Category Archives: Sysadmin

Yet another fine article by me:

“Xfce 4.8 is a major upgrade to the popular lightweight desktop environment. 4.8 was released in January 2011, replacing 4.6. Xfce 4.8 is available in Debian Testing, Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, Fedora 15, and probably other Linux distributions. There is more to Xfce than meets the eye; let’s dig under the hood and uncover some of its hidden goodies.

“Xfce is broken up into several dozen packages, so you have a lot of control over which components you install. In Debian and Natty you can install the Xfce4 meta-package to get a complete desktop environment with niceties like Network Manager, themes, a top panel, a dock, system menu, and a nice logout dialog with a complete set of actions: log out, shut down, restart, suspend, hibernate, and save session. Figure 1 shows how it looks in Natty.

Xubuntu, Ubuntu’s official Xfce spin, ships with more th”emes, multimedia apps, more apps in the dock, and much Gnome integration. Ubuntu users don’t need to download and install Xubuntu, but can get it by installing xubuntu-desktop with all of its Recommends on any *buntu. You can install any number of desktops and window managers on any Linux, and select the one you want to use at login. There is a trick to it on Ubuntu, in case you hadn’t noticed– the Ubuntu login screen won’t show your options until you enter which user is logging in. Then a teeny-tiny menu with various options appears at the bottom of the screen. (Apparently Ubuntu is “humanity towards others with perfect vision and sharp, high resolution computer monitors.”)

“Fedora has its own Xfce customizations that I’ve only skimmed…” Read the rest here

Things You Can’t Do With a GUI: Finding Stuff on Linux , by me, is full of great stuff like:

“How much space is left on my hard drive or drives? This particular incantation is one of my favorites because it uses egrep to exclude temporary directories, and shows the filesystem types:

$ df -hT | egrep -i "file|^/"
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext4 51G 3.6G 32G 11% /
/dev/sda3 ext4 136G 2.3G 127G 2% /home
/dev/sda1 ext3 244G 114G 70G 63% /home/carla/photoshare
/dev/sdb2 ext3 54G 5.8G 45G 12% /home/carla/music

What files were changed on this day, in the current directory?

$ ls -lrt | awk '{print $6" "$7" "$9 }' | grep 'May 22'

May 22 file_a.txt
May 22 file_b.txt”

Read the rest on Linux.com!