Have you ever missed an appointment because you were so absorbed in some thing that you totally lost the track of time? It’s a good thing if you were doing nuclear research at that time you probably didn’t want your link to be broken, but for most of us, missing appointments is a bad thing. What you can do it… Set up reminders on your phone, then again, many people like me don’t always keep checking their phones.  The solution? Learn to use cron jobs. Cron jobs are helpful with your appointments and ‘to-do’s of course, but their real power can only be perceived when you actually start using cron jobs on your servers or workstations to automate backups. Here’s a detailed how-to about the same.

System Monitoring is one of the key factor to keep an eye on what’s really happening behind the scenes in your operating system. People who are very much interested in the system performance and optimization often tend to check the resource usage of various applications, components and other system related processes.

There are many ways to monitor these processes. On a personal computer running Linux with GUI environment, there are quite a lot of apps and programs tailored exactly to do this job. Many Linux distributions will have one inbuilt as well. But there are few scenarios where you wont be able to get the luxury of GUI, so you will entirely have to depend on CLI or the Command Line Interface. SSH is one good example for this, where you can connect to remote computer and operate it with commands.

For all those unfortunate enough to have a very bad DNS from their service provider, the ability to set your own DNS is a must. Here I will be giving a short tutorial on how to set a DNS using network manager under gnome. What you need to do is :-

1. Go to networkmanager -> edit connections. This can be done by right clicking on the gnome panel icon and clicking on edit connections.
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Ever wanted to type some simple and very widely used characters other than the $ sign? A £ maybe? Or a ¢? Maybe you just wanted a © or ® symbol for your blog. This can be really painful under Linux as you will have to enter character map, or maybe copy the letter from somewhere else and paste it. What if the function were available on the keyboard itself? The answer to your prayers is here. The compose key.

One of the best thing about Ubuntu is that the availability of constant updates. The download includes updates for the operating system and its application as well. The interval between updates is so shorter it makes you to get updates almost every day or sometimes more than once in a day.

Though this is good for maintaining healthy status of your Ubuntu, it turns out to be annoying sometimes when you don’t want to update it everyday. So instead you can opt to update it once in a week or month.

Is there a way to seperate the history for all the admin user accounts who ultimately make use of the command ’su’? Instead of having all the history dumped into a single history file, why not have multiple history files, each corresponding to the particular user in question? Using a simple bash script you can have different history files for all different users. There are a few simple steps to do this.

Did you ever get into (a lot of) trouble because someone found some information on your computer they should not have? Want to hide sensitive information from spying eyes? Here’s the best way to deceive all such nosy people away.

An image file like JPG is read from the beginning of the file and terminated with an ‘End of Image’ marker. An archive file like ZIP has its metadata stored at the end of the file. Put them together and the image will be read as a valid image file and the appended ZIP file will be read as an archive. As easy as that. How to do it? Simple…

You might have been tired of the same old text mode GRUB splash screen in your Linux box, right? (Especially those of you who use Ubuntu just for the looks of it ) And maybe, you want to switch over from that blue and black hell to something better. Maybe a more realistic hell with red and black? Here is what you need to do for that.

You can add a background image just like wallpaper to your GRUB menu to make it more attractive. OR, you can also change the color of the menus and the text. Choice if yours to make. So, what you will need is,

Some users expressed the need to boot multiple distributions from single USB drive upon reading the post about LIVE Ubuntu USB. To all of you, here is a way to boot into multiple ISO images from a single USB drive.

One thing to remember here is, this method cannot create persistent distributions on the pendrive. Any changes you make to the system will be lost. The only method to avoid that is to install operating systems to the USB drive and use them as installed systems and not as live systems.

We learned about LIVE CDs in our last post here on noob2geek. When you really think about it, very few people use CDs these days with the price of DVD media so low. To add to that, changes in LIVE CD are not persistent. That is, when you shut the system, all the changes you made are lost and you have to re-do them the next time you start the system. Then there’s the cost of the CDs and the time it takes to burn a CD. The easy way out? Use LIVE USB drives.