Windows 7 is Microsoft’s most stable and reliable version of their desktop operating system yet, but it’s still such a complex piece of software that when something does go wrong it can be extremely difficult to diagnose and repair the problem. As the author of “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” from Microsoft Press one of [...]

I’m delighted to be able to announce that I’ve got some more free webcasts coming up, with the first one this Thursday, 4th August, on Securing your files and data in Windows. The webcasts are all on the theme “Windows 7 Troubleshooting” and will include Securing Windows 7 and Internet Explorer, Troubleshooting Windows Update and [...]

I get troubleshooting emails on a wide variety of subjects, it’s always great when you can help people out and one I received this week was from someone who’d bought the latest version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus in response to a minor virus attack on her PC. Kaspersky removed the virus diligently enough, but it had [...]

I’m delighted to announce that my 170 page Windows 7 Power Users Guide is now completely FREE to download and own as an eBook. The book is for people of all technical ability from complete novices to IT Pros. UPDATE : In the first day of it’s release as a free eBook, the Windows 7 [...]

There are so many ways to install applications in Linux. There’s Synaptic, apt-get, dpkg, Ubuntu Software Center, and many more.  In Ubuntu (or a Debian derivative) you can even install from your browser with the help of GDebi. But did you know there is another way to install with the help of the Firefox browser? That’s [...]

The task of joining Linux to a Windows domain can be a challenge. I have covered it before here (see my article “Join a Ubuntu machine to a Windows domain“), but many users have had issues with Likewise Open either not being able to join or not being able to reliably remain joined. Naturally, if [...]

Many administrators/users prefer to set up their servers as headless machines. If you’re not sure what a headless machine is – it’s a PC without a monitor. This is an outstanding way to use Linux as a server as typically people install Linux servers sans GUIs. Thing is, a problem has arisen with recent iterations [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Are you desperately searching for ways to finally reach that elusive 10 second boot time? You certainly heard that Ubuntu 10.04 has the capability of doing just that right? It can…but you have to help it along. One of the ways you can help your boot time is removing unnecessary services and drivers that are [...]

Some times you just have to pull some tricks out of the vault.  These tips can be timeless, classic, or just retro. But generally speaking they still apply to users today. I’m not talking about how to backup to a tape drive, or using punch cards to create a program. I’m talking about tangible tips [...]

It’s always a worry when you get rid of a PC or hard drive that all sorts of personal data could be sitting on it waiting to be stolen.  This is even more important when it comes to business computers. There have always been a huge variety of hard disk wiping packages available from third-parties, [...]

You know what it’s like when you’re sitting on really great news for several months but you can’t tell anyone?   This is even worse writing for gHacks every day knowing I’m sitting on a great nugget  :} Well after a long period of frustration I can now officially announce that I’ve been signed by Microsoft Press to write [...]

If you’ve been around Linux long enough you know there are many ways to secure your box. What you may or may not know is that a number of those means are simply front-ends for the all-mighty iptables tool. IPtables is a very powerful, complicated system which can control packet traffic on your system. It [...]

There was talk, some time prior to the release of 10.04, that RGBA support would be included in the release. Well, it wasn’t (much to the chagrin of many – including myself). That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, it can and it’s not all that difficult. There are a few bugs lingering, [...]

One of the most useful operating system recovery tools in Windows XP was the recovery console.  Here you could perform very useful tasks like repairing the Master Boot Record and the Boot Sector of the disk on which you had Windows installed. Then with the advent of Windows Vista Microsoft automated the process or repairing [...]

I wanted to continue with the rescue theme, but since Partimage is limited in it’s file system support, I thought I would go another route. That route? Gparted. Gparted is an amazingly flexible tool that serves as a graphical partition editor built for the GNOME desktop environment. But Gparted can do much more than just [...]

Microsoft have made great strides in making the search and organise features in Windows 7 easier to use than ever before but despite the best efforts of Microsoft to make search in Windows 7 as easy and as intuitive as possible the use, a great many people still find some aspects of using search, especially [...]

In my last article I showed you how to save a partition from a drive to a local image file using the Partimage tool (see my article “Copy partitions on your system with Partimage“). And although (as a reader did point out) Partimage is limited by not supporting ext4 file systems, it still has plenty [...]

Let’s face it, although most operating systems don’t install Java by default, there are many applications that rely on this tool. The reasons for OSes to not install Java are many (mostly of the licensing flavor) and, at least with Linux, the installation process can be confusing (at best) or painful (at worse). To begin [...]

Not many of today’s Linux users remember the days when you could (and sometimes had to) compile your own kernel. If you had a special device or special needs for the kernel there was no other way to get it to work. Today most kernels work out of the box with most hardware. But there [...]

Disk space is cheap, but there are still situations where you’d like to reclaim space. For me, one of them is getting the maximum of the free Dropbox account I use to synchronize my applications between work and home. hey, don’t say my sysadmin I do this, he’d get a heart attack from the sole [...]

I had been hoping to accomplish this for some time now. At work we work under a Windows domain and I have a Ubuntu test machine that I have been hoping to join to that domain. Finally, thanks to Likewise-Open5, it happened. And, believe it or not, it’s not all that difficult. Oh sure you [...]

We are plowing forward with the eGroupware installation. We have already been introduced to eGroupware (see my article “eGroupware: Your Exchange replacement has arrived“), we have also seen how to take care of all the prerequisites (see my article “How to install eGroupware“), and finally we’ve seen how to create the header.inc.php (see my article [...]

The trash (or “Recycle bin”) is a sane concept of our operating systems. A file sent to the trash can be recovered if the user realizes the file was still needed after all. Now, the problem is: when should you empty the trash? If you never empty it, it grows and wastes valuable disk space [...]

Quite some time ago I wrote an article that illustrated how eGroupware could serve as a legitimate Exchange replacement (see my article “eGroupware: Your Exchange replacement has arrived“). I very briefly skimmed over the process of installing this outstanding groupware tool. In this case, skimming will get you nowhere. Recently I revisited the installation of [...]

Here we are again, back witho ur old friend Nagios. If you’ve been following you know I have covered quite a bit of ground with this outstanding network monitoring tool (check all Ghacks Nagios articles). There is a reason for this, Nagios is an incredible tool. But for many of you, you might have come [...]

My last article described how to “Quickly install Nagios on Ubunut“. That article had you up and running with the powerful open source network monitoring tool, but not much more. If you really want to make Nagios useful you have to do a bit of work. Some might see this work as too time consuming [...]

If you’ve ever tried to share folders on a Linux machine over a network, you’ve most likely attempted to get NFS working. And on many occasions you might have found yourself nearly pulling out your hair in frustration. Well, you’ll be glad to know that getting NFS working on modern Ubuntu systems is actually quite [...]

Linux on a laptop is notorious for sucking batteries down far faster than their Windows counterparts. My personal Linux laptops, without help, are lucky to get half the battery life than when running on windows. Why is that? There are plenty of reasons for this. From applications installed to power saving options.  For anyone who [...]

Once more unto the KDE topic my friends, once more. This time, however, we take a look at a very useful feature that allows you to easily share out folders with a few clicks. These folders will be shared with the help of Samba and not a single line of a configuration file will have [...]

Have you ever had a need to migrate current running Linux users from installation to another? That would be a simple task if the user count was low. But  what happens when the user count is in the hundreds? What do you do then? If you’re not using LDAP, you know you will have to [...]

This morning I woke up to find one of the sites I administer down. The error on the page was very clear in that it could not connect to the database due to a corrupt table. I had two choices, recover from a backup or attempt to repair the corrupted tables. I opted to try [...]

iTalc is one of those programs that, when you see it up and running, is a thing of brilliance. But what is it? iTALC is a didactical tool that allows a teacher to view and/or control a students’ PC on the internal network in multiple ways. It supports Linux and Windows and can be used [...]

I have covered MySQL in a number of ways so far. You can read how to administer your MySQL database with MySQL Workbench (see my article “Complete database administration package MySQL Workbench“), MySQL Administrator (see my article “Creating a database with MySQL Administrator“), MySQL Navigator (see my article “Manage you MySQL databases with an easy [...]

It’s taken me long enough, but finally a solution for syncing both an iPhone and an iTouch with Linux is possible. What is best about this method, is that it does NOT require a jailbroken iPhone. That’s right, you’ll be able to sync your iPhone, via USB, and add all sorts of good music to [...]

If you’ve been reading the Linux section of Ghacks long enough then you most likely have come across a few articles about virtual machines (see articles covering VirtualBox here on Ghacks.) And if you’ve read enough of these articles, you know how important virtual machines can be to a developer, administrator, or even a user. [...]