4.5 came a lot of updates and changes. From the bottom to the top, nothing was immune from an update or two. One tool that received a nice overhaul is the Notification Area. Not only did the Notification Area get a face lift, it also received a streamlining of the notification system. Although [...]

Taking good care of a digital music collection can add to the listening experience. Properly named and tagged mp3 songs for instance help identify songs on first glance. Most computer users have collected music for some time, and chance is that the music came from different sources. Those sources may have included music CDs that [...]

In my last post (“KDE Desktop Activities explained“) I set out to help you understand just what KDE Desktop Activities are. This new feature simply wants to make your desktop experience as efficient and useful as possible. Of those Activities there is the  Desktop, Newspaper Activity, Folder View, and Search and Launch Containment. It’s that [...]

With the release of KDE 4 a new feature was added that, at first, seemed to be more confusing than anything else. Although the theory behind the idea was simple, the execution made the idea overly complex. The idea was this: You break the desktop up into activities so each desktop is very well defined [...]

A desktop software to manage Google Docs documents sometimes offers advantages that the in-browser web version does not offer. Like what, you ask? It does not leave any traces in the web browser or cache for one, which can be beneficial even with private browsing modes available. While that is usually not a huge benefit [...]

For the longest time I have shrugged off KDE 4 because of poor performance. But since 4.4 I have noticed a rather vast leap of the improvement chasm. Now, 4.5 is out and the leap went lunar! That’s right, KDE has finally reached a level of usability and performance that rivals any of its competition [...]

There are tons of possible backup solutions for the Linux desktop (and/or server). I have covered a number of possible solutions here on Ghacks. One of my favorite (and the one I use most often) is Luckybackup (see my article “Luckybackup: Linux backup made easy“), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of really good [...]

If you are a Ghacks regular you know that deleting files the standard way in Windows does not really remove their contents from the hard drive their have been stored on. Windows merely removes the file information and enables the storage space of the file for writing. With time, other data uses that space so [...]

How many machines do you have? How many contacts do you have? How many machines do you try to keep your contacts in sync on? There are a lot of ways to do this. You could copy those contacts on a flash drive and move them back and forth, making sure you add the new [...]

It’s time to head off to that wonderful land of KDE where the desktop only gets better and better with each release. In fact, a new release should be out now – KDE 4.5 with 1,723 new features and 16.022 bug fixes. I don’t believe the packages have hit the repositories just yet, but they [...]

Let’s say you’re a little bit behind the times. You’ve wanted to do some upgrading of your Linux machines but you’ve just not really had the time. Or let’s say you did do some upgrading of your Linux system but you didn’t make any changes to your file system and you’re still running a machine [...]

Well all strive to make our desktop as efficient as possible. Whether you’re a coder who wants nothing more than to never remove your fingers from the keyboard, or if you’re a writer who wants to use the mouse only when necessary, there are so many ways to make this happen. One of the easiest [...]

There are so many Linux distributions out there it’s dizzying. Some are simply respins of various base distributions with a different theme or maybe one or two specific applications thrown in for good measure. Sometimes it’s hard to reason why someone actually created a new distribution because there’s so closely resembles the distribution they used [...]

As a writer one of the most important things for me is to keep organized. This may seem like a fairly simple task, but when you are doing everything from researching a topic to piecing together a much larger work, having fast access to all of the particular documents you are working on can make [...]

I have had a few PCs in my time where keeping track of the temperature was critical to knowing the health of my system. In fact, I had one system that I knew would shut down if the temp reached anywhere near 44 degrees Celsius. So knowing the exact temperature can sometimes really be a [...]

There are a lot of ways to keep track of your files on your Linux machine. You can use the command-line tools, you can do index searching, you can manually search. But there is one method that is quite unique and keeps a real-time display of your daily interaction with files. This tool is the [...]

Since today is the birthday of both myself and the US President I thought it apropos to cover a birthday reminder tool for the Linux operating system. There are a few of these tools but only one of them really is worth discussing at any length. That tool? GBirthday. GBirthday is a tool that lives in [...]

Linux is a true multi-user system. What that means is you can have multiple users logged in concurrently. There are so many advantages of this on so many levels. Many modern Linux desktops and distributions take advantage of this multi-user environment from bottom to top. The bottom level (at the kernel) is not so obvious to [...]

Most PC users have no idea what a boot loader is. Yet all PCs have them. Most Linux users, by nature, do know what a boot loader is because they have had to deal with them one on one for a long time. Of course times have changed and gone are the days when you [...]

Users who often reformat and reinstall their operating system, or install and configure computer systems regularly, have to repeat specific processes over and over again. One of those processes is the installation of applications on the new system. While it is perfectly possible to install the apps one-by-one, or to restore them from an existing [...]

What do you do when you KNOW your hard disk is failing but you’re not ready to do a re-install or lose any of that precious data? Obviously the first solution is to always have a backup of your data. This is great, but it doesn’t solve the issue of having to re-install the operating [...]

If you downloaded and installed Fedora 13,  most likely you are using the GNOME desktop. If you’ve been reading me here on Ghacks long enough then you know I am fairly partial to the GNOME desktop. That doesn’t mean I feel KDE should get the cold shoulder. In fact, the latest iterations of KDE have [...]

I do a lot of work with Linux servers. Many of those servers are either web or mail that require the use of a signed certificate for authentication. In some of these cases a CA authorized certificate is necessary. In other cases though a self-signed certificate can be used. I can generate a self-signed certificate [...]

Recently I had a request to illustrate how I managed to get a particular theme working in GNOME. The article referenced was my article on “What will Ubuntu 10.04 bring to the table“. The image in that article was using a number of cool tricks to get the look they had. So I thought I [...]

There’s a line between closing an application and leaving it open. That line generally lies within the notification area. This is where small apps usually hang out waiting to be quickly re-opened. But aren’t there times when you wish you could force an app not made for the notification area into that “quick recall” space? [...]

Some time ago I did a series on the Postfix email server here on Ghacks (see the Postfix content on Ghacks for more information). Hopefully you found this outstanding mail server as easy to set up and maintain as I do. But you might have noticed a bit of a challenge using your smtp server [...]

Images and photos can often be compressed to reduce their storage space requirements. If used with care, image compression can reduce file sizes of images and photos anywhere between 10% to 90%, without a visible loss in quality. Webmasters for instance need to make sure the images they post on their websites are optimized, to [...]

Ubuntu 10.04 has been out for a while now…long enough so that some of the more pestering issues have been finally fixed. But in some cases those issues continue on. What do you do? Some of these issues are hardly noticeable. Some, on the other hand, are fairly annoying. In this article I am going [...]

Collaboration is a key component to working in a business or on a team. There are so many ways to collaborate on a project: Google Docs, Online Whiteboards, Chatting, CMS tools, and many more. One tool, though, has a bit of a different approach. This tool is built into the open source document writer Abiword. [...]

There are so many Linux distributions out there. Some of them are pretty standard and some of them go well out of their way to try to bring something different to the table. I’ve seen just about every take on the Linux desktop. Today, however, I came across a distribution, Peppermint Linux, that added another [...]

Yesterday, at the office, we had a client come to use needing to merge two 20 Gig directories of data together. Naturally I chimed in saying “I’m sure Linux can do that with a simple shell script”! Of course neither the client or my fellow workers wanted to deal with a shell script. So, instead, [...]

Evolution is an outstanding groupware suite with one of the finest email clients in all of Linux-land. For many users the standard email setup is great. It does everything they need: it sends and receives email (even HTML email if you so desire). But for others a little extra is needed…especially in the form of [...]

If there is one thing that’s not so great about the Windows Clipboard, then its the fact that it only stores one entry at a time. New entries automatically replace the old entries, which can result in lots of copying and pasting if multiple items need to be pasted. Clipbox is a barebones clipboard extender [...]

If there’s one thing that Linux has it’s flexibility. And this is true from the top down; from the desktop environment all the way down to the kernel. One area that offers a lot of tweaks, one that most new users aren’t used to being able to tweak, is the file manager. This is true [...]

There is an old saying in the Linux community (actually in just about every community – but I heard it from a Linux developer first) “eating your own dog food” (or the shorter “hipster friendly” version dogfooding. This basically means using the product you create. It can also be associated with practice what you preach. [...]

My wife and I are avid cyclists and hikers. I am also a runner. On our bikes we use cyclometers, but sometimes that isn’t enough to track your workouts. I have recently come across a nice tool that will do this for me (and more). That tool is called pyTrainer. pyTrainer is a fine example [...]