The PS1 is the text that you see to the left on the command prompt. Often times it will read something like, mark@debian~/$. This text reveals a lot of relevent information. The first part, ‘mark’ tells us the username. The ‘@debian‘ tells us that the machine’s name is ‘debian‘. The ‘~/‘ is the current working directory and the ‘$‘ means that we are using a non-root user. Read more »

Vim is a powerful text editor that pretty much rivals anything out there. Once you get used to the commands and hotkeys you can wiz through config files. Vim is also very popular for programming, not only for its productivity reasons but also because it incorporates syntax highlighting, aliases, code folding, line numbers, and more. Read more »

I am not quite sure why it is but there are always people that want to do things faster and more efficient, even if the current system is working fine. I have to admit I love to tweak things to no end. For whatever reason I am attracted to this type of perfection. I want to optimize code, automate, and increase my productivity as a user. Just as there are more efficient text editors and operating systems, we also have more efficient email programs. Mutt is one of them. Since Gmail offers IMAP we can retrieve our emails with an email program such as mutt. Read more »

I can’t tell you how excited I am that I found out about this. Vim has a built in plugin to connect to FTP sites. What this means is that you can modify your web documents from vim without having to save the file and then FTP the file up to the server. With this plugin all you have to do is save your work and it is reflected on the server. Read more »

I love Linux so much I made a list of 50 reasons why I love it so.

1. I can extract something with one command without opening a separate program.

2. I can print a document without opening it.

3. I can update all applications with two magical words, apt-get upgrade.

4. Its free Read more »

1. Everything in Linux is a file, even your hard drives. (dev/hda1) No c:/ stuff. Linux is based on a directory system which is all contained in ‘/‘, aka root.

The ’slash’ is very important, for example, /mnt will start at / and look for mnt. If you type mnt/file it will look in the current directory that you are in for the folder ‘mnt’ and the file ‘file’. This was very confusing for someone that isn’t used to typing paths into the command line. Windows users are used to typing c:/ for the root directory so they may forget that / is the top level. Read more »

Bash can be configured to recognize any word you want and link it to a command. This is called an alias. This is can be used for many reasons. For instance, you could assign a short word like dvdbackupnow to execute a very long command that you don’t want to memorize each time you want to back up a DVD. We will explore a few useful aliases and how to add them to bash. Read more »

If you ever wanted to quickly encrypt a file in Linux or FreeBSD without complicated keyrings and key files this is the post for you. In this guide we will use gnupg to quickly encrypt any file in Linux or FreeBSD. We will keep it simple and easy and leave out public/private key ring authentication and stick with simple password phrase encryption. Unlike password protection in zip files and other weak security implementation, PGP or GnuPG is a very secure way of encrypting files. It is pretty easy to set up so lets get going. Read more »