In this tutorial I’ll show how to get some nicely colored man pages by adding several lines inside the .bashrc file, explaining what the code means and how it works.
GNU find is a powerful command-line utility that lets you search for files and folders in a hierarchical tree directory structure. It is the backend for all those utilities out there like the graphical searching in KDE or GNOME. However, find can be a little hard to handle at first by beginners. In this tutorial I will try to explain some of the capabilities of find, show some useful one-liners and provide more explanations regarding this command.
The file used to change various GRUB 2 settings is /etc/default/grub. This file also contains options to adjust the timeout in seconds before GRUB boots the default OS (GRUB_TIMEOUT), change which OS should be selected by default (GRUB_DEFAULT, first entry being 0), and also the option to change the resolution used by default – GRUB_GFXMODE.
First of all I’d like to thank TuxArena’s readers for giving good feedback in the first part of this series, which overviews 15 of the tools I consider particularly useful in a console. This article overviews 10 more such tools, and most of them were suggested by you. Screenshots included.
telnet
telnet is a well-known command-line tool which uses sockets to open a TCP connection to the specified hostname and port. telnet can be primarily used for non-secure connections to connect to a HTTP server and get a file or to an IRC server for example. Escape character in telnet is ^] (press Ctrl+])
Homepage
PeaZip is an open-source file archiver with GTK and Qt interfaces, with support for all the major archives out there, including gzip, 7z, bzip2, zip, and arc.
Gnac is a graphical audio converter for GNOME with support for encoding/decoding to and from various formats, including the free formats FLAC and Ogg, WAV, MP3, M4A or SPX.
AssaultCube is a popular cross-platform first-person shooter with pretty low hardware requirements, with a fast gameplay and many modes – including the classic CTF, TDM, FFA, or the popular TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill), LSS (Last Swiss Standing), or HTF (Hold the Flag).
Starting a server should be pretty straightforward in Linux, all you have to do is run the server dedicated binary with several parameters, however AssaultCube provided a script, called server.sh for doing it. Here’s an example:
Not long ago Mozilla changed the release cycle of Firefox, so that major new versions (Firefox 5, 6 and so on) will be released every 2-3 months. Currently, the latest alpha release is Firefox 6 Aurora, while the latest beta development version is Firefox Beta 5, which has made it into the Firefox Next PPA already. Installing this version should be very easy if you follow the next steps.
I guess this has been around for some time, however I was not aware of it. I bumped into it in a thread on UbuntuForums, and decided to give it a try.
From the add-on page description, Flash-Aid is a Firefox 4 and 3.5 (and maybe 5 Beta too) add-on which was built to “Remove conflicting flash plugins from Ubuntu/Debian Linux systems, install the appropriate version according to system architecture and apply some tweaks to improve performance and fix common issues.”
Well, I must say it sounds promising at least, especially since the page says it’s designed especially for Ubuntu. Let’s see how it works with Firefox 4.
This is the second article in this series, and brings eight additional tips for working faster with the shell. Here is the first article of the series, containing 10 tips.
Create aliases for quick access to commands or one-liners
Aliases are handy custom commands which can be used to make shortcuts to various commands, scripts or one-liners. Aliases can be added in the ~/.bashrc file like this:
alias name='command'
