MadBuntu

With all the advances in documetation and UI that ubuntu has gone through in the past decade, man pages are still the best way to get info on various commands.  Manpages.ubuntu.com has the manpages for all the active versions of Ubuntu up in a searchable database.

For my money, I would much rather read manpages in a browser.

Ubuntu Manpages Repository

*What I am waiting for now though is a way to search the manpages by function.  I have to know the command ‘wc’ to search the man pages for how to make it output the number of lines now (’wc -l’). What I would like to see is this ability integrated into manpages.*

IBM developerworks has a ton of useful information.  I recently came across two great and related articles that might be of interest to readers of this blog.  These two articles describe the steps to take you out of the basic command line functionality into power user territory.

The first article “Learn 10 Good Unix Usage Habits“:

• Make directory trees in a single swipe.
• Change the path; do not move the archive.
• Combine your commands with control operators.
• Quote variables with caution.
• Use escape sequences to manage long input.
• Group your commands together in a list.
• Use xargs outside of find .
• Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
• Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
• Stop piping cats.

The other article expands on it “Learn 10 More Good Unix Usage Habits” :

• Use file name completion.
• Use history expansion.
• Reuse previous arguments.
• Manage directory navigation with pushd and popd.
• Find large files.
• Create temporary files without an editor.
• Use the curl command-line utility.
• Make the most of regular expressions.
• Determine the current user.
• Process data with awk.

Hi all, I’m still alive and will have some new content up on this site soon, but I am getting married this week and am so insanely busy that I am not going to be very productive.

So I will be out for this week and probably next.  I will still be twittering and should be doing that pretty frequently these couple weeks in my personal life. You can get updates on that here

Till then, take care all!

Baobab is a handy little utility that I have really come to like.  Baobab provides an easy to visualize layout of the used space on your hard disk.  Although this doesn’t sound that useful, I find myself using it all the time to see where I have recoverable disk space.

If your using Gnome, Baobab is listed as Disk Usage Analyzer under Applications->Accessories.  My KDE 4.1 installation did not have it on the menu, but it can be added via Kmenuedit or run from the command line with the command:

sean@redstar:~$ /usr/bin/baobab &

Baobab is a Gnome application, so if you run it under a different window manager you will need to to have the gnome libraries installed.

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ps shows running processes on your system. It has many options to show different information, but I usually find running ps -aef the most useful. Bonus CLI-fu: pipe it to grep and search the process list

I setup KDE 4 this week and really enjoy it.  My biggest gripe was that the numlock key was off by default.  I searched and search, but could find no settings to turn it on.  Apparently, there have been some changes between KDE3 and KDE4 and the instructions for KDE3 will not work.  This is what I ended up doing and it seems to work.

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Part 1 Installing Kdar

Kdar Splash Screen

We all are terrible about backups.  Admit it.  You haven’t done a backup in a while.  I hadn’t either.  That is until I discovered Kdar and fell in love.

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Ubuntu will occasionally run a filesystem check every 30th (or so) bootup. Usually that happens when I am working on something, and don’t want to wait. But I also like to make sure my disk is error free, so I will occasionally run it manually. The gotcha here is you should NEVER run fsck on a mounted file system. But a simple command can cause a fsck run on the next reboot:

when the machine restarts, it will run fsck.

A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.

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df shows you the free hard disk space on your system. df -h will show the information in a more readable format (ie MB or GB instead of blocks).