Tips, tricks, hints, and hacks

If you’re resizing a partition in a VMWare virtual machine using Gparted/Ubuntu’s live CD and constantly get an error along the lines of “Nothing to do!” (I just LOVE error messages with exclamation marks), right-click the partition in question and click Check.

Once the check is complete, power-down the virtual machine, and then boot it up again. Then try resizing the partition. It should now complete properly.

(C) 2008 Keir Thomas. You may reproduce the above on your blog provided that an author credit is given and a link to www.ubuntukungfu.com is clearly shown.

If there’s one piece of software the Linux world seemingly lacks, then it’s a good-quality command-line word processor (which is to say, one that works entirely within a virtual console or a terminal window).

There are some excellent text editors, of course, and most can be expanded to include word-processor-like features. But these still have steep learning curves and, to my knowledge, there are no actual word processors for the command-line that include the likes of easy formatting tools or built-in spell checking.

The solution? Download and install an old DOS version of Microsoft Word that is now offered for free from Microsoft’s website. You can then use the DOSBox software to run it. It really does work! (Although you can’t print—at least not unless you want to hook up your old dot matrix printer…) 

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Have you ever been chatting on a website forum and been totally unable to describe an action you’ve performed on Ubuntu? “Click the top bar—the grey thing at the top, you know. And then drag the icon. The blue icon. Drag it to the desktop…”

The fact is that it can be hard describing in words what are simple procedures with a mouse. A solution is at hand, however.

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Linux is more than just software. It’s an entire community of users, and as such, there’s a detailed social history behind it. Below I take a look at the origins of Linux, both in terms of where it came from and the people who make it.

Your instinct might be to skip information like this. But it’s important that you understand it at some stage, because it’s what being a Linux user is all about. Linux is more than simply the sum of its parts. It’s far more than simply a set of computer programs.

If nothing else, what’s below explains the fundamental philosophies behind Linux and attempts to answer some of the often-baffling questions that arise when Linux is considered as a whole.

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Here are ten things that you (probably) didn’t know you could do in Ubuntu. All are taken from Ubuntu Kung Fu, my new book.

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If you’ve tried to install the new alpha 3 release of Ubuntu in VMWare, you’ll find that it doesn’t work well. Here’s how I installed it and got it up and running:
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Some people like to digitally sign their emails. This means that the recipient can be sure that the email is from them. Emails can also be entirely encrypted so that only the recipient can read them—anybody who intercepts the message along its travels through the Internet will see only garbage.

Email encryption and signing works on the principle of a key pair. Two cryptographic keys are created by an individual—a private one, that is keep secret, and a public one that is shared with others, either by giving them the details in a file or uploading it to a public key server.

The two keys work in concert—effectively, anything encrypted with one can only be decrypted with the other. When used with email, this allows you to digitally sign using your private key. Those who have the public key can check the signature of the email, which could only have been generated by you, and which is also based on the contents of the email, thus proving things weren’t tampered with in transit.

Alternatively, anybody with your public key can encrypt an email so that only you can decrypt it using your private key. If you have their public key, you can encrypt emails so that only they can read them.

Closer to home, once a key pair has been created, you can use it within your own system to encrypt files on your hard disk so that only you can decrypt them using your passphrase.

The steps below look at setting up encryption, first by creating a key pair, and then configuring Evolution to use it. Following that, we’ll look at using the same encryption setup to encrypt files.

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Once upon a time I edited a Linux magazine. As you might expect I worked with several advertising sales guys. None of them really knew what Linux was. They all thought the penguin mascot was cute but left the details to geek guys like me. Everyone was happy.

Then one of the advertising guys stuck his head around my door and asked if Linux “ran on top of Windows NT”. I tried to explain but it was like explaining architectural design to a cinder block. I gave up, but said it was great he’d taken an interest. His eyes lit up. If he had a tail, I’m sure it would have been beating against the floor like a puppy.

About a week later he called tech support to his computer. He couldn’t log into Windows. His emails were mysteriously missing, as was his precious sales database. The reason? You’ve guessed it. He’d installed Linux. This was in the days before Linux installers repartitioned the hard disk, so the installation program had blitzed his hard disk.

The tech support guy sorted him out, of course, but during Windows reinstallation gave his computer the network name “Idiot” and the comment “I’m an ass who installed Linux”. Only those connecting to his shared network folders ever saw this. He never did. But, not without reason, Linux dropped down a little in his estimation following this adventure.

This guide is for him, or for people like him, or for anybody who wants to try-out Ubuntu but is, frankly, afraid of what might happen. Continue reading →