the empty quarter

My recent misadventures with adding a group membership for my user and in the process managing to remove all other groups (including admin) got me thinking about the message “… is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.” Exactly where and how and to whom is this reported? Well, according to clever […]

Every now and then the Power Manager and/or Network Manager applets crash and disappear from the notification area on my old Xubuntu 8.04 laptop. There have been some bugs posted about this on Launchpad, and it seems as if it should be fixed in more recent releases. Leaving that aside, here are the commands to […]

This article on The Register has a link to a very good page on CentOS website with tips on securing OpenSSH. The tips are applicable for all distros, not just CentOS, and are definitely worth going through and implementing if you have SSH enabled on your server. Good luck and stay secure.

Here is a very simple one which caught me out: you want to add your user to a group through command line. The command is very straightforward: sudo usermod -aG tools hammer This adds the user “hammer” to the group “tools”. Notice the -a switch (for add). This means “hammer” will become member of “tools” […]

A bit of background: for a while now I have been buying books from the SF Masterworks series from Orion Publishing, mainly when I am in a bookshop and I see a book from the series which I don’t yet have. So far I have bought sixteen of the books, and I though it would […]

To save a bit of space, you can remove the menu bar in Xubuntu Terminal (Edit > Preferences > Appearance > uncheck “Display menubar in new window”. Here are the steps to restore it later on (since you can’t access the Preferences dialog without the menu itself!). Run the following command to open the terminal […]

UPDATE: These steps work fine for Xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). For more recent Xubuntu versions you should take a look at this later post which has the correct steps. One of the things I find very annoying is the default “tap to click” behaviour of laptop touchpads. Here are easy steps how to configure Xubuntu to […]

I used the following steps to install RealPlayer in order to listen to BBC Radio. Although I did this on Xubuntu 8.04, it should also work for Ubuntu and other distros. Download and install RealPlayer for Linux from Real. I downloaded the deb package and installed it through gdebi. My install path was now /opt/real/RealPlayer. […]