Aug 29, 2013

Of course, not everyone wants to read RSS feeds with the browser. The main problem with reading RSS feeds with Firefox is that you get to see only the headline, rather than any actual text. This is where a dedicated RSS reader comes in handy, and Liferea is one of the best. It is not installed by default, but Liferea is available from the repositories under the...

Sep 6, 2012

With so many packages available, it can be hard to find the exact thing you need using command-line APT. The general search tool is called apt-cache and is used like this: [email protected]:~$ apt-cache search kde Depending on which repositories you have enabled, that tool returns about a thousand packages. Many of those results will not even have KDE in the package...

Sep 5, 2012

The Add/Remove Applications dialog works just fine for adding applications, but if you need to install something very specific—such as a library—or if you want to reconfigure your installation system, you need to use Synaptic. You can install Synaptic using the Ubuntu Software Center described earlier; it is not installed by default. At first glance, Synaptic...

Sep 5, 2012

Leverage Ubuntu’s default sudo installation to allow fine-grained control over privileged access. If you have used a number of different Linux distributions in the past, one surprising thing you’ll notice the first time you use Ubuntu is that it disables the root account. For most other distributions, the installer prompts you for root’s...

Sep 5, 2012

Linux has inherited from UNIX a well-planned hierarchy for organizing where things may be found. It isn’t perfect, but it is generally logical and mostly consistent, although distributions do tend to make some modifications that force some thinking and adaptation when moving between, say, Fedora, Slackware, and Ubuntu. The following table shows some of the...