LinuxLinks

Pick a suitable distribution for yourself or someone else:

Distrochooser
This test will help you to choose a suitable Linux distribution for you.

Test whether your anti-virus software is correctly operating:

WICAR.org - Test Your Anti-Malware Solution! - Home
The wicar.org website was designed to test the correct operation your anti-virus / anti-malware software.

Use a console utility to find out what's hogging disk space:

NCurses Disk Usage
Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. It is designed to find space hogs on a remote server where you don't have an entire graphical setup available, but it is a useful tool even on regular desktop systems. Ncdu aims to be fast, simple and easy to use, and should be able to run in any minimal POSIX-like environment with ncurses installed.

Transform “bash syntax” to a cleaner, more modern syntax:

Bash Infinity Framework
The aim of Bash Infinity is to maximize readability of bash scripts, minimize the amount of code repeat and create a central repository for well-written, and a well-tested standard library for bash.

A new attack-resistant Linux distribution is under development:

Subgraph OS
Subgraph OS is a desktop computing and communications platform that is designed to be resistant to network-borne exploit and malware attacks.

Ideal optimization is achieved one small tweak at a time:

Disable Transparent Hugepages - Made of Bugs
Transparent Hugepages gives some applications a small performance improvement (~ 10% at best, 0-3% more typically), but can cause significant performance problems, or even apparent memory leaks at worst.

SSH has escape sequences:

SSH Escape Sequences (aka Kill Dead SSH Sessions) - The Lone Sysadmin
Did you know that when you’re using OpenSSH from the command line you have a variety of escape sequences available to you?

Regular Expressions de-mystified:

GitHub - zeeshanu/learn-regex: Learn regex the easy way
A regular expression is a pattern that is matched against a subject string from left to right. The word "Regular expression" is a mouthful, you will usually find the term abbreviated as "regex" or "regexp".

Linux distribution suitable for old hardware and/or new Linux users:

Linux Lite Easy to Use Free Linux Operating System
Linux Lite is currently deployed in businesses and Universities around the world. Whether you're in Education or Business, Linux Lite works with you.

Useful shell for poor/intermittent connections:

Mosh: the mobile shell
Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

Useful Vim technique:

How does the vim "write with sudo" trick work? - Stack Overflow
Uh-oh:
Critical Linux bug opens systems to compromise - Help Net Security
It’s ironic that the vulnerability crops up only if you have encrypted the system partition when installing the OS or have done it afterwards.

PuTTy Plus:

KiTTY - Welcome
KiTTY is a fork from version 0.67 of PuTTY, the best telnet / SSH client in the world.

Potential cure for Backlight Blues:

Unable to adjust the brightness in Ubuntu 16.04 - Ask Ubuntu
I would like to control the brightness of my Laptop

Intended to replace Freshmeat:

Open Hub, the open source network
Discover, Track and Compare Open Source

An alternative to PuTTY - Also known as "Tunnelier":

Bitvise SSH Client
Free SSH file transfer, terminal and tunneling!

Some tips and tricks about wildcards:

Unix Wildcards Gone Wild
Wildcards as their name states, are "wild" by their nature, but moreover, in some cases, wildcards can go berserk.

Free Windows XP-10 VirtualBox/Parallels Images from Microsoft

Virtual Machine (VM), Windows Virtual PC & BrowserStack : Microsoft Edge Dev
Download virtual machines

An abandoned project can still be used as a learning tool:

Firewall Builder | Simplifying Firewall Management
Are you still managing firewalls from the command line? [...] Firewall Builder makes it easy to configure your firewalls. Our application is trusted by thousands of users to help them manage their production firewalls.

BSD and Linux are similar and different:

BSD For Linux Users :: Intro
as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.

As with any OS, some post-installation hardening is recommended for FreeBSD:

FreeBSD installed. Your Next Five Moves Should...
[...] make these next five changes to secure it. [...] I would recommend these to anyone that is playing around with a FreeBSD install which will connect to the internet.

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution:

How to install and configure Cacti on Linux - Xmodulo
Cacti is one of the most widely used tools in network management solutions. It is open source, has built in user authentications and user permission features, shipped with frequently used graph templates like bandwidth, 95th percentile, hard disk usage, CPU usage, load average, RAM statistics and many more.

Font-rendering in Linux is finally getting pretty good:

Better Font Rendering In Linux With Infinality ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog
[Infinality] greatly improves the font rendering on Linux.

Dual-boot Macbook with rEFInd:

How to Install and Dual Boot Linux on a Mac
rEFInd is a boot manager that will allow you to choose between Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and other operating systems when you boot your computer.

Tomato tweaks:

5 Tips For Getting The Most Out of Your Tomato Router
5 favorite tips for Tomato routers to help speed them up and help you get your work done… faster!

Disable Location disclosure in Firefox:

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser — Geolocation in Firefox — Mozilla
Location-Aware Browsing is always opt-in in Firefox. No location information is ever sent without your permission. If you wish to disable the feature completely, please follow this set of steps:

A potential replacement for big webmail:

Mailpile: Let's take e-mail back!
A modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.

A user-friendly Linux server solution:

Zentyal, the Linux Small Business Server
Zentyal is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, that you can set up in less than 30 minutes.

A potential replacement for TrueCrypt:

Tomb :: The Crypto Undertaker - dyne.org
Tomb aims to be an 100% free and open source system for easy encryption and backup of personal files, written in code that is easy to review and links commonly shared components.

A bug-reporting procedure for Android OS:

Bug Reports - Post #94 - XDA Forum
To report bugs, follow these steps:
  • Install ADB (Google SDK) www.android.com for reference
  • Connect your phone to USB (Make sure USB Debugging is set)
  • run "adb logcat > {somefileonyourpc}"
  • Reproduce the problem
  • Press CRTL+C on your computer
  • Open a Bug Report, the link is on the main thread.
  • Make sure to attach the logcat file, a description of the problem, and the time it happened
  • After that, it can be tracked and I can ask additional information to solve

Tip for Android phones that have become non-phones:

The Inactive Skyrocket Projects Thread - Post #4 - XDA Forum
Nice note for those at home. If you rename libril.so it kills the no sim warning and stops the cell radios. So for unused devices it will do wonders for extending battery life.

Some Debian Firefox privacy add-ons are available as .deb packages:

DebianDesktopHowTo - Debian Wiki
For secure and sane browsing, install the following extensions with the Debian package manager: xul-ext-noscript (clean companies from default whitelist), xul-ext-adblock-plus (disable its default whitelist), xul-ext-cookie-monster, xul-ext-useragentswitcher (set generically), and xul-ext-refcontrol (set to block).

Lots of free useful information is waiting to be found online:

Free Online Computer Science and Programming Publications - FreeTechBooks.com
Please note that (a) we do not host pirated books and (b) we do not link to sites that host pirated books and (c) we do not even link to sites that link to sites that host pirated books.

Linux on the desktop is almost ready for Prime Time.. almost:

Linux Equivalents to Windows Software - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
This collection of articles aims to dispel the myth that Linux isn't ready for the desktop user to move away from the Microsoft world. If you are contemplating switching from Windows to Linux, please be assured that many of your favorite desktop applications have Linux equivalents, often with a comparable feature set.

Someone who's learning Python asked about something like this:

indentLine.vim - An indent guides plugin displaying thin vertical lines. : vim online
This plugin is used for displaying thin vertical lines at each indentation level for code indented with spaces. For code indented with tabs I think there is no need to support it, because you can use :set list lcs=tab:\|\ (here is a space).

Zenity looks like it has a lot of potential:

How to Make Simple Graphical Shell Scripts with Zenity on Linux
Zenity adds graphical interfaces to shell scripts with a single command. Shell scripts are a great way to automate repetitive tasks, but they’re normally confined to the terminal — Zenity brings them out of the terminal and onto your desktop.

A simple Zenity example:

#!/bin/bash
if zenity --question --text="Please press a button."
then zenity --info --text="You pressed Yes\!"
else zenity --error --text="You pressed No\!"
fi

A Linux Mint user suggested "vnstat -i wlan0 -l" for troublshooting.

vnStat - a network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD
vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s). It uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won't actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources. However, in Linux at least a 2.2 series kernel is required.

This is large, comprehensive-looking compilation of Linux substitutes for Windows programs:

Linux Equivalents to Windows Software - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
If you are contemplating switching from Windows to Linux, please be assured that many of your favorite desktop applications have Linux equivalents, often with a comparable feature set.

A copy of Xubuntu (or Linux Mint XFCE) can turn an old retired laptop or PC into a home web server:

How to install LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) on Xubuntu 14.04 | Linux, Forex and GIS
Its (sic) very easy to install LAMP on Xubuntu 14.04. With a single command we can get this LAMP and all dependencies installed.
Page last modified on January 07, 2019
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