HOW-TOs

Kinect with Linux

The Minority Report has been in rotation on cable lately, and you've probably seen the futuristic vision of Tom Cruise standing in front of a large screen, manipulating information with waves of his hands. That vision is a bit closer to reality, thanks in part to the economies of scale of the game industry.

How-To: Release Stuck NFS Mounts without a Reboot

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.

Getting Help from Linux - Part 1 Man Pages

man womanNo manual entry for woman Oooh, I just know I'm going to hear it in the comments for that one. But you know what? Just how many of you have tried something similar with other words? You know you have at least once or twice. Go ahead, try one or two..you might be surprised.

Creating Software-backed iSCSI Targets in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Studying for certification exams can be an adventure. Even more so when the certification exam is a hands-on, performance-based exam. The quandry most people I know fall into, is that to effectively study for such an exam, you need access to a lab environment with elements that may be beyond the scope of the average Linux enthusiast. One such element is iSCSI. 

Secondary Window Tools in Scribus

Scribus is designed so that the main window shows only the document you are designing. Other tools are positioned to secondary windows, where they have all the room they need for detailed settings. You may discover some of these secondary windows via menus and toolbars as you work, but not all.

Safer Access without Passwords

How do you make sure that your passwords are safe? You can make them longer, complicate them by adding odd characters, making sure to use different passwords for each user account that you have. Or, you can simply skip them all together.

How Fast Can You Type? Develop a Tiny Utility in Bash to Find Out

If you spend most of your time typing on your keyboard (and I hope you don’t use that mouse very frequently, if you care for your wrists, that is), getting up to speed and practicing to become a better and faster typist is well worth the time and effort. And measuring something is the first step to improve it.

Tweaking text in Scribus

In word processors, users generally settle for an appearance that is good enough. By contrast, in a design application like Scribus, you have the tools to adjust the layout until it is exactly the way you want.

Grabbing Your Music from YouTube: Do It Your Way

A few months ago my father-in-law said that his company was renewing their computers. When I heard that some second-hand PCs were about to be available, I decided to take some of them, thinking that a few old PCs would not hurt when it comes to enlarging my home network and doing experiments with GNU/Linux.

Internet Relay Chat

Wow, talk about a dinosaur! IRC seems like it has been around since the dawn of time. Without dating myself, I still remember logging into BBSs back in the eighties and nineties and getting help in chat rooms that would eventually become what IRC is today.

Linux on a Fingernail

This issue of Linux Journal is all about how to get Linux in your pocket. In this article, I go one better and tell you how to get Linux on your fingernail. Now, before you get too excited, I won't be discussing some new nano-computer being used by James Bond, unfortunately. Instead, I discuss how to put Linux on a micro-SD card (or any other USB drive, for that matter).

Using Styles in Scribus

If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually.

Working with Frames and Objects in Scribus

A Scribus document consists of a series of objects that are added to a page, and contained within a frame. In addition to the usual cut, copy, and paste functions available in most applications, frames in Scribus share a general set of editing attributes and, so far as possible, the same set of properties.

Working with Images in Scribus

Apart from text, images are probably the most commonly used objects in Scribus or any other layout application. The basics of working with images in Scribus are mostly straightforward, but there are some methods and resources that you might miss, especially at first.

Wi-Fi on the Command Line

More people than ever are using wireless networks as their primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11 that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great functionality.

Text Frames in Scribus

As a layout program, Scribus puts objects in frames so that they can be manipulated more easily. Images, drawing primitives, tables -- if it is content, Scribus puts it in a color-coded frame, with eight handles so that you can position it by dragging it around. But of all its frames, the most important -- and probably the most customizable -- is the text frame.

What Hardware Do I Have?

Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.