Linux Administration Tips and Tutorials

Getting Started With Linux Shell Scripting

Mike — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:58:42 +0000

Pretty much every normal task you need to perform on Linux should be possible through point-and-click on the graphical interface. There are occasions when you need to use the command line or terminal window, and that’s normally when something’s gone wrong or isn’t working the way it should do. The command line isn’t just a [...]

TLWIR 55: How Moodle is Revolutionizing Education With Open Source Freedom

Rex Djere — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:27:40 +0000

Summary: Moodle is a free software Learning Management System (LMS) that is taking the educational world by storm. It is bringing advanced features that used to only exist in expensive commercial products to the educational community. Technically speaking, Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that allows one to administer every aspect of student courses. [...]

MailMerge on OpenOffice and LibreOffice

Mike — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:53:50 +0000

In its most common use, MailMerge allows you to customize a standard letter you want to mail out to a bunch of people. You have your letter and you have a file with their names and addresses in. Using MailMerge you put the two together and end up with one individually addressed letter for each [...]

Introduction to Blender

Andrew — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:18:26 +0000

If you’ve ever dreamed of creating the next Shrek or Kung Fu Panda, or even working on a more modest 3D modelling project, you’ll need a piece of software like Blender. 3D modelling is a specialist area, and there aren’t too many software players in the field. Commercial studios tend to use proprietary software like [...]

Using Separate Drive Partitions for MySQL Databases

Andrew — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:40:47 +0000

One way to enhance database performance is to break large database files into smaller chunks. These smaller chunks can either be all on the same hard drive, or they can be spread across different hard drives. Either way, this process is referred to as “partitioning” the database. But, there are a few problems with this [...]

Understanding SELinux

Mike — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:06:57 +0000

SELinux A task of any operating system is to provide software that strongly increases its security. A lot of programs of this type have been created; some are better than others. What does it look like in terms of Linux? Of course, here we have many more choices when it comes to this type of [...]

TLWIR 54: Fedora 18 – A Solid Distro with a Few Quirks

Rex Djere — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 22:25:07 +0000

Summary: On January 15, 2013, Fedora 18 was released, after a few delays. I’ve had F18 running on my Toshiba laptop for about a month-and-a-half now. In TLWIR 54, I’ll give you some of my impressions of the latest and greatest Fedora operating system. Fedora 18 Versus Fedora 17 Fedora 18 is not radically different [...]

Video on Linux

Mike — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:17:55 +0000

It seems like only yesterday that getting video to play on Linux was tougher than counting ballot papers in Florida, but in reality it’s come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Here’s how it used to work. First there were codecs. A codec – or “coder-decoder” is a piece of software to [...]

Four ways to share files in Linux

Andrew — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:20:07 +0000

1. Simple sharing with Samba Windows has long allowed you to share a folder with other users on your local network with a simple right-click, and over that time the Samba project has done a good job of reverse engineering the Windows software, bringing the same functionality to Linux. For the end user, that means [...]

Securing your Linux PC

Andrew — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:17:54 +0000

A few years ago, your author took possession of what was then the latest version of SuSE Linux. For the first time, this version allowed you to easily encrypt a whole filesystem right from the start (it was always possible to do before then, but required a lot of obscure command line magic). Interested in [...]