Xubuntu – Time Synchronization
In xubuntu (XFCE) you can run the following command to synchronize your system clock with time servers:
sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org
After running this command you would get a response similar to the following:
21 Aug 04:08:20 ntpdate[4824]: adjust time server 209.167.68.100 offset 0.017300 secRead More
XFCE – XUBUNTU
First time I installed xfce on my laptop I was surprised with how light and stable it was. I have been using XFCE for more than 2 years now I would have to say that its great. I would strongly recommend it specially if you don’t have a really powerful machine like me. To customize it the way you like its obviously a little different from Gnome but once you can used to it you would see how easy it is. Here is a screen-shot of my desktop:
Ubuntu change computer name
If you would like to change your computer name in Ubuntu Linux you would need to modify two files:
First you would need to change hostname file:
sudo vi /etc/hostname
This file contains your existing computer name. You can change it to anything you like.
The next step is to modify the hosts file:
sudo vi /etc/hosts
Inside this file look for the entry starting with:
127.0.1.1
You would need to change the name in this line to whatever you change to in the first file name.
If you don’t do the second step your computer name would still be changed but you would get the error message “unable to resolve host” everything you login to your account.
PySDM – Storage Device Manager
To auto-mount storage devices in Linux normally you would need to edit /etc/fstab file, which sometimes can be quite difficult specially if you are a Linux newbie. To make things easier you can look into using a software called PySDM which does exactly what you need to do with a nice user interface. Using this tool you can easily manage your mount points.
to Install PySDM:
sudo apt-get install pysdmRead More
Ubuntu and Open ports
For security reasons you may want to check the open ports on your machine and validate that applications using them. To scan your open ports you can use the following command:
sudo nmap -sV localhost
Namp will scan the machines open ports using the “-sV” parameter will also display the applications using the open ports and their version. Once you execute the command you should get a list similar to what I have here:
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 21/tcp open ftp vsftpd 2.2.0 22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 5.1p1 Debian 6ubuntu2 (protocol 2.0) 80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.2.12 ((Ubuntu)) 3306/tcp open mysql MySQL 5.1.37-1ubuntu5.1
You should go through the list and if there are any applications which you don’t recognize you can always Google their name and see if you want them to be using the open ports or not.
You could also use netstat to see your open ports. For instance:
sudo netstat -tap
would return similar results.
Read MoreMounting .iso files in Ubuntu Linux
Sometimes you would like to mount an .iso file without burning the file to a CD/DVD. To mount an iso file in Ubuntu you could use an script to mount the iso file and one script to unmount the iso file.
Once you download these scripts you would need to make them executable. In the following scripts username is your home folder. Assuming that you have downloaded these scripts to your home folder you would need to do:
chmod +x /home/username/mount.sh chmod +x /home/username/unmount.sh
Then you would need to move these scripts into nautilus scripts folder:
mv /home/username/mount.sh ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ mv /home/username/unmount.sh ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
Once the files are moved to this folder you could right-click on the iso file and mount the iso file.
You could do the same process to unmount the .iso file.