Ubuntu Hacks

Here is the information you need to quickly get up to speed on how to customize it. Recently, the GNOME desktop seems to have lost some features. Looking around on mailing lists and reading people's blogs, you'll often find gripe...

While GNOME, the heart of Ubuntu, seems to be adopting an extremist policy of "simplify simplify simplify" that goes so far as to result in the father of Linux strongly criticizing it (see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-D...

If you're on an older system, or you just want a change of pace, you can use other window managers under Ubuntu, such as Fluxbox, XFCE, and Enlightenment. If there's one thing that's grea...

Here's how to install Java and caffeinate your web browser. Ubuntu's an amazing Linux distribution for lots of different reasons, but one of the things people find attractive about it is the fact that it ships with ...

One of Linux's weaker points as a desktop OS has been the lack of a search feature. Nautilus has had a "find this file" function for quite some time, but it's really not much more sophisticated than a GUI wrapper around the command-line find command....

Let's face it: sometimes it's difficult to fit all of the files you need on a single computer. Whether they be Windows shares at your office, FTP servers somewhere on the Internet, or even machines on the network running SSH, you can access all of th...

The default Ubuntu GNOME environment is very streamlined and easy to use. Due to its ease of use, however, some of the "power user" features aren't included in the base install. KDE can also benefit from the same tweaking. Here's how to get more usab...

Learn how to install applications on your Palm or Treo, keep it in sync with Evolution, and back it up. Getting a Palm OS PDA to synchronize with Linux has usually involved some amount of effort, and some pain installing and conf...

Inside the box of your Pocket PC, you'll find a USB cable that's compatible with nearly every computer on the planet. What you won't find is software that's compatible with anything other than Windows. To sync your Pocket PC with Ubuntu, you'll need ...

Right-clicking on items on the desktop or in the Nautilus file browser pulls up a contextual menu that allows you to perform operations directly on the item. But you're not limited to just the default options: you can add template documents and scrip...

Peer-to-peer is huge and getting bigger all the time. Linux users don't have to be left out of all the excitement. In fact, we have a huge variety of P2P apps and networks from which to choose. In this hack, I'm going to show you how to install sever...

A very handy feature that's included in the Mac OS X operating system is the ability to "print" a PDF file from any application. Windows can also do this, via Adobe Acrobat. However, with the addition of a single package and a little bit of tweaking,...

Blogging has become a very popular activity as of late; there's even been an O'Reilly book about it (Essential Blogging by Cory Doctorow et al.). Lots of people have LiveJournals or maintain their own blog servers. Most blogs have their own web-based...