I feel overwhelmed by the amount of free material that is available for learning Linux. Thosunds of free books, videos, and podcasts are waiting for people who are thirsty to learn about Linux. A couple of hours ago I found this post by Linux 101 Hacks‘ author, Ramesh Natarajan, informing us that his nifty little Book is available for online reading. I’ve read some of the hacks and found them very interesting and informative. I’m sure you will get a kick out of reading this book.
Free Password Management Software For Ubuntu
Years ago, before the craze of Web 2.0 most of us had just few accounts in services like Yahoo and we did not have much trouble with memorizing them. But now with the growing number of social services, It’s becoming more difficult to keep track of all your passwords. For years I had a simple remedy for this problem, that is, using one single password for all the services. Nevertheless, It was too risky and if somebody could find the password of one of my accounts he could access to the rest too (a similar mistake made by one of Twitter staff led to the leakage of confidential documents of this company.)
A few months ago, I started to use my iPod Touch and a security application to organize my passwords. It was a good application and I loved it but after a hard reset the application refused to work and discarded all my passwords. Fortunately, I had a backup of all my passwords somewhere else but I couldn’t confide my iPod Touch anymore.
KeePassX - A Light-weight Password Manager for Ubuntu
Today I was searching for a good password management software for Ubuntu and I found a light-weight program dubbed KeePassX. I installed it on my Ubuntu machine and after a few minutes I started to love it. It simply has all the features I want from a password management software. It stores all my passwords in one single encrypted database which makes it easy to make backup from it. I also can easily create groups and organize my passwords into groups. However, my favorite feature is the Password Generator. KeePassX can generate very lengthy and strong passwords that even a bad-ass hacker will have trouble to decrypt it.
KeePassX Password Generator
How to install KeePassX on Ubuntu 9.10
KeePassX is very light-weight and it shouldn’t take more than few seconds to get downloaded and installed:
sudo apt-get install keepassx
If you are in Ubuntu 9.10, you can also use the Software Center to install this app.
Floss Manuals: Free Manuals For Free Softwares
I’d like to write a quick post about an interesting concept that I’ve just stumbled across. If you are a beginner in Linux world and you are starved for good reading materials to learn open source and free softwares, there is a website for that. Floss Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source softwares. Currently, I’m reading one of their manuals about Ardour, the free DAW software that has gained momentum recently, and I tell you it rocks. The writing style is clean and they use high quality graphics to illustrate the concepts. Truth to be told, I’m actually got inspired to write my posts in this way! You can read more about Floss Manuals in their About page.
Free as in Freedom: The Story of Richard Stallman
Ubuntu is free, not only free of charge but also free to be studied, changed, and redistributed. The question is, however, where does this freedom come from? We all know the answer – open source and the free software movement. However most beginners have little clue about the origin of the free software movement and the story of Ricahrd Stallman.
Honestly, It’s been a while that I wanted to study open source and the philosophy behind it. Today I stumbled across a book called Free as in Freedom written by Sam Williams. I read the first chapter and it seemed to be a very absorbing book. It essentially tells the story of RMS and how he came across the idea of free software.
If you are interested to read this book, you can read the free online version here.
Take Control Over Your Laptop’s Display Brightness in Ubuntu
Display brightness is one of the main power eating culprits in laptops. As a result, many modern operating systems including Ubuntu are optimized to automatically adjust the brightness so as to maximize laptop’s battery life.
If you run Ubuntu on a laptop you might have noticed that Ubuntu dims the display when the system is idle and is not connected to the AC power. This feature is definitely helpful for increasing battery life but can be extremely annoying if you are reading a long web page or article. Now if you are tormented by this feature you can either disable it or extend the time that screen goes dim.
Disabling ‘Dim Display When Idle” feature
- Go to System > Preferences > Power Management.
- In the Power Management Preferences window, click on the On Battery Power tab.
- Remove the check of both “Reduce backlight brightness” and “Dim display when idle” options.
Increasing the Amount of Time to Dim the Screen
If you are interested to change the amount of screen dim time or the brightness amount, you’ll need to use Configuration Editor:
- Press ALT + F2 and in the Run Application window, type gconf-editor.
- Go to apps > gnome-power-managment > backlight.
- Now change the value of idle_dim_time. You may also want to change other settings such as the value of idle_brightness.
