Peter
Newbie-oriented Linux distribution Linspire has announced that they will be basing future versions on Ubuntu, rather than their current Debian base.
Ubuntu is still, obviously, based on Debian, but it already is modified enough to make it easier to build desktop-oriented distributions, as presumably a lot of the work to get it 'less geeky' is already done.
In fact, this is a growing trend amongst some Debian-based distributions. We've already …
PeterAlmost all Unix-like operating systems use a printing system called the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). It's a very important piece of software, if you ever want to print on - oh, just about any system that is a Unix-like OS (even Mac OS X, I think...).
There's also a really neat feature in CUPS, and that's a web-based administration panel. If you're ever having trouble getting your system to …
PeterIf you've ever run the free command on Linux to see how much of your RAM is free, you might have been quite alarmed at the amount of memory listed as free. You can use the free command from the terminal to show your memory usage (the -m switch shows the output in megabytes):
$ free -m
For example, here's the output on my system (values shown are megabytes):
As …
PeterInstalling software on Linux isn't always an easy process, as you might know. In this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through installing .package files.
These files are known as AutoPackage files (an idea spearheaded by the AutoPackage project).
Installing them is frightfully easy. Once you've downloaded or otherwise acquired a .package, first of all right-click it and choose Properties. Go to the Permissions tab and tick 'Is executable' …