They may think it’s too difficult or too much to remember. But once a user becomes accustomed to using the command line interface, it soon becomes the preferred method in many tasks. Not only is it much quicker to accomplish just about any given task at the command line, it opens a whole new world of possibilities. It allows the user to begin to understand how an operating system is structured and functions. It gives the user very powerful tools to do the things graphical interfaces will never be able to reproduce. And best of all, it’s just fun.

There are several shells, the interface between the user and the system, with their own set of built-in functions and commands. The most popular is probably Bash, which is an improved clone of the Unix Borne Shell. Not only does Bash include lots of handy built-in commands, but a user can execute (or fork) a multitude of other application executables from within it.

There is a short list of commands that one can learn to get started. With this short list, you can begin to build your toolbox and with the help of a few good reference sites, become a command line master yourself. Not only will this enable you to feel comfortable running just about any Linux distribution available, but every programmer working today began with that first command.

But how might one go about trying to use the dreaded command line? Once open, the user stares at the prompt wondering what to do first. They know folks work from the command line all day every day, but what do you do? Fortunately, you’re not on your own. There are a plethora of sites with all the information you’ll need to take you from beginner to advanced user or anywhere in between.

LinuxCommand

One of the best places to get started is LinuxCommand. This site gently introduces the first time user what a shell is and how to use it. Then, if desired, it will instruct the user on how to write their first shell scripts.

The homepage of this site is very relaxing. It merely shows an image of a terminal and reassures the user “Don’t worry, we’ll show you what to do.” Its Table of Contents addresses usage in an task oriented manner. Instead of listing the command and explaining what it does, it lists an operation one might want to perform.

For example, the first thing any user might want to learn is navigation. With a reference to the graphical hierarchy, it begins the user with the first babysteps of moving around their system with the command line.

Then one is taken on a tour of the Linux filesystem hierarchy and shown how to manipulate files such as renaming, moving, or deleting, and permissions. Once you learn this beginning information, you are already on your way to fixing a Linux system on which the Graphical User Interface is broken.

Next the site gets more involved walking the user through writing shell scripts, first easy then more and more complicated. If you finish this latter section, you are already almost a master.

O’Reilly’s Linux Command Directory

O’Reilly’s Linux Command Directory is a wonderful quick reference chart-like guide. This page lists not only the built-in commands, but also many little utilities commonly included in all Linux distributions. This is great for the beginner or even more advanced users as the listed commands are links to full information as to what the command is and how to use it.

While this information may be available right on your system as Main pages, it comes in handy for those who forgot the command or perhaps doesn’t know which to use. For example, you’d like the current system date and time, so you visit this page and see the command time. This must be it, so you click on it and find out that time is actually used to measure the elasped time of a given process. So, you know that isn’t it. Then you scroll down and spot date. Ah yes, that’s the one. What was that command to quickly check to see if a certain word or phrase is in a file? Oh yes, you remember now that you see the command grep listed.

By clicking it you’ll find all sorts of ways it can be manipulated to output just what you need. A favorite activity is just reading through the list for unfamiliar or forgotten commands and learning what they do. This is just a particularly handy site to bookmark.

The Linux Cookbook

The Linux Cookbook fits in somewhere between LinuxCommand’s Learning the Shell and Writing Shell Scripts. It takes the user from logging in to as deep as they want to go.

However, its best resource is its intermediate instruction. After learning a few commands one might want to know how to edit a file and the cookbook features introductions to common text editors.  It also tells a user things such as how to change their password, listing directories in color, and how to understand help files and documentation.

Later, it instructs on how to configure the X Windows System, how to start X, and all other aspects of using X.  Then it even goes further into using the graphical interface and includes things like audio, printing,  networking, and communications.  It basically gives the user a full overview of using Linux.

This site is the online version of a hard copy book sold in many stores and featured on Amazon. Once you complete this book and the LinuxCommand.org instruction, you’ll be a Linux Kung Fu Master.

Do you have any favourite websites for mastering the Linux command line?   If so, let us know about them in the comments.

Image Credit : Slashcrisis

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1. Get lightning fast and clever at the command line

You can use keyboard shortcuts and other command line tricks to make entering commands easier and faster. You might already know about the ‘tab’ key which completes partial commands and even file and directory names.

Here are some other keyboard shortcuts you can use within terminal:

Also don’t forget to check out 4 websites where you can learn cool command line tricks

2. Launch Ubuntu Linux Applications with keyboard

There are two ways you can achieve this:

• Use applications like Launchy or Gnome-Do that make it easier to launch applications by typing a few characters of the application’s name.
• Or you can summon gconf editor (Alt+F2 then type gconf-editor and hit enter), and navigate to apps > metacity > global_keybindings, double click on any of the run_command_N and type in the keyboard shortcut you want to assign to an application then make a mental note of the number N. Then go to apps > metacity > keybinding_commands and double click on command_N (N being the number you used above) and type in the command you want to run. As an example if you wanted to run Firefox you would type in firefox.

Also check out these Ubuntu keyboard shortcuts you might not know about.

3. Start from wherever you left off

You can make Ubuntu remember the applications you had open when you last logged out, so that when you log back in again you’ll find all those applications running and you can resume right from where you left off.

To achieve this go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications, then go to the options tab and check "Automatically remember running applications when logging out"

4. Create a Separate Ubuntu Linux Home Partition

New versions of Ubuntu arrive every 6 months. Although you can upgrade to the latest version via the update manager, sometimes the upgrade doesn’t work as expected so some users like to do a fresh clean install.

The disadvantage with that of course is that you lose data you had in your home directory. To overcome this you can create a separate Home partition when you are installing Ubuntu, size it according to your requirements and then when you decide to install Ubuntu the next time, simply specify this partition as the Home partition (by choosing /home as the mount point).

All your files and data on the Home partition will be preserved even after a fresh install.

5. Update and Install Ubuntu Linux Software Without Internet Connection

There are lots of way to do this, the easiest of all is to use APTonCD. APTonCD allows you to create CDs and DVD’s containing all the packages you want, which you can then use to install software on computers without an internet connection.

Note that APTonCD requires you to have an internet connection (or downloaded packages) to create the installed media. However once the media is ready you don’t need an internet connection for any of the machines you want to install the software on. Insert the appropriate CD/DVD and use apt-get as you would normally.

6. Install new fonts, Microsoft fonts and improve font rendering

Ubuntu doesn’t offer many choices when it comes to the fonts. However you can easily install new fonts including those from Microsoft like Arial, Verdana, impact and many more. You can use different sites to find the kind of font you are looking for.

7. Use PPAs, Install latest versions of software

There are a lot of steps that a software has to go through before it becomes part of Ubuntu or becomes available through the Ubuntu repositories. While all those steps lend additional stability, it generally means that you don’t get the latest versions of all the software as soon as they are released.

If you like to stay on the cutting edge, you can search for Personal Package Archives for your favorite software on Launchpad and add those to your installation’s software sources. I briefly touched on PPAs and how to use them here. If that seems like too much work, you can also download the latest deb packages and install them by double clicking (you won’t get automatic updates for the software if you install it this way).

Remember you might get into an occasional trouble or two with the latest versions, but mostly it wouldn’t be catastrophic. You can always hop over to the Ubuntu Forums to get quick help.

8. Be the root

The root account is disabled by default on Ubuntu installations, mainly to prevent you from doing something you didn’t intend to do. However if you "promise to be careful" you can enable root account as follows:

1. Type sudo passwd root and provide a root password.
2. Then head on over to System > Administration > Login Window, go to the Security tab and check "Enable local system administrator login"

You should now be able to login as root from the Login prompt. As an alternative you can use "sudo su" to provide your password and get root prompt.

9. Run Windows applications and games

Who wouldn’t like to play Counter Strike on Ubuntu (unless of course you are completely not into it) or perhaps even run Photoshop? Well it is very much possible and here is how to do it.

10. Shorten boot time with profiling

Ubuntu Linux devs have done a great job with the boot time, Jaunty is fast and Karmic is slotted to be even faster. There is however a bit more you can do by profiling your boot. Profiling lets Ubuntu make a list of all the files that are accessed during bootup, it then sorts the files according to how they are stored on your hard disk. So the next time the system is booted, the files would be read faster.

To profile boot you need to follow these steps

• At the grub menu highlight the kernel you boot most often.
• Press e for edit.
• Choose the line starting with kernel and press e again. Now add the word profile to the end of this line. Hit Enter and then press b to boot

Note that while profiling, the system will boot slower this one time, the next time however you should see an improvement. Also keep in mind that all this is machine-dependent and also depends on the arrangement of files on your hard disk, so the difference you see might not be huge, or even nil in some cases.

11. Try out different Ubuntu Linux Desktop Environments and Desktop Managers

If you are looking for something different than the default Gnome interface, you should check out alternative desktop managers that you can use. If it is a complete Desktop Environment you are looking for, KDE4 has come a long way and is now impressively usable and fun. You can do a "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" to get KDE.

12. Create a media center or a media server

It would be great if you could easily browse and manage your huge collection of music, videos and pictures. Mesmerized by Windows Media Center’s slick interface? Wait till you see what all cool options you have to turn your Ubuntu system into a media center. You can even access your media collection on your phone, PSP or a different computer if you set up a media server on your Ubuntu machine.

13. Share Firefox profile data with Windows

Many people use Windows and Linux on the same machine. If you are one of them, there would have been times you couldn’t find that bookmark you created or password you stored when you were using Firefox from within Windows. Check out how you can share Firefox profile data across operating systems without syncing it over the web (works best if you have the same version of Firefox in both OS’s). For different computers you can of course use Weave.

14. Customize Nautilus to your liking

Nautilus is the default file manager on Ubuntu. While you may be content with what it does, there is lots more you can make it do. You can use extensions to improve functionality and even add custom functionality to Nautilus

15. Compile your own Kernel

If you can’t find something to keep you busy for the weekend and you have your customization hat on, how about building a kernel to specifically meet your requirements? This is frankly more of a learning experience. Some might say that it enables you to use just the features and drivers you require, but if everything is working fine with the kernel supplied and you don’t have any interest in the Linux kernel, skip ahead this one is not for you.

If however you require some of the experimental features of the kernel, or need it to be compiled in some other special way we say you check out this guide within Ubuntu Documentation.

16. Change Usplash Screen and create a custom splash screen for GRUB

So you didn’t count the last one? Here is another one then. A Usplash screen is Ubuntu text and a logo with a progress bar that you see when you boot up Ubuntu.

If you would like to change that to something more interesting follow these steps. What better way to show your Linux fu than customizing the very first screen that appears? You can create a custom splash screen using one of your photos, GIMP and a little tweaking. Here is the how-to.

Know some more tips or great hacks for Ubuntu Linux users? Sure you do, go ahead let us know about them in the comments.

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• How to Get Screen Actions for your Mouse on Linux (4)
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Here’s a list of 10 essential software apps for web development on a Mac.

10. TextWrangler is a multipurpose text editor that works for editing code and plain text documents. It can even open files from (and save them to) remote FTP and SFTP servers.

9. Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator. It is the first open source program to adopt Spiro curves. You can also go through their clip art collection and find dozens of images made with Inkscape that are free to use or modify.

8. Cyberduck is the all-in-one FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDav and Mosso Cloud Files browser application. Web developers often need to switch between different file systems, and Cyberduck does this without a hiccup. It works with Textmate (which has a free 30 day trial), so you can open files from Cyberduck in Textmate, edit, save and upload. Read more about FTP clients for Mac here.

7. Gimp is the second-most popular photo editing software program on the market, second only to Adobe Photoshop. The difference? Gimp is absolutely free! You can do just about everything in Gimp that you can do in Adobe Photoshop, so web developers will find this a welcome and wallet friendly addition to their software arsenal.

6. Aptana takes up where Textmate leaves off in some aspects. It is a full featured code editor, but adds the FTP support of Cyberduck, as well as important web technologies like Ajax, Adobe AIR and PHP. Read more about Aptana here on MUO.

5. Firefox is a must have for web development because of three great add-ons – Firebug, the Web Developer toolbar and ColorZilla. Firebug lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page; while the Web Developer toolbar adds additional tools like clearing cookies, disable CSS, display ruler and display source. ColorZilla lets you pick colors from websites or images online, so you can match them to your web designs, plus measure the distance between two points on a website.

4. JAlbum helps you make attractive photo galleries for websites. JAlbum comes with various templates built-in, but you can also customize your own template to better match a web project you’re working on. Read about 5 more Excellent Mac Apps for Graphic & Web Design

3. Colloquy is a basic IRC client that every web developer will use at one point or another. Many web platforms use IRC for support, including WordPress.

2. MAMP is what you need to manage websites locally when you are without an internet connection or want to test changes without making them live on a website. It is easy to install MAMP and have access to Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X. It is also a stand-alone program, so if you need to install it, it won’t interfere with your OSX installation. Plus, you can use it to install WordPress on your Mac.

1. iTerm is a feature-filled Terminal emulator for OSX. You can bookmark your frequently used sessions, have tabbed windows with multiple sessions and more.

Do you have any suggestions for better similar apps? Let’s hear them in the comments!

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That’s why everyday computer users tend to avoid Terminal. People say that tinkering with the Terminal is not for the faint hearted. Because something could – and possibly would – go wrong.

But actually, there are fun things that we can do using the Terminal’s command line. Here are few of the simple ones.

1. Play the Old (Classics) Games

Mac OS X comes with GNU Emacs, part of GNU operating system, which can be accessed via Terminal. There are some old, classic games hidden there. They are far from beautiful if you compare them with all the graphically-intense ones that we have today. But to fill in some spare times, these ‘uglies’ will do just fine.

To access them, type in (or better yet, copy and paste) this command into the Terminal to access the GNU Emacs:

emacs

Click Enter, then continue with the key combination of “Esc + x”. Type in one of these game’s names to start playing:

5×5
blackbox
dunnet
gomoku
hanoi
landmark
mpuz
pong
snake
solitaire
tetris

I know some of them well (the last four on the list) while other names did not exist in my dictionary until just now. I tried to play them all but without any information or how-to’s, it’s a tough effort to carry out.

If you want to quit the game, use the key combination “Ctrl + x” followed by “Ctrl + c”

2. Watch the text-based episode of StarWars IV

I used to think that George Lucas skipped his early Math classes since he started the Star Wars sagas with number IV. Yet, I’m always a big fan of Luke and Leia.

If you feel like being nostalgic (and have plenty of free time to spare), why don’t you connect to the net, open the terminal and type in:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

That’s how far a REAL fan will go. (And if you are lucky enough to have IPv6, you’ll get more scenes and – drum roll, please – color!)

3. Talking Terminal

Still have so much time to spare but no one to spare the time with? You could have the terminal talking to keep you company.

Just type in:

say {Fill in your text here}

Fill in any text in the area provided above and Terminal will speak it out for you.

4. Meet the Doctor

After going as far as letting the talking Terminal accompany you during your lonely hours, you feel worried about your mental health and thinking about going to a mental therapist.

Well, look no further. Emacs also hides a virtual psychologist. To consult it with your problems, follow the above steps on number 1, but instead of typing in the name of the game, you type “doctor” (sans quote).

I guarantee that you would need a real psychotherapist after consulting with this one.

As a final note, I think I should mention that I tried these fun things on my Mac. But since everything described here is merely command lines, these commands should also work fine on Linux machines.

Do you know any other fun but simple things that you can do with the Terminal? Or can you help with some of the unknown games above? Share your knowledge using the comments section below.

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Hardinfo is a Linux application. To install Hardinfo, look inside your distribution’s package manager. Ubuntu users can install Hardinfo via the terminal using:

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

Once installed, go ahead and run it. You will be greeted by various parameters towards the left and you can get more information by clicking on them.

The information is broadly classified into 3 categories: The computer, devices and benchmarks. You can get a information summary about your computer or detailed information about the Operating System, Kernel Modules, Filesystems, shared directories, network interfaces, monitors, languages installed and a log of system boots. In addition, you can also get detailed information about the processor, memory, PCI device, USB devices, battery, printers and storage etc.

All this information is neatly organised and you can copy any one of them to the clipboard with the click of a button or generate a report to post on forums for help. You can pick and choose what information is to be included in the report by un-checking the modules you want to exclude.

Hardinfo also provides you with benchmarking that allows you run certain tests and see how well your computer does! Hardinfo benchmarks your CPU with zlib, fibonacci, md5, sha1, blowfish and FPU raytracing tests. It displays the result as well as how other common CPUs performed on the same test.

If you are unsure about how to interpret the results, Hardinfo displays a line towards the bottom – giving you some additional information about the test results. You can also synchronize the benchmark tests with the Hardinfo server to receive updated results for other CPUs and submit your own results if you so please.

Do you know of similar profiling and benchmarking tools? Please recommend them in the comments!

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Users can add or remove widgets to fit their personal preferences. There are already thousands widgets available today on Apple’s Dashboard download page, and who knows how many more are there scattered all over the internet. Users can even create their own widgets.

Some widgets are the ‘smaller versions’ of full-featured applications although not all are. That doesn’t mean these widgets are below the quality of the “real applications”. Many widgets are even so good (like these ones) that they should’ve been made available as stand-alone applications.

Imagine using a currency convertor widget like this one, to convert a whole list of different currencies. You’ll probably have to switch between Dashboard and your desktop a million times.

It turns out that it’s possible to detach widgets from the Dashboard and make them available as individual applications. Here is the way to do that.


Enable Developer Mode
First thing to do is to put the Dashboard in the Developer Mode. You can do that by launching Terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal) and typing in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Hit Enter or Return.

To avoid mistakes, I suggest you just copy and paste the command.

The second step is to restart the Dashboard. But instead of logging out and logging in, type in another command in the Terminal:

killall Dock

And again, hit Enter or Return.

Drag the Widgets out and back in
Now you can press the keyboard shortcut assigned to show and hide the Dashboard. The default key would be F12 (or in some keyboard F4). You can change the settings by going to System Preferences → Expose & Spaces.

After the Dashboard appears, drag the widget that you want to detach. While still dragging, press the keyboard shortcut again. The Dashboard will disappear but the widget will stay. You can move it around the desktop and it will always stay above other applications.

You can drag as many widgets as you want out of the Dashboard and into the desktop by repeating the above process.

You can also drag the widgets back into the Dashboard by reversing the process: drag a widget on the desktop; and while still dragging, press the keyboard shortcut. Drop the widget back on the Dashboard, and press the shortcut key to go back to the desktop.

Disable the Developer Mode
If later on you decide to disable the Developer Mode, you can do so by typing in this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode NO

Hit Enter or Return, then continue with this command:

killall Dock

And hit Enter or Return.

Other methods
Using the Terminal commands is not the only way to detach widgets from the Dashboard. You can also use free widget called DashIt or a paid app called Amnesty Singles.

Please note that if you’ve moved the widgets to the desktop then disable the Dashboard, for example by using MainMenu, the widgets will disappear along with the Dashboard.

If you know other methods to pull widgets out of Dashboard, please share using the comment below.

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All you need to do is to install the required package and you get a ton of ways to “make use of” your time! Ubuntu users can get it via “sudo apt-get install ” or via the Synaptic package manager. Other users might want to check out their distribution’s package manager.

BSDgames

BSDgames consists of a quite a handful of programs. There are some pretty interesting games included in the package. Board games like backgammon, gomoku and Monopoly, some card games, some quizzes and puzzles like hangman and boggle.

Formatting and Interconversion – create banners, convert your messages to Morse code or convert text to and from rot13

Some screensavers – like rain and worms, which seem more like primitive animation.

Calculators to decrypt Caesar cyphers, calculate the phase of moon and generate prime numbers.

Other random stuff including score charts and game tutorials.

A lot of the games might not be as intuitive to the iPhone generation as you would think, so if you would like help on any of the games just type “man 6 <name of the game>”

nInvaders

Based on the classic space invaders game, nInvaders provides an ncurses based interface where you control the ship and set out to destroy the invaders before they reach you.

greed

Get greedy and eat as much of the screen as you can possibly eat. You can not cross over any spaces created by eating previous numbers so you might have to think a little and you might not actually want to get down right greedy.

robotfindskitten

Look for the kitten among the myriad of random characters and distinguish between the kittens and non kitten items.

There are some other terminal based games like bastet, ski, myman and overkill that you might want to check out.

For some other cool command line tricks check out the list of sites where you can learn cool tricks and also check out 5 applications to make your terminal better.

Do you know of some other cool programs to do some fun stuff on the terminal? Any other games you like to play in Linux terminal? Share them with us in the comments and don’t forget to mention which one you liked the most!

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Tilda and Guake

If you’ve ever played Quake you’ll know how we could bring down the console in the game and then type in the command. Bringing such functionalities to the Linux Terminal are Tilda and Guake. Both these applications perform similar functions viz allow you to show/hide a terminal windows with a hotkey. Guake is still in the early stages of development, Tilda offers somewhat more functions as compared to Guake.

Both Guake and Tilda allows you to customize the background of the window (with images or colors), create transparent backgrounds, manage the scroll history, manage colors. Tilda however offers some more options like custom width and height, custom animations, custom themes etc.

YaKuake

Yakuake provides similar functionality to KDE users. You can add a new tab with Shift+Up, delete it with Shift+Down, and switch between tabs with Shift+Left Right.

Oh by the way, I forgot to mention that all three have tab functionality also!!

Some would ask, “Why not just launch the terminal with a shortcut key?”. Well because its faster this way and more prettier/stylish too. Now that the Linux desktop is trying to outshine Apple you should start getting used to some ‘fancy and useful’ stuff.

Terminator

If tabs are not for you then would you like some panes or a grid? Terminator offers you panes/grid (although it does tabs as well). You can view the commands running side by side in different panes and you can also resize the various panes according to your needs! Personally I like Terminator. Working with panes is a lot more productive than using tabs(although you get more screen real estate in each tab). You can easily visualize the output of multiple commands or the status of that ‘compile from source’ you had started a few minutes back!

DragBox

This is more of a utility than a terminal emulator. What DragBox does is it provides you with a shelf where you can make the command line and the GUI meet. You can highlight the names of directories and files from the command line output and then drag them to the shelf.

From the shelf you can then drag and drop these files or directories into other GUI applications just as you would do using the clipboard. Not only this but you can also use the items in the shelf as arguments to commands using xargs.

Each one of us has our own preferred applications. Do you have one that does something similar to these? Why not share it with the world? Let us know in the comments!

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