Presentation software isn't complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be. Maybe that's why OpenOffice.org's Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

If you've got an NVidia graphics card and it has a fan that sounds like a jet engine, or, if as in my case your fan starts at full speed when the computer boots but then turns off after 20 seconds or so, you need nvclock.

Recently I needed to create a script that processed two input files. By processed I mean that the script needed to get a line from one file, then get a line from the second file, and then do something with them. Sounds easy enough, but it's not that easy unless you know about some of bash's extended redirection capabilities.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code.

If you have a process ID but aren't sure whether it's valid, you can use the most unlikely of candidates to test it: the kill command. If you don't see any reference to this on the kill(1) man page, check the info pages. The man/info page states that signal 0 is special and that the exit code from kill tells whether a signal could be sent to the specified process (or processes).

If you have multiple computers on your desktop there are a number of scenarios for using them:

Setting up a file server doesn't need to be complicated.

Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions. JACK: The 1-minute Profile

David Howells put in quite a bit of work on a script, ./scripts/syscall-manage.pl, to simplify the entire process of changing the system call tables. With this script, it was a simple matter to add, remove, rename or renumber any system call you liked. The script also would resolve git conflicts, in the event that two repositories renumbered the system calls in conflicting ways.