PeterQuick headnote - welcome to a new breed of FOSSwire post, the Reference post. In a Reference post, we'll try to put as much useful information as possible that you might want to quickly come back and find later!
If you've ever worked with a Unix system, you've probably used tar. Put simply, tar is a way to archive a folder, or multiple files into one file (and optionally …
PeterRemembering all those esoteric command names and all the crazy switches when you're messing around with the command line interface underneath Linux can be a pain.
If you're new to the whole thing, but keen to learn your way around the CLI, it can be useful to have a quick cheat sheet around for when you inevitably forget something.
LXpages have a nice command line reference page which you might …
PeterIf you're trying to diagnose a misbehaving network or you're just plain curious about what machines handle your requests to the internet, you might be interested in a tool called traceroute.
The traceroute tool is built into almost all Linux systems, and if it doesn't ship by default you can usually install it by simply heading to your package manager and finding the traceroute package.
It's really easy to …
PeterIf you're security conscious (like me) and you've got a Linux system or a dual boot system, or in fact, any setup where you've got a GRUB boot loader installed, you may well be aware that you can pass kernel arguments to the Linux kernel from the GRUB menu.
What does this mean? Well, a kernel argument instructs the kernel to do something different when it boots. For example, passing …