Cool Tips, Tricks And Hacks For inux

Some of The Best and Most Popular Linux Application Programs. All are available for free

If you are a Linux user and looking for some cool free Linux apps, than this post is for you 'cause here i'm posting must have free apps for you Linux. There are lots of Linux apps available on the net, but only few of them are really helpful for your Linux. In this post i'll show you some of the most useful Linux apps.

Here is the list of the must have free apps for Linux

1. Konqueror - Konqueror is a web browser, file manager and file viewer designed as a core part of the K Desktop Environment. It is developed by volunteers and can run on most Unix-like operating systems. Konqueror, along with the rest of the components in the KDEBase package, is licensed and distributed under the GNU General Public License.

2. Lynx - Lynx is one of the most popular web browsers for command-line interfaces. Lynx runs on Un*x, VMS, Windows 95/98/NT, DOS386+ but not 3.1, 3.11, or OS/2 EMX.

3. Thunderbird - Thunderbird is a good quality graphical email client that uses the GTK toolkit but is not tied to any particular desktop environment. It has pretty much all the features you would expect to find in such a program: mailing list handling, encryption and digital signatures for outgoing and incoming mails and plenty of filtering options.

4. KMail is the email component of Kontact, the integrated personal information manager of KDE.

5. Evolution - Evolution is the most feature-rich of the mailers we looked at – at least as they were set up out of the box – largely because of the comprehensive range of plugins provided, although the one to play audio attachments could get a little tiresome, especially if deployed in a large office.

6. OpenOffice.org - OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo) is a cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office ‘97–2003 formats, Microsoft Office 2007 format among others.

7. KOffice - KOffice is an office suite for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). All its components are released under free software/open source licenses. KOffice applications use OpenDocument as their native file format when possible and the suite is released separately from KDE and can be downloaded at the KOffice homepage.

8. MPlayer - MPlayer is a free and open source media player distributed under the GNU General Public License. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows versions works, with some minor problems, also in DOS using HX DOS Extender. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available.

9. Totem - Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on xine-lib or GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation.

10. Gedit - Gedit is a free software, UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It is mainly designed for editing program code, and structured text, such as markup languages. It is designed to have a clean, simple graphical user interface according to the philosophy of the GNOME project.

11. KPhotoAlbum - KPhotoAlbum (previously known as KimDaBa) is an image viewer and organizer for Unix-like systems created and maintained by Jesper K. Pedersen. The core philosophy behind its creation was that it should be easy for users to annotate images and videos taken with a digital camera. Users can search for images based on those annotations (also called categories) and use the results in a variety of ways. Features include slideshows, annotation, KIPI plugin support for manipulating images, and boolean searches.

12. DigiKam - DigiKam is an image organizer and editor for the KDE desktop environment. It supports all major image formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by date, timeline, or by tags. Users can also add captions and ratings to their images, search through them and save searches as ’smart folders’. With the plugins they can also export albums to Flickr, Gallery2, Google Earth’s KML files, Simpleviewer, burn them on CD, or create web galleries.

13. GCompris - GCompris is a suite of educational software for children aged 2 to 10. It is available for Linux, Mac OS X and other systems. A Windows version is available as crippleware with a restricted number of activities; it is possible to access all the activities in Windows for a fee.

Learn More About Linux Security

General overview of security issues that face the administrator of Linux systems.

Although linux-based operating systems are considerably safer when compared to Windows and Mac OSX, there are still steps that you can take to ensure that your linux box stays safe and protected. In this post I will illustrate a few techniques you can use to keep your machine locked down tight.

1. Firewalls are your guardian angels.

First of all, keep a software firewall active on your system, and restrict access to ports that allow remote access into your system, a good idea is to allow only a few select hosts access to ports used by services such as ssh (port 22) or telnet (port 23). Keeping a firewall in place ensures that you alone dictate who gets to access remote services on your computer and who doesn’t. To set up a firewall in linux, you can use the iptables program which comes standard with most linux distributions. However, iptables is quite difficult and complicated to set up correctly, and you will need to spend some time fiddling with the command line, but it is very flexible and powerful once configured correctly.

If messing about with iptables dosen’t appeal to you, there are frontends to iptables that you can use to set up effective firewalls. One such frontend is ufw (uncomplicated firewall) this program comes standard on ubuntu and is quite simple to set up, to use it you first have to enable it by typing in ’sudo enable ufw’ in the terminal, once the ufw service is active, adding rules is as simple as ’sudo allow 22/tcp’ > this statement allows all tcp traffic on port 22, swap allow for deny and you have the ssh service blocked, Its that simple, much easier than mucking about with iptables.

Of course, there are many people who do not like the idea of using command-line programs and like all their apps to be graphical. If you prefer a GUI configured firewall, then firestarter is the choice for you. Firestarter is a breeze to use, and has good documentation available on the firestarter website.

2. Passwords are for your protection, choose them well

Choose good user passwords, especially for root. One way to choose a secure password is to take a sentence, reduce it to an acronym and then replace some letters of the acronym with symbols and add some numbers to it. this mixing of alphabets, numbers and symbols, along with its long length will be a strong password.

Never use actual words that have meaning as passwords. These types of passwords are weak and can be cracked using dictionary attacks. Also along those lines: Never use words that hold personal significance with you.. i.e don’t use passwords that people who know you will be inclined to think that you would use, like a favorite pet’s name.. etc.

And for god’s sake, don’t use the word ‘password’ as a password…. ( don’t laugh… thats one of the most common passwords .. )

3. Use antivirus

Yeaps you read right.. antivirus. Antivirus on linux you say? Yes, linux has antivirus suites as well , but this is more for cleaning off your thumbdrives that you may have used in an infected windows machine than for killing linux viruses, as the system of user permissions for executing files makes linux a very inhospitable place for computer viruses to live. clamAV is a good antivirus choice, with a GUI version available for most major distros.

4. Be careful what scripts you get off the net

Getting bash scripts off the net is convenient, but be careful what scripts you run on your system, and make sure you check them out first. If you suspect that a script you got has some nasty intentions behind it, but you do not have the expertise in bash scripting to be sure, post the script in text form on linux support forums and the community will help you out. Unfortunatly, there are idiots out there who write destructive shell scripts and release them into the wilds of the internet, in this case intuition is your best defence.

5. Encrypt sensitive data that you may have.

The concept behind encryption is relatively simple, make the data to be encrypted unreadable to anybody besides authorised users.
My favourite program for encrypting data on linux AND windows would have to be truecrypt. Truecrypt works by creating a virtual volume which you can then set a passphrase or security key to. When you mount the virtual volume, you can then add files to it, which will be totally encrypted and unviewable once unmounted. The only way to mount the drive is to supply the passphrase or key.

6. Keep your BIOS set to boot from your harddrive and then add a password to your bios.

This is to keep people from booting off from live CDs and cracking your password from them. Although it is relatively easy to reset the BIOS password, this should be at least a minor detterance to those who may try this cracking method.

Download Youtube Videos In Linux Without Any Software

Download and save videos directly from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, Putfile and more.

Previously i posted "10 Easy Ways to Download YouTube Videos in Windows OS". In this post i'll show you simple trick to download youtube videos in Linux. You don't need any software to download youtube videos in Linux… Just follow these steps and enjoy the flvs :)

• Open the required video in the web browser.
• Let it start streaming/buffering.
• Minimise the window and open /tmp.
• Look for a file flash
• Drag the file on to your desktop.
• Once the video is buffered in the browser, the file would have been downloaded.

NOTE: Do Not Close The Browser Window/Tab while doing this. This method works for other similar websites also.

Do you have questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to post a comment!

pcmelabd.com

Top 10 Linux Media Players - Play Any Audio Or Video Format In Linux OS

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, i have compiled a list of 10 high quality Linux video applications, covering a broad spectrum of uses.

One of the many perks of being a Linux user is that you have plenty of excellent software to choose from. This is especially true if you are in search for an essential application like a media player because there are definitely loads of options. However, this could sometimes be a disadvantage particularly to new-to-Linux users for the reason that they could get overwhelmed with the many choices they have.

Here i have compiled some of the best free media players for Linux OS to play almost any video, audio formats you will ever need as a Linux user.

Here is the list of my Top 10 Linux Media Players:

1. MPlayer

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies. Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+. MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

Read More | Download MPlayer


2. VLC Player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols without external codec or program.

It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC can play:

* MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
* DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
* From satellite cards (DVB-S)
* Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
* From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)

Read More | Download VLC media player


3. Xine

Xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and some of the most uncommon formats, too.

Read More | Download Xine


4. Totem

Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation. It comes with added functionality such as: Video thumbnailer for the file manager, Nautilus properties tab, Mozilla (Firefox) plugin to view movies inside your browser (in development), Webcam utility (in development) and more.

Read More | Download Totem


5. Ogle DVD Player

Ogle is the first opensource DVD player to support DVD menus! A DVD player for the Solaris, Linux and BSD environments released under the GNU Public License (GPL). Ogle, bringing you what you've always wanted e.g. Bookmarks, time skipping, multichannel audio, SPDIF output, crop & zoom video and more.

Read More | Download Ogle DVD Player


6. Helix Player

The Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating system versions are currently in development.

Read More | Download Helix Player


7. Real Player

RealPlayer for Linux allows you to play more video, including popular Windows Media files, RealMedia files and more. Get instant access to your favorite songs or video. Easily create, save, edit and manage different playlists for any event or mood. Updated multi-channel stereo sound allows you to enjoy 5-channel audio plus a dedicated sub-woofer channel for streaming or playback through either your ALSA or OSS sound system. Need to take a break from a live stream? Just click pause. Perfect Play automatically buffers streaming content. So you can pause, rewind and fast-forward through live broadcasts without missing a thing.

Read More | Download Real Player for Linux


8. Kaffeine

Kaffeine is a full featured Multimedia-Player for KDE. By default it uses xine as backend.
Kaffeine is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

Here are some key features of "Kaffeine":

* Timeshifting
* Instant record
* Electronic Program Guide
* On screen display

Read More | Download Kaffeine Media Player


9. KMPlayer

The KMPlayer is a versatile media player which can cover various types of container format such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime among others. It handles a wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and screenshots in many ways.

The player provides both internal and external filters with a fully controlled environment in terms of connections to other splitters, decoders, audio/video transform filters and renderers without grappling with the DirectShow merit system. Internal filters are not registered to user's system to keep it from being messed up with system filters.

In December 2008 KMPlayer was bought by Pandora.tv, and continues to be made available as freeware.

Read More | Download KMPlayer


10. Codeine

Codeine project is a very simple xine-based media player.

Here are some key features of "Codeine":

* Plays DVDs, VCDs, all video formats *
* Bundled with a simple web-page KPart () Starts very quickly
* Simple, uncluttered interface
* "Session based"
* Intelligent behaviour
* You can record http streams with the hidden record action
* You can use drag and drop to play files. Try dragging shoutcast stream playlists, they will play too.

Read More | Download Codeine

Do you have questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to post a comment! pcmelabd.com

Linux, Unix, and variant tips

Below is a listing of various tips that can be used with most Linux and Unix. Some of the below tips may list a date next to them for the month and year that they were featured in our monthly tip section.

Access and control different computers on a network.
Quickly search manuals in Linux and Unix
Unix / Linux shortcuts
Create aliases for commands
Back to tips main page

Access and control different computers on a network

Easily and freely control multiple computers running any number of operating systems from one computer using VNC.

The latest version of VNC can be downloaded directly from their website here.

Quickly search manuals in Linux and Unix

Users who have the manuals installed on their computer can quickly search those manuals by typing:

man -k keyword

This is great for locating a command you may not be able to remember.

• Additional information about the man command can be found here.

Unix / Linux shortcuts

Get the latest Unix/Linux shortcuts by visiting our Unix/Linux shortcut page.

Create aliases for commands

Create an alias for commands frequently forgotten, cause issues or long commands.

For example, you may type edit to edit a file when in Linux or Unix. However, users who may be new to Linux or Unix may not be able to use the edit program or this may cause an error message.

Set the edit command for an easier to use editor such as pico. Below is an example:

alias edit pico

raihan