GNOME Shell is a component of GNOME 3.0 which is the next generation of the GNOME Desktop Environment scheduled for release in April 2011. With the release fast approaching you may be eager to give it a try on your current Ubuntu 10.10 installation. There are currently two ways to install GNOME Shell. The easiest [...]

When pulling from a remote git repository located on shared hosting you will get the “git-upload-pack: command not found” error. A similar error occurs with the git-receive-pack when doing a push as well. This occurs when git is installed locally (in your home directory), and not system wide because git cannot locate these binaries. Normally [...]

Since VirtualBox version 4.0 USB support can be enabled in the Open Source Edition (OSE) by installing the optional Oracle Extension Pack. You can find out how to install the Extension Pack here. If you have an earlier 3.2 version, you must make sure you have the Oracle closed source version of VirtualBox which was [...]

Here is a great little command line trick to list only the subdirectories in your current working directory. $ ls -d */

By default the echo command will include a trailing newline at the end of a string. There are many times when you may want to suppress this newline for example when you want to format text in a certain way.There are a couple easy ways to do this. First you can use the ‘-n’ option. [...]

The column utility is helpful for taking raw data and formatting it in a way that is easier for humans to comprehend. It can take a single column of data and format it into many equally spaced columns. Alternatively it can format multiple rows of data into tables. In our first example we have a [...]

With the new version of VirtualBox (4.0.0) comes a new feature called Extension Packs. Before version 4.0, there were two editions of VirtualBox: a full binary containing all features and an “Open Source Edition” (OSE) with source code. With version 4.0, there is only one version any more, which is open source, and the closed-source [...]

A handy feature about Google Chrome web browser besides its speed and simplicity is the ability to sync everything to your Google account between multiple browsers. Currently the features the support synchronization include apps, extensions, autofill, preferences, bookmarks, and themes. Other services like xmarks (previously Foxmarks) sync bookmarks but to have this feature supported natively [...]

There are a couple ways to enable or disable system services at boot time in SUSE. From the command line: To enable a service: $ sudo insserv SERVICE To disable a service from starting: $ sudo insserv -r SERVICE You can also use YaST: YaST Control Center -> System -> System Services (runlevel) Select the [...]

Most programs will return an exit status of 0 if the program was successful, while a non-zero exit status usually indicates an error. You can find the exit status or exit code of the previously executed command by accessing the “$?” shell variable. $ COMMAND $ echo $? Typically when a command terminates on a [...]