In Ubuntu it can be difficult to customize the indicator applet which by default contains the sound, battery, Bluetooth, and empathy icons. If you don’t use empathy and want to remove the icon there is no simple option to change. Since this is a default indicator icon you must completely remove the indicator-messages package to [...]

For whatever reason you may need to free the disk cache at some point. Since Linux 2.6.16 the interface /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches has been available to simplify this process. First we run the sync command before dropping the cache. Doing this will ensure that all memory in the cache is updated and all dirty pages are synchronized [...]

Strangely enough there is no way to directly extract the contents of an .rpm package using the rpm (RPM Package Manager) tool. This feature can come in handy for example if you need to access a single file in a package but you don’t want to install it on your system. Fortunately there is a [...]

There are a few ways to take a relative path and convert it to an absolute path which can be accessed regardless of the current working directory. The easiest method is to use the readlink utility which comes bundled with about every distribution. Here my working directory is my home directory. It is printed as [...]

Comments are done in BASH and most other shells by placing a ‘#’ mark at the beginning of a line. To create a multi-line comment, or to comment out an entire block of code, you can use the following HERE DOCUMENT feature. :

Having a clone of a particular VM is helpful whether you want to keep a backup vanilla image to use in the future, or create a cluster of identical machines that can run in parallel. This process is not well documented and can be slightly tricky. Hopefully this guide will help many of you through [...]

It is often necessary to have the ability to SSH between your Linux Host and your Guest virtual machines. In VirtualBox you can do this by simply configuring a second network interface on the Guest. This type of setup will not only allow SSH sessions between Host and Guest, but also between separate Guests themselves. [...]

Changing the hostname on a RHEL box is fairly straightforward if you perform the following steps. First change the HOSTNAME line in /etc/sysconfig/network Then change the hostname in /etc/hosts From here you can either reboot for the changes to take effect or do the following two steps. Force the system to start using the hostname. [...]

In many cases it can be helpful to access text from within a PDF file but accomplishing this can be next to impossible. Luckily in Linux there is a command line program called pdftotext which is included with the xpdf package. This first step is making sure that the xpdf package is installed. In Ubuntu [...]

VirtualBox makes it easy to share folders between the host OS and various guest virtual machines, but it can be difficult to remember the exact way to go about mounting the shared folder within a guest VM. Here is the way to do it correctly. First off make sure you have installed VirtualBox guest additions. [...]