FOSSwire

A very quick command line tip today, for users of pretty much any Unix-based operating system, including Linux distributions.

When you're looking up information on a certain web site or domain name, you might be used to using whois functions on websites such as DNS Tools to see who owns a domain.

However, in most cases there is a much quicker way to get the same information, which is through your command line.

As you might guess, it's simply:

$ whois domain.com

If you also want to hide the legal information that gets returned on a whois request, for brevity, you can easily do so with:

$ whois -H domain.com

This often won't catch it all and give you purely the results, but it usually helps reduce the level of output.

Historically, installing Flash Player, and therefore getting access to much of the internet's video content, on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions has been a right pain.

You can download the archive from Adobe and run through the text-based installer, but Ubuntu Hardy Heron actually makes it a whole lot easier than previous releases (if you're using Firefox at least).

Here's how.

Launch Firefox 3 Beta 5, and browse to any site where you know that Flash is used (YouTube is a good one, but you need to be on an actual video page, not just the home page).

Click the Install Missing Plugins button, and in the next window, select the top option for the Adobe Flash Player installer.

There will be a couple of confirmation dialogues you will need to accept, including enabling the multiverse software repository for non-open source software.

The installer then downloads the package and gets installing. The installation process might appear to sit there for a while doing nothing, but really that is just the Flash Player installer doing its stuff behind the scenes, just not feeding its progress back to you.

Once that is done, however, you click Finish, the page reloads and the Flash Player works!

It really is a great improvement to the old installation method, and makes getting Flash up and running on your new Ubuntu system pretty painless!

Kubuntu (and some other KDE-based distributions) features a special System Settings application which takes the place of the full KDE Control Centre application, which is used for setting all sorts of KDE preferences and changing different settings on the system.

However, many people like the older KDE Control Centre layout, especially if you're a longer time KDE user or can't find the option you're looking for in the System Settings applet. Unfortunately, it's nowhere to be seen on the menu.

To launch the original KDE Control Centre, go to your desktop and press Alt-F2. Now type kcontrol and press Enter. You should get the original, unadulterated KDE Control Centre.

If you want to now make KControl available on the menu, you will have to add it manually using the Menu Editor. Press Alt-F2 again, but this time enter the command kmenuedit to bring up the menu editor.

Right-click a suitable category, I'll pick Utilities, and click New Item.

Name it whatever you find suitable, and under the Command box, type kcontrol. You can also click the generic file icon in the top right to set a custom icon for the new entry. Once you're done, hit Save and next time you'll be able to access the 'real' KControl when you need it, or all the time if you prefer, with a lot more ease.