MTR combines the functions of both the standard programs ping and traceroute. Like ping, it sends ICMP requests to a destination, either a domain name or an IP address, and listens for the destination to answer back. Like Traceroute, it also works by setting the Time To Live (TTL), or the number of maximum hops a packet can take over the network, to a low number, increasing with each attempt. This determines the route packets are taking to a destination along the way. The information will update continuously for as long as MTR runs.

Installation

Installing it is easy enough. If you’re on a Debian/Ubuntu system just type:

sudo apt-get install mtr

For other distro that doesn’t include MTR in its repository, you can download the source code and compile it with the command:

./configure
make
make install

Usage

MTR works in two modes, a graphical mode that users who aren’t as comfortable with the command line can work with more easily, and in a text-based mode.

Using MTR is pretty easy. If you wanted to test Google, you’d just use this command:

mtr google.com

The version in Ubuntu comes with a graphical interface. When you start MTR, the results will pop up in a window. If you’d rather have it in your terminal window like most Linux users, you have several options.

The easiest way is to call MTR with the “--curses” switch:

mtr --curses google.com

If that’s too much for you as well, you can download the plain text version:

sudo apt-get install mtr-tiny

If you want the graphical bells and whistles (although there really aren’t any in MTR), just use the “--gtk” option.

If you want to test an IP address instead of a hostname, use the “--address” option:

mtr --address 127.0.0.1

Of course, this will test the loopback device, or in other words, your own machine. You can use any IP address you want. It can be useful in case your DNS ever gets hosed.

You can also do some interesting things like change the display node and the way the fields are represented.

Linux is a great platform for learning how the Internet really works, and it’s due in no small part to the availability of tools like MTR. While sophisticated networking tools can cost thousands of dollars on other platforms, you can find quality tools to diagnose and troubleshoot connections available for free on Linux.

Image credit: Medical Instrument With Computer by BigStockPhoto

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Fortunately, there’s an easy way to play these games again in Linux, even though they were never made for that platform.

Thanks to the miracle of emulation, you can install a piece of software that lets you play lots of adventure games from the ’80s and ’90s, including classics like the King’s Quest and Space Quest series, as well as The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam and Max Hit the Road.

Installing ScummVm

ScummVM is a cross-platform application that provides support for a number of major classic adventure games of the era. The games that have the most compatibility are the ones that were created under LucasArt’s SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). The other major game engines supported included Sierra’s AGI and SCI engines. AGI was used on Sierra’s earlier adventures, including the first three installments of the King’s Quest series. SCI was used in the later games in the late ’80s and the ’90s. ScummVM’s site has a list of compatible games.

Installing it on Linux is easy enough. If you’re using Ubuntu, just type:

sudo apt-get install scummvm

Getting Games

ScummVM is no good by itself. You need games, of course. If you want to play these classic games, you’ll have to have them on your computer somehow. If you have copies of them, it’s a matter of simply copying the disks to your hard drive.

If you don’t have them, and you want to play them legally, you’ll have to buy them. One source for old games is Gog.com, which has a large selection of classic adventure games compatible with ScummVM. Most of them are distributed as Windows executable files, so you’ll have to run WINE to extract them. You can also make a trip to your favorite online auction site to see if anyone has a copy of the games you want.

In the ScummVM menu, just click the “Add Game” button, then navigate to the directory where your game is stored, and if it’s a game that ScummVM recognizes, it will be added to the menu.

Fortunately, there are some free adventure games you can play if you don’t want to shell out any more for adventure games.

One of the best is Beneath A Steel Sky, a dystopian science fiction adventure that was released as freeware by its publisher, Revolution Software.

Another good one is Flight of the Amazon Queen, an irreverent take on adventure movies from the ’30s and ’40s.

These games and more are available from ScummVM’s download page, or as Ubuntu packages:

sudo apt-get install beneath-a-steel-sky

sudo apt-get install flight-of-the-amazon-queen

ScummVM is a must-have for anyone who wants to relive the heyday of adventure gaming in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s nice to know that there are still people out there who care about the genre, even if the mainstream game industry doesn’t.

Image credit: Wikipedia

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1. NetHack

One of the oldest games currently in development, this RPG has been around since the ’80s. Its heritage goes back even farther to Rogue, which was developed in the late ’70s. This style of game has been known as “Roguelike,” and has a strong cult following to this day.

This style of gameplay is distinctive for its use of ASCII graphics, though tile-based graphics are available.

You can install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install nethack-x11

2. Muds

If you prefer role-playing with other people, but you don’t have a lot of computing power, then you might want to check out the original MMORPGs – MUDs. The website Mud Connector lists hundreds of listings. You can telnet into them but a better option is to use a client. They can do things like remember usernames and passwords for you. A good one to start with on Linux is KildClient:

sudo apt-get install kildclient

3. Interactive Fiction

Yes, interactive fiction and text adventure games are still around. And they’re even better than you might remember from back in the ’80s. Although no professional developers are creating them, there’s an enthusiastic amateur community of interactive fiction authors on the Web, and even an annual competition. There are a number of games listed on the Interactive Fiction Database, in a variety of formats. One of the most popular is Z-Machine, which was the format used by Infocom’s classic text adventures of the ’80s.

A popular Z-machine client is Frotz, which runs in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install frotz

One of the most intriguing IF games is Emily Short’s “Galatea“, where you have conversation with a living statue.

4. BSD Games

It seems that where computers go, games follow. This was true even in the ’70s and ’80s. Games have had a long tradition in Unix culture. Unix was even created to play a game, known as Space Travel. At UC Berkeley. The programmers working on BSD, or the Berkeley Software Distribution, when they weren’t working on the implementation of TCP/IP that’s used almost everywhere, created a bunch of fun games. Some of them include “Robots“, where you try to out-maneuver robots trying to kill you, “Adventure“, one of the original text adventure games, and various board and card games. Some of these inspired the modern graphical counterparts included with modern distros.

You can install it in Ubuntu using this command:

sudo apt-get install bsdgames

5. Emulators

Although emulators require more horsepower than the original hardware, most recent computers can run them easily. They’re available for just about any game console or computer ever made. Some of the previous ones we’ve covered include Stella and DOSBox. If you’re a fan of graphical adventure games, you should check out ScummVM.

You can install it in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install scummvm

This article should give you a taste of what’s available, but it’s only scratching the surface. You might want to explore your package manager and see what you can find. And if you found one, do share with us in the comments.

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1. The C Programming Language

This classic guide, known as “K&R” among programmers, is a compact guide to the C language, much as the title suggests. Unlike the thousand-page tomes out there, this book, written by C’s creators, the late Dennis Ritchie (also one of the creators of Unix) and Brian Kernighan, the second edition weighs in at a comparatively slim 272 pages, including the appendices. Anyone familiar with the terse style of the manpages should know what to expect from this book. It’s for people who are comfortable programming and doesn’t waste ink explaining basic concepts.

“C is not a big language, and it is not well-served by a big book,” the authors explain in the preface.

The reason serious Linux users (who seem to turn into programmers anyway) should read this book, even if they don’t use C very much and aren’t experienced programmers, is that much of Linux is written in C.

2.Unix Power Tools

Unlike K&R, this is a hefty book by O’Reilly, one of the major technical book publishers. You don’t have to slog through the book page by page as the authors have designed the book as a series of short chapters written in a breezy style. It’s great for Unix and Linux users of every skill level to learn something new, from setting up the terminal to Perl programming.

Since the short pieces are extensively cross-referenced, you’ll find yourself bouncing around the book, almost like a paper edition of TV Tropes. It’s a fun book that you’ll learn a lot from. I’ve used the style as a model for my posts here at Make Tech Easier.

3. Essential System Administration

Aeleen Frisch’s guide is another hefty tome, thought this one deals with, you guessed it, system administration. This book deals with various Unix flavors, including Red Hat and SUSE Linux. You can usually apply the information to nearly any Linux flavor out there. Frisch doesn’t skimp on information.

Even if you’re only managing a personal computer instead of racks and racks of servers, you’re still a system administrator. This is a great book for learning how to take care of your system effectively. A lot of other people swear by UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook Edition; however, though I haven’t read it.

4. Linux and the Unix Philosophy

Mike Gancarz’s update of his classic “The Unix Philosophy” for the Linux era is a manifesto of the Unix philosophy of building small tools designed for the command line, where they can be easily scripted for efficiency. In an age of increasing software bloat, it’s nice to know that there are still people who believe in “keep it simple, stupid!”

5. The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond’s classic essay shows how the Linux economy works, even if it should have failed long ago. Raymond shows how Linux is a “bazaar” where lots of people all over the world submit code as opposed to the “cathedral” where only a select few are in charge of a software project at places like Microsoft. True to the open source spirit, it’s available for free online.

Of course, there are plenty of good books on Unix and Linux, much more than can be covered in a single post. Other than the obvious choices of looking on the Internet and in libraries, another good source for Unix and Linux books is universities with good computer science departments.

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only write about products we think deserve to be on this site, Make Tech Easier may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question.

Image credit: opened book, lying on the bookshelf with a glasses by BigStockPhoto

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If you need some introduction to regular expressions, check out our beginner guide here.

Some More Complex Examples

Matching a certain number of characters.

Here’s an example for a U.S. phone number, not counting the area code:

[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}

This will match any phone number of the format “111-1111″.

Making a pattern optional

Here’s the U.S. phone number example again, this time with optional area codes. We’ll assume that the file with the phone numbers we’re looking for has phone numbers structured like this: 555-555-5555. The “?” operator denotes an optional pattern preceding it.

([0-9]{3}-)?[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}

Sure, it’s a bit ugly, as regular expressions tend to be, but it’s very powerful.

Finding a range of characters:

.{1,3}

This will match any character between 1 and 3 times.

Download Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet

Can’t get enough of this? We have prepared a downloadable cheat sheet for you so you can access to it when you need it.

Download it here.

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Although it wasn’t quite a commercial success compared to the PC, it did manage to attract a dedicated cult following, especially in Europe. If you thought Mac fans were fanatical, hang out with some Amiga users sometime. They’ve kept the platform going almost 20 years after Commodore folded in 1994.

Getting started

So if you’re intrigued, how do you get started? It’s easy. the Icaros project has created a live image that can be downloaded to a DVD or a USB stick and then used like a live Linux distro. It also comes with a pre-configured QEMU image so you can run right away. There’s also a “light” version that can fit on a single CD.

If you’re using a virtualization program such as VirtualBox, you can simply set up a new machine and boot the disk image from that, or you can use a DVD or USB key if you want.

When you boot, you’ll have a fully-working replica of the traditional Amiga OS. Of course, it’ll be a lot smoother than it was in the ’80s.

One feature of Icaros worth noting is the RAM disk. It works exactly as it sounds: it uses part of the RAM as storage space. It’ll be gone when you reboot the machine, however. It’s good for temporary stuff like downloads that you’re only going to use once. If your download folder on other machines is like mine, you can see why this can be a useful feature. This will help reduce clutter on your hard drive.

If you’re a serious Linux user, you know how useful the shell is. Fortunately, Icaros has one as well, but it uses AmigaDOS rather than Linux commands; however, you can pick it up if you’re a Linux user.

If you have some old Amiga games, you’ll be pleased to know that the system can emulate the old 68000-based Amigas for some retro gaming fun. And speaking of games, Icaros comes with the classic Turrican. If that’s not enough, you can find various Amgia games on the Web if you know where to look. You can also buy a collection of Amiga games on Amiga Forever. The benefit of doing it this way is that it’s legal and you’ll get an emulator for Windows if you want, plus ROMs you can use on Amiga emulators on other platforms, including Linux.

If you’re looking for something different from the standard Windows, Mac and Linux desktops, or you’re an Amiga fan, Icaros is well worth a look.

Icaros

The post Icaros: A Modern Open Source Amiga OS appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Bell Labs also developed a package called Writer’s Workbench that could help researchers, clerks and other people developing documentation to write effectively. It could even detect sexist phrases.

The Writer’s Workbench is long gone, but you can assemble your own toolkit by using some Linux tools. Some come with most distributions and other you’ll have to install by yourself, but you can have a more flexible solution than a word processor like LibreOffice.

Editor

The first tool you’ll need is an editor. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of them available for Linux. The most popular ones are Vim and Emacs. I won’t go into too much detail on how to actually use them, but we have lots of posts with tips and tricks for various editors on this blog, including one for Vim.

To install Vim or Emacs on Ubuntu, just use these commands:

sudo apt-get install vim

sudo apt-get install emacs24

There’s a long-standing debate over which one is best, but you should just try both (or something else completely) and try which one feels best to you. And please, don’t argue about it on the Internet!

Spelling/Style Checker

Another necessary tool that’s built into most word processors is a spelling checker. This is available as a seperate program in Linux. It’s called ispell.

To install it in Ubuntu, simply type this command:

sudo apt-get install ispell

You’ll have to install a language pack. If you use American English, for example, you’d install the “iamerican” pack as you would any other Debian/Ubuntu package. There are language packs available for any language you’d care to imagine.

To scan a piece of text you’ve created, just type:

ispell sometext.txt

You’ll get an interactive screen similar to what you’d use for a spell checker in a word processing package. It will flag words it thinks it’s misspelled, and you can either leave them or keep them.

Remember the Writer’s Workbench I talked about? There are a couple of GNU tools that replicate some part of the original project, called Style and Diction.

You can install them both with one command:

sudo apt-get install diction

Both programs will analyze text for stylistic elements. Style displays readability metrics so you don’t bore your audience with overly formal language, and Diction attempts to help you get rid of wordy phrases with too many words in them.

You can call them with “style” and “diction” at the command line.

Advanced Text Processing

You can get into more sophisticated tools for doing things to text, like Sed, Awk and Perl. These are fully-fledged programming languages, and they’re beyond the scope of a short tutorial, but they’re worth digging into if you have to change a lot of data quickly. If you’re intrigued about using Linux for text, you might be interested in a book from the ’80s – Unix Text Processing by O’Reilly. Even though it’s old, it’s got a lot of good info still applicable to modern Linux systems.

The post Linux: The Ultimate Word Processor? appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Fortunately, there’s a way to pick out precise patterns in text right down to the character. It’s called regular expressions, and it lets you become a master of searching through text.

If you’ve paid any attention at all to Linux utilities, you probably notice that they frequently make use of something called regular expressions. Although Unix and Linux made them popular, regular expressions are available in a variety of packages, including Microsoft Word.

Regular expressions are most notably used in several notable Linux programs, including grep (which stands for Global Regular Expression Print), Awk and Sed.

It’s better to think of regular expressions as a little language, the basics of which can be described in a small space.

You can search using tools like Grep or Ack from either the standard input or a text file.

For example, if you were trying to find the term “Firefox” in output from the ps command, here’s how you would do it:

ps | grep firefox

And here’s how you’d find the term “maketecheasier” in a file.

grep maketecheasier somefile

MetaCharacters

In regular expressions, you can also search for parts of a string. The way you’d do this is with two characters. They’re actually called metacharacters. They’re similar to the wildcard matches you might have used in the shell.

• “.” stands for a single character. The pattern “c.t” matches both the words “cat,” “cut” and “cot.” for example.
• The “*” metacharacter means finding the previous character 0 or more times. The pattern “l.*x” would find “linux”, as well as any other words that happened to fit the same pattern.

The reason you just can’t use something like "l*x" like you would in the shell is because matching 0 or more characters means that it would find lines that didn’t have an “l” followed by any other character. In other words, any line trying to be matched, which is absolutely useless.

Finding patterns at the beginning or the end

You can also find patterns starting at the beginning or the end of lines.

• The “^” character matches at the beginning
• The “$” matched at the end.

For example, "sier$" would match “Make Tech Easier” and "^Make" would match “Make.”

Finding match in a range

You can also get into more complicated characters. Anything you put in square brackets will be matched as a range. For example, “[a-z]” matches all the lowercase letters. “[a-zA-Z]” matches all of the letters. “[a-zA-Z0-9]” matches alphanumeric characters. Inside of the brackets, the “^” character negates anything. “[^a-zA-Z]” matches anything that’s not a letter.

You can also find word boundaries with the “\<” and “\>” characters. The pattern “\<Linux\>” matches “Linux,” obviously.

You can match something a specific number of times with curly brackets. “{3}” matches something three times and “{3,5}” matches something between 3 and 5 times.

With these simple building blocks, you can match some pretty complicated stuff. There’s a lot more to regular expressions than can be explained in a short article. If you want a comprehensive book-length treatment of the subject, you should definitely check out Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl.

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only write about products we think deserve to be on this site, Make Tech Easier may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question.

Image Credit: xkcd

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If you’re still not convinced, here are a few reasons why you should use Linux (or any other Unix, including the BSDs) to learn how to program.

It’s Free

Linux is best known for the fact that all the distributions and most of the software is available free of charge. While Microsoft and Apple development tools can cost upwards of hundreds of dollars, Linux, since its user base is comprised of a lot of developers, has lots of programming tools available for free. Some distros have them pre-installed, some make them available through their package repositories. Browsing the available tools will make you feel, as Homer Simpson put it, like a kid in some kind of store. There are editors, compilers and interpreters for nearly every language ever created, debuggers, parser generators, you name it. If these programs actually cost money, you’d probably be able to buy a small house for the money you paid for them.

In addition, as Richard Stallman famously put it, these programs are also “free as in speech, not as in beer.” Stallman is best known for founding the free software movement back in the ’80s, which was an attempt to make sure that users could always get access to software that had the source code available. Whether you call it “free software” or “open source,” reading the source code to programs is the best way to learn programming. Imagine if you wanted to become a great writer but weren’t allowed to read any books. How could you be expected to produce anything worthwhile without knowing about the history of literature.

It’s Been Around Forever

While Microsoft changes its tools frequently, it’s an apparent attempt to simply charge their customers for their products by forcing them to upgrade.

Linux, on the other hand, builds on the Unix tradition by offering tried-and-true tools. You can pick up a book on Unix from the ’80s and much of it will still be applicable to a modern Linux distribution today. Although the GNU project and others have rewritten and enhanced many of the classic Unix tools, they still work pretty much the same as they did back in the ’70s and ’80s.

It’s Easy to Build Programs

One reason Unix and Linux has been popular with programmers all these years is that it’s incredibly easy to build complex programs without a whole lot of effort.

The most notable feature of Unix is the way shells handle input and output. It’s easy to send the output from one program to the other. A trivial example would be to send the output of the “who” command that shows everyone logged into a system into the less pager:

who | less

If you tried to code up something similar in C from scratch, you’d be looking at at least a thousand lines of code. The use of pipes, on the other hand, turns Unix and Linux into software LEGO, which lets you build complex programs out of a simple set of building blocks. This is also the reason serious Linux users prefer the command line. It’s almost impossible to pipe input from graphical programs.

If you’re thinking of getting started, why not pick a Linux distribution and start exploring today?

Photo Credit: Striatic

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Ack is a program written in Perl that aims to be a replacement for the venerable old Grep, which has been around since the early ’70s. (In case you’re wondering, grep stands for “Global Regular Expression Print.”)

Ack’s author, Andy Lester,  is so confident that Ack is better than grep, that his project’s website is named betterthangrep.com.

You can get it in a few ways. If you’re a regular Perl user, you can use CPAN to install it, perhaps with Perlbrew as I outlined in an earlier article. Cpanminus is a popular lightweight CPAN client. To install Ack with it, just use this command:

cpanm App::Ack

Of course, if you’re using Ubuntu and want to install it via apt-get, you’re free to do that as well, though Ubuntu tends to be behind the developer’s latest version. Just use this command:

sudo apt-get install ack-grep

You can use Ack pretty much the way you can using grep. For example, to find the name “maketecheasier” in the file mte.txt, just use this command:

ack maktecheasier mte.txt

Or you can redirect output into it:

cat | ack maketecheasier

One of the major features new users will notice is that it gives a nice visual highlight to your search string in the output, which means you can see exactly if you’re actually matching what you’re looking for.

If you’ve searching with a complicated regular expression, you can see what exactly is matching while also detecting false positives.

Another useful feature is that that Ack automatically searches files recursively. This means that not only will Ack search all the files in a directory if you give it one, if that directory contains other directories, it will search those as well, until you get to the bottom of the directory tree. This is especially useful for programmers (and if you are one, you probably already know what recursive means), but it’s also very useful if you’re looking for a pattern in a bunch of plain text files.

And speaking of programming, you can narrow your search to a variety of popular programming languages. Here’s an example using Perl:

ack --perl 'somepattern' /my/directory

You can find even more examples in the “Ack’s file types” section of the documentation.

Since Ack is written in Perl, it’s automatically compatible with Perl’s regular expressions. Regular expressions is a kind of super-precise text-searching, letting you find very specific text patterns.

The best and funniest feature is the “--thpppt” option, which calls up an ASCII art drawing of Bill the Cat:

_   /|
\'o.O'
=(___)=
   U    ack --thppt!

Since Unix and Linux make it relatively easy to write programs, it’s possible to easily create replacements for common system programs. Ack is one of those that shows the creativity of the Perl and Unix/Linux communities.

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While Perl has a reputation for being difficult to read, it’s really not that bad. If you’re comfortable writing shell scripts you should pick it up easily.

If you’re on a Linux or other Unix system, you probably have it already. But you probably don’t want to use the one that comes with your system. For one thing, it’s usually not the latest version, and second, it’s meant to support some utilities on the system rather than your own programs.

You could download a new version of Perl and compile it, but you risk messing up your system Perl. A better solution is using Perlbrew. It can compile and install multiple versions of Perl in your home directory, which means you won’t need superuser privileges to install it.

Installing it is easy enough. Perlbrew’s homepag has a line of code you can copy and paste into your terminal. You’ll need to have a C compiler installed first. To do this on Ubuntu, just use this command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

You’ll get a whole bunch of development tools this way.

Once you’re set up, you can start installing versions of Perl.

To see which versions are available, just issue this command:

perlbrew available

Here’s a list of the available versions from when I ran it:

perl-5.12.5-RC2
i perl-5.16.2
  perl-5.14.3
  perl-5.12.5
  perl-5.10.1
  perl-5.8.9
  perl-5.6.2
  perl5.005_04
  perl5.004_05
  perl5.003_07

The “i” in front of the second one means that it is currently installed. Version 5.16.2 is the current version of Perl.

If it wasn’t installed on my system and I wanted to do so, I’d simply type this command:

perlbrew install perl-5.16.2

Then I’d go get a cup of coffee while it compiles.

To use it, just type this:

perlbrew switch perl-5.16.2

You can do this with any available version of Perl.

If you just want to play with a version of Perl in the current shell, just use this command:

perlbrew use perl-5.16.2

This is a good way to test a different version of Perl without committing to it. If you’re a serious developer, it’s a good idea to install several versions in order to test your program. Not everyone is going to have the latest version of Perl, since many distros ship with older versions.

Here’s an easy way to test a script against the installed version of Perl, shamelessly stolen from Perlbrew’s website:

perlbrew exec myprogram.pl

You can read the manual page or simply type:

perlbrew help

to get more information. Perlbrew is a great way to have an updated Perl without stepping on the toes of your system’s default Perl, and it lets you experiment with different installations, from a more conservative older installation all the way to the bleeding edge.

The Perl community has always been awesome ever since the language’s debut in the late ’80s, and tools like this shows that Perl still has some life in it yet.

The post Manage Your Perl Installation with Perlbrew [Linux] appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

In Linux, and other Unix-based systems, including the BSDs and Mac OS X, it’s located in “/etc/hosts”, and it works almost exactly the same way it does under Windows. In fact, it existed under Unix for longer than it has under Windows.

The Linux Hosts File

The hosts file originally performed the same role that DNS did: matching IP addresses to hostnames. It worked fine under the early Internet, where there were only a handful of hosts. System administrators would download a copy of the file from a central source that had a list of known hosts.

Even as soon as the early 1980s, it started to become unwieldy, and the need for a more flexible system was born. DNS quickly became the solution, because it’s decentralized and distributed among many machines across the Internet.

The old, humble “/etc/hosts” is still around, and still comes in handy sometimes, as you saw in the earlier article. It’s great if you’re in charge of a home or small office network, and setting up a DNS server would be overkill.

Getting Permission

The “/etc/hosts” file belongs to the superuser, so you’ll have to use “sudo” to be able to modify it, provided your system has it. Otherwise, you can just use “su” and issue the command as if you were root.

As with any other important system file, it’s a good idea to make a copy of it first as a backup. Then if anything goes wrong, you can just copy your backup over it and you’ll be back to normal.

Here’s how to make the backup:

sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.old

You can call the file anything you like, however. It’s just a plain ASCII file. And speaking of plain ASCII files, you’ll be editing /etc/hosts in your favorite text editor. Here’s a screenshot of Emacs, just because that’s my favorite.

Yes, my netbook is named after Sam Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings.

sudo emacs /etc/hosts

Alternatively, you can also use

sudo nano /etc/hosts

to edit the file in your terminal.

The format is also almost exactly the same on Unix-like systems as it is on Windows, which, considering that the Internet was implemented on these systems before it was on Windows, isn’t exactly surprising.

I’m not going to spend too much time rehashing the earlier article, but I’ll just point out some of the things you can do with the file.

Editing the Hosts File

For example, here’s how you’d block a website from your computer:

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

And to make a personal shortcut:

66.220.152.16 fa.ce

By the way, if you want to look up a site’s IP address, you can use the “nslookup” utility, just as you would with windows. Actually, a lot of these Internet utilities first showed up on Unix.

If you want more detailed information on a domain name, you can use this command:

whois facebook.com

This post should show you that if you can do something on Windows, you can do it in Linux or any other Unix-like system as well.

Image credit: Domain search vector icon. .com .net .org domain finder by Big Stock Photo.

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You can access the Kindle using Amazon’s software on Mac OS X or Windows, but you won’t be able to get it to work in Linux? Fortunately, it’s easy to access your kindle from Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution using a simple piece of software.

The first program is gMTP It’s intended for managing MP3 players, but it works great for managing devices like the Kindle Fire HD.

To install it under Ubuntu, just use this command:

sudo apt-get install gmtp

To connect to your kindle, just plug the USB cable into your computer and the Kindle, start gMTP, and click “Connect.”

You’ll be able to navigate the files on your Kindle much as you would on the Desktop. You can add and remove folders and transfer files back and forth.

On the Kindle side, the app you’ll want to install is the ES File Explorer. It’s a file manager for Android similar to Nautilus in Ubuntu. It’s how you’ll actually be able to access the files you’re transferring to your Kindle.

You can transfer any kind of data you want to your Kindle, even Android apps that aren’t available in Amazon’s store. You won’t be able to use apps from Google Play, as it’s not supported, but if you have another Android device like a tablet or smartphone available, you can transfer them from your device, to your computer, and then sideload it onto the Kindle that way.

There are also a number of open source applications that you can download to your computer and then transfer to your Kindle.

In either case, you’ll have to allow the use of unknown apps on your device. To do this on your Kindle Fire HD, just go into the “Settings -> Device” and turn the “Allow Installation of Applications from Unknown Sources” option to “On.” To install the app, just navigate to where you stored it, tap on it, and you’ll be asked whether you’ll wantt to install it.

By adding a couple of simple applications to your computer running Linux and your Kindle Fire HD, you’ll have a lot more flexibility in using it, while getting around some of the limitations that Amazon’s put on the device. It will also be more functional and even close to a real computer.

The post Manage Files On Your Kindle Fire HD With Ubuntu appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

As awesome as IRC is, there are a couple of drawbacks. First, if an Internet connection goes down, your connection will be lost. It’s also difficult to move your settings from computer to computer.

Fortunately, if you’re not afraid of the Linux command line and with a few programs, you can keep your IRC connection going almost as long as you like.

There are two ways to do this: either using a home server or signing up for shell account. Shell accounts are public servers that let you log in to a remote Linux or other operating system command line remotely. They’re popular for IRC users who want to keep IRC sessions going for a long time.

Setting up a session on a home server is easy enough. Since you’ll be using text-based software, you don’t need a really powerful machine. If you’ve got an old computer lying around, you can use that.

There are a number of text-based IRC clients around, but the favorite seems to be Irssi. If you’ve got a Debian or Ubuntu system running, just type this command:

sudo apt-get install irssi

The other program you’ll want to install is either GNU Screen or tmux. Both of these programs are terminal multiplexers, which means that they let you run more than one program at a time in a single terminal window, similar to tabbed browsing for the command line.

GNU Screen has been around since 1987, and it’s been very useful for both IRC users and system administrators working on remote systems, especially over Wi-Fi connections. It’s been somewhat difficult to use. Recently, a challenger in the field has emerged in the form of tmux, developed by the OpenBSD team. Although tmux is developed as part of OpenBSD, it’s also available as a standalone system that works across platforms. Most Linux distros have both programs in their repositories. If you’re on Debian/Ubuntu, here’s how to get them:

To install GNU Screen:

sudo apt-get install screen

To install tmux:

sudo apt-get install tmux

If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend using tmux, as it’s a lot easier to use. You’ll SSH into either your home server or your shell server, and issue this command:

tmux

This isn’t going to be a complete tutorial on tmux. If you want more info, you can always check out the documentation. You’ll get a shell that you can use as you would normally. You can start your IRC client and chat away.

You can detach in tmux using the command “Ctrl-B”. (The prefix can be changed in a configuration file.) If your connection is interrupted or you detach from your session, you can reattach by issuing this command at the shell:

tmux attach

You’ll have an eternal IRC session you can connect to from any machine with an SSH client, including your favorite tablets and smartphones. You can move from device to device without a hitch.

If you’re using a shell server, however, it might not let you detach and leave processes running unless you pay for the privilege.

There’s more to tmux than meets the eye, and you can do amazing things with them if you take the time to learn. This tutorial should be enough to get you started.

Image credit: Joshk/Wikipedia

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Web Apps

For better or for worse, Web sites have transformed from simple, static documents to fully-fledged applications. Most computer operating systems, however, have failed to keep pace, segregating popular Web apps to the browser. Ubuntu 12.10, however, has made them first class citizens. If you’re browsing certain sites in Firefox, such as Facebook or Twitter, a pop-up box will ask you if you want to add the site as an application. If you do, you can now launch it from the Dash as if it was a regular app. You can also pin it to the dock for easy access if it’s a site you frequently visit.

If you live in the browser, on the other hand, it might not seem like an essential feature. But having your favorite websites handy is still very convenient. If nothing else, you can save time on typing the URL.

Shopping Lens

This is one of the most talked-about and one of the most controversial features of Ubuntu 12.10. One of the new lenses in the Dash is a shopping lens, which will allow you to search Amazon from the Dash instead of having to fire up the browser. This feature has attracted a fair amount of controversy and criticism because of privacy concerns. Some people also like to say that Canonical’s selling out by allowing Amazon search results the way some people claim their favorite band now sucks because they signed to a major label. On the other hand, Canonical has been a commercial business from the outset, and has to pay for the development costs somehow.

Social Media Lens

In addition to searching for Amazon products, you can also search your posts on social media services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. You can access them by simply putting your account information for the various services you’re subscribed to in the “Online Accounts” section of the System Information menu.

Media Preview

Another change to the Dash that Canonical has made in 12.10 is the ability to preview media you’ve downloaded without having to launch the application associated with it first. For example, if you’ve purchased an album in Ubuntu’s music store, after searching for it in the Dash, you can listen to it immediately. If you’re looking to buy or download music, apps or games, you can also do so in the Dash.

Should You Upgrade?

As cool as these new features are, do they make it worth the upgrade? The new additions don’t allow you to do anything you couldn’t already do in the browser and other applications. On the other hand, having them integrated in the Dash might be attractive to people who want to minimize switching between different tasks. Of course, there are always people who just love to hate on Unity anyway. A more practical concern is compatibility. A number of people have reported various problems getting the latest version to run on their hardware. You might want to wait a bit until the Ubuntu team can release some more updates. If reliability is very important to you, you’re better off with one of the LTS releases.

If these new features do look cool to you, then why not take the plunge?

Image source: Ubuntu

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If Unity has got you frustrated and you think the upcoming integration with Amazon is too much, you’ve got lots of options if you want to change desktop environments.

KDE

A good one to try is KDE, which is the longtime rival to the GNOME environment that Ubuntu was traditionally based upon. To install KDE, just fire up your trusty terminal and use this command:

sudo apt-get install kde-plasma-desktop

This will install the minimal KDE desktop. You might want the more full-featured Kubuntu experience. Kubuntu is a variant of Ubuntu based on KDE instead of Unity. If you don’t want to install a new system, you can just install Kubuntu on top of an existing Ubuntu installation. You can do so with this command:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

If you just want the stock KDE environment without the Kubuntu enhancements, you can also install that as well:

sudo apt-get install kde-full

If you do decide you want the Kubuntu enchancements after all, there’s a package for that as well:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-full

GNOME

If you’re still pining for the GNOME environment that was default before 11.04, then you can also install it. The GNOME project has moved to a similar look to Unity called the GNOME Shell. It’s just as polarizing as its Ubuntu counterpart.

To install it, use this command:

sudo apt-get install gnome

XFCE

There’s also Xfce, a smaller and more lightweight cousin to the two major desktop environments. Xfce aims to offer a full-featured desktop environment that’s faster and runs on older computers. The Xubuntu desktop is a good choice if you want to start exploring it. It’s a similarly Ubuntu-customized version of Xfce the way Kubuntu is the Ubuntu version of KDE.

To install it, just type

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

You can also install the stock Xfce:

sudo apt-get install xfce4

The great thing about Linux is that you can get into more advanced window managers. These include tiling window managers that programmers and other people who swear by the command line live by. Here’s what one looks like. The windows are arranged in tiles that aim to make the most efficient use of screen space.

These include Awesomewm, Wmii, Ratpoison and xmonad. They’re all available in the Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install awesomewm
sudo apt-get install wmii
sudo apt-get install ratpoison

If you want to go down the desktop and window manager rabbit hole in Linux, there’s no shortage of ways to do so. The lack of a “standard” interface for Linux will allow Ubuntu users and other Linux users to explore many options for different environments. There’s plenty in the repositories to keep you busy for years.

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Although the mouse transformed the computing world when it was invented, in extended use, it can actually become somewhat tedious, especially in repetitive operations. One of the most repetitive is clicking options in dialog boxes. Fortunately, there’s a way to take the drudgery out of this task.

One piece of software, however, makes it possible to automate graphical programs by automating mouse clicks.

You can download the program from Murguu.com. It’s available for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. The program has been tested on Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Fedora.

Just unpack the .zip file into a directory and double-click on the “AutoMouseClick” icon. The program will start up and you’ll be able to automate your mouse clicks.

You’ll have to know a bit about how your screen’s coordinates are laid out. It’s similar to the Cartesian geometry you learned in your high school algebra class, but the origin is at the top left corner of the screen instead of the middle like you learned in math class. This is because it’s the same on every screen, no matter how big it actually is.

If you have more than one monitor serving as a single screen, the origin will be at the top left corner of the leftmost screen.

Just press F11 to get a reading of the coordinates of the mouse pointer. You can specify the X and Y Coordinates of each click. You can single click, double-click, left-click, right-click, Ctrl-click, shift-click and just about any kind of click you can imagine.

The program does have to be in focus in order to work, but you can define a keyboard shortcut in order to use it without having to actually click in its window.

To add a mouse click, just click the “Add” button. You can add remove, and rearrange clicks. You can even specify how long to wait between clicks. This is perfect for dialog boxes that take a while to show up.

You can also save your clicks and load them for later retrieval. This makes it a rudimentary version of a shell/Perl/Python script for graphical applications. Similar programs are also available for Windows and Mac OS X, if you think this program is a great idea and want to use it on other systems.

A text-based program and a scripting languages are going to give you a lot more flexibility, but if the only choice you have available is a GUI program and you have a lot of repetitive operations to perform, then the Auto Mouse Click program might be a good choice if you want to save some wear and tear on your wrist or your clicking fingers.

You might even have your hands free to use the keyboard.

The post How To Automate Mouse Clicks In Linux appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

What is Ubuntu Studio?

Ubuntu Studio is a customized Ubuntu version geared for creative work: audio, video and graphics.

The maintaners explain it this way:

Our goal is a stable, usable OS with flexibility and integration during the creative process. If you can imagine a configuration, chances are Ubuntu Studio can do it. The design philosophy is one of many software components that all integrate with one another.

Audio Apps

The distro has a lot to offer to people doing audio work on Linux.

The first major component is the JACK audio server. The term sounds odd for people who only associate the term with networking. The server offers audio services in real time on the computer, which is important for people doing music and other sound work. There just isn’t any allowing for latency. It allows several audio applications to share the same audio interface.

The major attraction for people doing audio work is Ardour, an open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), similar to Logic and Pro Tools. The advantage of this package is that it gives you the tools of a professional recording studio right on your Linux PC, all for free.

There is an option for those who want to pay, however. Harrison Consoles, a major manufacturer of mixing boards for real recording studios, has released a modified version of Ardour called the Mixbus. They’ve made the interface easier to use and made other improvements. They even keep most of it open source. It’s really cool that a company has decided to support a free and open source project the way Harrison has.

There are some other neat tools, like a Qtractor, A DAW that works with MIDI. If you want lay down some fat beats, you can do so with Hydrogen drum machine and sequencer. If you want to create your own crazy synth patches, the Yoshimi software synthesizer is what you want.

If you want to rock out with your electric guitar, there are a couple of amp emulators available: Rakarrack, which is pre-installed, and Guitarix. These two apps will let you simulate a stack of classic Marshall amps. You can route them to your headphones so they won’t annoy your neighbors.

If your audio goals are much less lofty, you can use Audacity to do some basic audio editing and sound generation. Audacity is pretty simple to use on its own, but it allows for some powerful audio effects. If that’s not enough, you can use Lisp to generate your own effects if you know how to code. You can also code some effects using programs like supercollider, csound and chuck

This is a whirlwhind tour, but this article should show that you can do pretty much anything you want in Linux that you’d do on Mac or Windows systems. The Linux world has a lot to offer musicians and other people who work with sound.

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The good news is that if you have relatively common hardware, Linux will probably work with it, even some fairly complicated devices like 3D-accelerated video cards. On the other hand, wireless networking adapters like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are areas where you still might run into some trouble.

Get Computer with Linux pre-installed

The easiest way to ensure that your hardware is Linux-compatible is to buy a computer with Linux pre-installed. In the past, that has meant going outside of mainstream computer vendors, but companies like Dell and Lenovo have sold computers with Linux pre-installed. If you’re an Ubuntu fan and in the market for a new computer, check out System 76. They offer a variety of stylish desktops, laptops and servers with Ubuntu pre-installed.

You can also follow our Linux Computer Buyer Guide to find the manufacturers that sell computers with Linux pre-installed.

Buy Ubuntu Certified hardware

Alternatively, you can buy Ubuntu certified hardware. Ubuntu tests versions of their distribution on various computers released by major companies, and ensures that Ubuntu will work with them.

Test using LiveCD

If you’re installing Linux on a computer you already have, you can use a Live CD to see how your computer would fare under a full-fledged installation. Using either Knoppix or the Ubuntu live distro, do things that you normally do, such as surfing the Internet. If all your important hardware works, then installing it on your hard drive should go smoothly.

If something doesn’t quite work, you can check the forums for various distros, or you can hop onto IRC. The developers themselves often hang out there, so you can get help directly from them, which is something you definitely can’t get from Microsoft or Apple.

Google it

If you’re having a problem getting a piece of hardware to run on Linux, chances are you aren’t the only one. Do a search for your specific device that’s not working, and you’ll either find a workaround or a fix to make it work. If not, you can submit a bug report and ideally someone will start trying to fix it. Unfortunately, for certain obsolete devices, maintainers often decide that it’s not worth their time to make an unusual device work with their distribution.

Conclusion

It always pays to look before you leap. Even if some piece of hardware doesn’t quite work with your favorite distro, it’s not the end of the world. For example, if you’re not a gamer, you can probably do without the accelerated video (though that’s one thing that’s handled better now than it was in the past.) Similarly, if you don’t use any Bluetooth devices, you can probably sleep easily enough at night if it doesn’t work in Ubuntu.

Linux works great with lots of different hardware these days, but if you pay attention you can avoid many of the major headaches when it doesn’t, and you can always get help from the community.

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In the early ’90s, some people had the bright idea to start packaging utilities with the Linux kernel to create distributions that essentially allowed programmers to run Unix, which was an operating system that they were familiar with on expensive computers from DEC and Sun, on cheap PCs.

The earliest known distribution was by HJ Lu in early 1992. It consisted of two floppies: a “boot” disk to boot the system and a “root” disk that contained the filesystem, and from which it actually ran. The concept was similar to today’s “live” distros that run off a CD or a thumb drive.

The next major variant was the MCC Interim Linux, created by Owen Le Blanc of Manchester University’s Manchester Computing Centre in England. This spanned several floppy disks, but had the advantage of being able to be installed on a hard drive. Or at least, without having to edit the master boot record with a hex editor the way HJ Lu’s “boot-root” distro did. It came with a number of utilities that most Linux users would recognize: the Bash shell, various GNU utilities, and Elvis, a VI-like editor.

One thing it didn’t include was X, so it was text-only. Another distribution that came out of Texas A&M University did, though as LWN put it, “the method they used to configure it occasionally allowed the magic smoke to escape from your monitor.”

The first true live CD distro was called Yggdrasil, which was one of the first distros to become available on a CD. One major advantage was that it configured itself automatically. The beta cost $60 and the finished version cost $99, which might seem a bit pricey. Real Unix systems such as Solaris or BSDi at the time cost upwards of $1,000, so it was a bargain.

The other major version of the time was SLS Linux, or the Softlanding Linux Distro. It was popular until some changes made it rather buggy. Patrick Volkerding made some changes of his own and released it as Slackware, which is still available today.

Another offshoot of SLS was called Debian, developed by Ian Murdoch. The name came from the combination of the names of both his and his girlfriend (now wife), Deborah. It’s still going strong as well, and is the basis for Ubuntu.

A few other names started around the same time and are well-known names, such as Red Hat or SUSE. Others have faded away, like MCC Interim Linux and Yggdrasil. Distros may come and go, but the flexibility of Linux and the ability to create new distributions means that they will continue to appear for a long time.

Photo Credit: Shermozle/Wikipedia

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