Table of contents for Linux Made Simple (Ninth Edition) in Linux Made Simple (Ninth Edition)

When Mint installs itself, it changes the bootloader at the beginning of your hard drive to a program called GNU GRand Unified Bootloader (Grub). Put simply, Grub scans your hard drive for visible operating systems and then presents you with a boot menu, allowing you to switch between them. In most cases – specifically those where your Windows install is detected by the Mint installer – this should be set up to work perfectly from the off. You start your PC, Grub displays the boot menu, and if you don’t make a choice within five seconds, it’ll start to load Linux Mint. In this event, the only thing you’ll want to know is how to make changes to the boot menu – you may prefer to make Windows the default…

Now that you’re up and running in Mint, you’ll be wanting to start making productive use of it. That naturally involves running applications and utilities. Start by taking an inventory of the programs you use in Windows and checking the website for each to see if a Linux build is available. If there isn’t one, don’t panic – you’ll find the vast majority of Windows applications have an equivalent version for Linux. Better still, many of these are both free and open source, so you won’t need to splash out to use them, but do of course donate to them. The most obvious place to start is your office suite. When it comes to replacing your word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation tool, you’ll find everything you need is already…

Fedora has been around, in one form or another, since the early 1990s. The distro had its first release in 1995 and the early releases were named Red Hat Commercial Linux. During these early years, the distro was developed exclusively by Red Hat and the community was limited to contributing bug reports and contributing packages included in the distro. This changed in 2003 when the company shuttered Red Hat Linux in support of the Fedora Project and opened it up to contributions from the community. The aim of Fedora is to provide the latest packages while maintaining a completely free software system. The distro was initially called Fedora Core and was named after one of the two main software repositories – Core and Extras. The Fedora Core repo contained all…

Anything Windows can do, Linux can do… just as well. Not as catchy as the classic song, we’ll admit, but it’s the truth: as a mature desktop operating system, Linux is blessed with some solid software which can perform everyday desktop tasks with absolute aplomb. Our recommendation in the office stakes is LibreOffice, a cross-platform collection of productivity applications which has been around, in many forms and under many names, since 1985. Despite its venerable legacy, it’s still the most actively-developed office package out there. The Write Stuff LibreOffice 5 should come preinstalled with your Linux distribution - you can check that you have the latest version by running Writer and going to Help/About LibreOffice. If it isn’t installed, open up your package manager and install it from there. You…

Instant messaging has made a huge cultural impact over the past decade, but it’s far from a modern concept. We can actually trace direct digital messaging back to the 1960s when multi-user systems at MIT contained their own internal messaging system. The first multi-user online client, as far as we can work out, was issued by Compuserve in 1980. Quaintly (and very much reflecting its place in time) they called it CB Simulator – and if you’ve ever used a CB radio, we’re sure you can grasp the chaos and iniquity that ensued. More recently, ICQ (released in 1996) really brought the concept of one-to-one or multi-user instant messaging to the attention of the public at a time when the internet was exploding in popularity, and it was been followed…

Remember the days when we used to buy CD players with built-in radios, or cassette tapes for listening to our music? No? You’re not alone. When it’s possible to carry around a lifetime’s worth of tunes on your phone, and stream audio wirelessly to your TV or HiFi system wirelessly, why on Earth would you invest in something so archaic? We’ll wager everyone needs a good media player on their desktop, however. Whether it’s to enjoy music or internet radio while you work, or watch a movie on your laptop while travelling by train, digital media should be enjoyable whenever, wherever and however you need it. And fortunately, Ubuntu has all the tools you need for playback built-in. If you’re coming from Windows, there is one key adjustment you’ll have…

There’s one name which dominates digital photo editing all around the world. Adobe, and more specifically its Photoshop package, has been so popular for so long it’s synonymous with the task and has become a verb. To “Photoshop” a picture is the same as conflating“to Google” for internet search or “to Hoover” for vacuuming the floor. The bad news is that the vast majority of Adobe products aren’t available on Linux operating systems. Photoshop certainly isn’t and probably never will be. Is that it then? The joys of Ubuntu and its ilk are not for photographers or those who like to tweak and digitally develop their snaps before sharing them with the world? Of course it doesn’t. Get your Gimp on We’d wager that even on Windows most people who…

Gaming on Linux has never been better. With over 1,500 games available on Steam (store.steampowered.com) alone that support Ubuntu (officially from 12.04 LTS and, unofficially, many other distros), the breadth of games that you can get on Linux is astonishing: from casual card games and puzzles for whiling away a few hours, to indie games that might be low on budget but are high on inventiveness, and even big budget‘AAA’ games are now available. Games are also beginning to run better than ever on Linux distros now that many game engines used by some of the biggest names in the gaming industry – such as the powerful CryEngine.com – have native Linux support. Gamers switching from the bloated Windows OS to Linux can also see performance increases, as their system…

If you’re migrating from Windows, you may find the way Linux handles drives and partitions is bit of a culture shock. For starters, there are no drive letters involved – instead, you’ll see lots of references to /dev/sda1,/dev/sdc and so on. It may look bewildering, but it doesn’t take long to realise the way Linux treats drives is just as logical as Windows – more so in some cases. Read on to discover how to demystify the jargon and understand exactly how drives work within the Linux file system. Identify your drives Open the Disks utility from the Dash – use the annotation opposite to navigate it, making a note of how drives are referenced in Ubuntu. They appear to relate to a folder path beginning /dev/ – and that’s…

Linux live CDs are a wonderful invention, they let you try new distros, show Linux off to your unenlightened friends, and fix broken systems. There are live distros aimed specifically at repairing damaged systems, but they have a common drawback. They all require a certain amount of expertise and most of us don’t break our systems often enough to gain that sort of experience. When your computer sits there showing you nothing but a glum message from the bootloader, your main priority is fixing it as quickly as possible, not spending time using a search engine from a live CD to try and find the correct Grub incantation for your situation. I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about bootloaders, but I still don’t break them so often that I feel comfortable…

For non-crypto nerds, VeraCrypt is a program that enables you to create encrypted containers of any size, inside which you can place your personal photos, bank details or any other data for which the world isn’t ready. VeraCrypt mounts these containers with a password, which means only you can access your files. For the uber-paranoid there are even options to combine multiple encryption ciphers and use key files in addition to a password. VeraCrypt does require you to have some idea in advance of the size of all the files you need. Once an encrypted container has been created, it’s not possible to resize it. What’s more, if you create a container in the full belief that there’s enough room for all your files and then find you don’t have…

Finding hardware drivers Q Where do I get drivers for my hardware? The accompanying disc includes Windows drivers only. A Most hardware doesn’t need separate drivers with Linux: the kernel includes drivers for a massive range of hardware. Nine times out of ten, the kernel recognises the hardware when you plug it in and loads the appropriate driver without any input from you. Some hardware does have separate drivers, often because they use proprietary code that cannot be included with the kernel. In such cases, a live CD, such as Knoppix or System Rescue CD, will often recognise the device – these tend to include a lot of extra drivers. If the hardware is an internal device, it will usually show up in the output from lspci, and adding the…

Previously we introduced you to the basics of using the Terminal. We opened by revealing it works in the same way as your Linux shell; how commands are structured (utility command -option); plus gave you the tools to manage software packages and get further help. This time, we’re going to look at how you can navigate your file system, work with files and folders and learn some more time-saving shortcuts in the bargain. When you open a new Terminal window, the command prompt automatically places you in your own personal home folder. You can verify this using the ls command, which lists the contents of the current folder. The default Terminal application displays folder names in blue, and filenames in white, helping you differentiate between them. The ls command can…

One of the biggest changes that catches Windows users moving to Linux is the way that software is installed. Instead of downloading an executable file from some website or other, running it and hoping it doesn’t clobber your existing library files (DLLs) or install some dubious adware or malware, Linux distributions maintain repositories of software, which are all packaged up for that distro and tested for compatibility with the rest of the distro. In this tutorial, we will look at how this is done by distros that use the Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) software management system, as developed by Debian and used by distros from Ubuntu to Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. Repositories A repository is a collection of software packages for a distro. Each major distro release will have…

Most people reading this are probably pretty familiar with creating, sending or receiving ZIP files. Zip takes a collection of files and stores them in a ZIP archive file, compressing the data in the process. As well as storing the contents of the files, it also stores metadata, which is extra information associated with an object. In the case of files, it includes the modification times, their owners and permissions, and, of course, the name of each file. When you unzip an archive, all of this information is extracted, which recreates the original set of files exactly as they were. Archives have several uses, but the most popular include bundling up a set of files for download – a single file is easier to handle and the compression makes it…

There’s nothing worse than attempting to upgrade or install a new operating system only for something to go wrong. You can replace that gut-clenching feeling with one of minor irritation by making sure you’ve backed up your Windows installation (or just your data) before you begin, this will enable you to easily roll back to a working state if something goes awry. There are numerous backup tools for the job, but we’ve plumped for Redo Backup and Recovery, which works beautifully with both Windows and Linux installations – go to www.redobackup.org/download.php and follow the instructions to download the Redo Backup live CD in ISO format. Burning it to disc is simple: pop a blank disc in the drive, browse to the ISO file in Windows 10, right-click it and choose…

You’re now ready to take your first steps into the Linux universe via the excellent Linux Mint distro, but before you get stuck in, let us explode some of the common myths and help you better understand why switching is a great move. Q Isn’t Linux just for geeks – newbies aren’t welcome? Utter rubbish. These days, Linux – and Mint in particular – is firmly aimed at normal human beings. It’s easy to dive in and get started, as you’ve already found out with the installation process, and is used for a wide variety of professional and personal purposes. Q Isn’t Linux all about the command line? Most Linux distros ship with a default desktop environment. You can even swap desktops to find the one that suits the way…

The best way to run applications in your new Linux Mint install is natively, but if there’s a specific Windows program you can’t do without then it may be possible to get it running. What you’ll need is a special program called Wine, which uses some clever trickery to use parts of Windows, enabling you to run many Windows programs as if they were native Linux ones. Wine can be a tricky tool to master, but thanks to the free PlayOnLinux tool, you can get many popular applications up and running with the minimum of fuss. Open the Software Manager, then search for ‘PlayOnLinux’. Click ‘Install’ and it’ll automatically download and install Wine. Once installed, launch PlayOnLinux and allow it walk you through the first-use wizard. You’ll be left with…

Ubuntu is, in many respects, the first distro to make a serious effort to bring in new users. The distro brought Linux into the mainstream, played a significant part in changing the notion and misconceptions about Linux and was able to successfully pitch itself as a viable OS alternative to Windows and mac OS. Ubuntu was started by Mark Shuttleworth. He formed Canonical after selling his security-firm, Thawte, to VeriSign. Shuttleworth was a huge fan of the Debian project. However, there were many things about Debian that didn’t fit in with Shuttleworth’s vision of an ideal OS. He therefore invited a dozen or so Debian developers he knew and respected to his flat in London in April 2004 and hashed out the groundwork for the Ubuntu project. The group decided…

Until the release of Mandrake, Linux was generally thought of as a geek’s OS. Mandrake was the first distribution that focused on the convenience of the user. The goal was to provide a distro that could be operated by regular computer users. It had features such as the ability to auto-mount CDs without messing around with configuration files, which brought greater convenience to the Linux desktop. The Mandrake project has perhaps the most convoluted existence for a free software project. Over the years, the project has undergone various name changes, mergers and forks. However, it has spawned many distros and there are several major ones that are still active and can trace their lineage to Mandrake. The distro has developed a bunch of custom tools – collectively known as drakxtools…

Gentoo Linux The goal of the Gentoo project was to create a distro without pre-compiled binaries that was tuned to the hardware on which it was installed. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user’s preferences and is often optimised. It was initially called Enoch but Gentoo 1.0 was released in 2002. Gentoo has the distinction of being one of the most configurable distros and appeals to Linux users who want full control of the software that’s installed and running on their computer. Gentoo users get to create their system from the ground up: the distro encourages the user to build a Linux kernel tailored to their particular hardware. It allows very fine control of which services are installed and running. Memory usage…

Firefox One of the most widely recognised pieces of open source software, Mozilla’s Firefoxweb browser is the default browser on virtually every Linux distro. It’s pretty responsive and known for its privacy features. You can customise it to the hilt and also extend it with an impressive number of extensions. www.firefox.com gFTP The gFTP client is a feature-rich client that’ll get the job done, if you need to download files via FTP occasionally. It has a simple two-pane interface that shows the content of the local and remote filesystem. Using gFTP you can also transfer files between two remote servers. http://gftp.seul.org Tox Privacy conscious users should try the new decentralised IM and VoIP client called Tox. This relies on a distributed network, which uses P2P connections, the same technology used…

Your Linux system comes pre-installed with a whole host of useful applications and software, but there will come a time – there always does – that you want something new. There are various complex ways of getting hold of new things, and perhaps they’ll be routes you explore later on in your Linux life. For now, there’s a much easier way to find new programs for your computer: a package manager. Package managers deal with everything for you. They retrieve the very latest versions of your desired software from the internet. They sort out any dependencies – items your computer might be missing – that are required for you to be able to run that software. They install everything automatically. And, once your software is firmly ensconced in your PC,…

Where would we be without spreadsheets? Either considerably poorer or considerably richer, most likely. Whichever is true, there comes a time when we all need to put numbers in a grid. You’re probably familiar with Microsoft’s Excel, which rules the spreadsheet roost over on Windows. On Linux there are, as ever, plenty of options, but we lean towards the well-honed spreadsheeting machine that is LibreOffice Calc. It should come preinstalled with your Linux distribution, but if it’s nowhere to be found you’ll need to install it – as part of the main LibreOffice package – from your distribution’s package manager. In the case of Ubuntu 15.10, you’d use Ubuntu Software Centre. We’re looking at LibreOffice 5 for this tutorial, but if you have an earlier version you’ll be fine to…

Email is one of the internet’s oldest technologies. It outdates the web, it outdates instant messaging and it even outdates the internet’s predecessor, Arpanet. MIT, so often the innovator in these fields, started using software called Mailbox and SndMsg to leave messages for each other in 1965. The @symbol was introduced to route mail to specific computers during the development of Arpanet in the early 70s; by 1974 the US military was a heavy user, and by 1978 75% of all Arpanet traffic was email. You could even reasonably give credit to email for inspiring the earliest development of the internet: this was a closed-system technology that the public couldn’t wait to use. We’d stake money on you having at least one email address, and if you’ve been around for…

While Linux has a sterling reputation as a server and desktop operating system, it’s less well known that many major studios also use Linux for their creative workstations too. When it comes to high end audio production, for example, there are many powerful and stable packages that professional studios use for mastering music and film soundtracks all around the world. Industry grade programs for audio editing include the excellent Ardour and LMMS (formerly known as the Linux Multimedia Studio). You’ll find both of these suites in the Ubuntu Software Centre and they’re well worth looking at just to understand the full potential of your OS. Both are completely free to download and use, and open source to boot. Before you get too involved, however, it’s worth pointing out that Ardour…

The likes of Instagram, Periscope and Vine may have made shooting and sharing short video clips much easier than in days of yore, but what if you want your family movie to be more than 15 seconds of quick gurning at the camera and gone? How do you stitch together multiple takes of little Betsy amusingly trying to eat the dog’s dinner, and add captions, subtitles and a title page for her gran? For cutting and stitching video with transitions and effects, there’s no replacement, yet, for the traditional non-linear video editing desktop application. And fortunately for you, Linux has plenty to choose from. Two to pick For most users in the Ubuntu environment you’ll likely settle quickly on one of two packages. The first is Openshot (www.openshot.org), which you…

One of the most confusing aspects of switching from Windows to Linux is understanding how drivers – and in particular graphics card drivers – work. When you install Ubuntu on your PC, you’ll notice it appears to install the drivers you need for graphics to work perfectly, and indeed this is the case in the vast majority of cases. These drivers are open source, designed to provide the key functionality for any graphics card to work with Ubuntu. Because they’re designed to just work, many of these drivers aren’t interested in providing you with cutting edge performance. For day to day use – browsing the internet, word processing and even editing images – they’re perfectly adequate, but if you have a modern graphics card, and want to take full advantage…

Linux handles drives differently to Windows, so if you’ve migrated from a Windows PC, we recommend you first read our tutorial on the previous page to ascertain how drives are labelled and accessed in Ubuntu. The good news is that – once you’ve over the initial shock – the transition isn’t that big. And now you’ve understood how things work, you can go on to learn more about removable media, including USB flash storage as well as CD and DVD. Working with USB drives Ubuntu is more than happy to work with USB storage of any nature – hard drives and flash drives are treated equally. Just plug it in, and the drive will be automatically mounted and accessible, so long as it’s formatted using a supported file system. Ubuntu…

If you’ve migrated to Ubuntu from Windows, you’ll already have an inkling about file permissions and users, plus the effect one has on the other, but it can still be a confusing subject to grasp, particularly where Linux is concerned. Before you dive into the confusing world of who’s got what access to which file, acquaint yourself with the essentials of file permissions. Grasp the fundamentals Despite appearances to the contrary, every single thing in Linux is a file, including folders and hardware devices. On top of this, the Linux file system – ext2, ext3 or ext4 – applies special permissions to files that ultimately determine how they’re accessed, and by whom. There are three levels of access to files in Linux, and while they differ slightly between files and…

One is never enough. These days most people – especially Linux-using enthusiasts – are likely to have more than one PC in their homes. Perhaps they even have home servers, media boxes, laptops and more. The annoyance is when you want to use more than one at once. Sure, you can pop a laptop next to your desktop. But what if you’re slumped in front of the TV and need something from the desktop upstairs? Enter remote desktop. This comes in a number of forms, but the basic concept is that it enables one remote PC to connect to another PC, over a network (even the internet) and take control of it. It’s as if you were sat in front of the remote machine. Sound crazy? Gamers livestream their gameplay…

Start-up problems. That moment when – having expected yourself to be getting on with your day’s work or entertainment – you find yourself staring at a cryptic error message, or even worse, a blank screen. No matter how many times you press reset or restart, the same impenetrable barrier blocks your path. So, what can you do? Start-up problems come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be difficult to track down. There are, however, some sound principles to use that will resolve many errors, and in this tutorial, we’re going to look at the tools and techniques required to troubleshoot most start-up problems. You should start by examining how the boot process works (see The Boot process box, p121). This reveals that the boot process can be split…

Are you an ‘accidental admin’? Someone who realised, too late, that they were responsible for the workings of a Linux server and – because something has gone wrong – finds themselves lost in a world of terminals and command lines that make little sense to normal humans? What is SSH, you may be asking yourself. Do those letters after ‘tar’ actually mean anything real? How do I apply security patches to my server? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And to help you out, we’ve put together this quick guide with essential Linux commands that every accidental admin should know. Becoming an accidental admin While we’d argue that they should, not everyone who starts using Linux as an operating system does so through choice. We suspect that most people’s first interaction…

With your fail-safe backup in place, you’re now ready to take the plunge and install Linux Mint. The following procedure assumes you want to install it alongside your existing Windows installation – it’s a good route to follow for first-time switchers, as well as for those helping others to make the migration to Linux. You’ll find the latest version at linuxmint.com. Like all versions of Mint, it’s a Long Term Support (LTS) release, with support guaranteed until April 2019. If you’d rather try Ubuntu, go to www.ubuntu.com and select ‘Download’. Click ‘Ubuntu Desktop’ and download the correct version for your processor (64-bit in most cases) of either Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS or for the latest release, 15.10. Creating your Mint or Ubuntu install disc or flash drive is the same process…

When you boot into Mint for the first time, you’ll find it looks very similar to Windows. The default desktop is called Cinnamon, and is structured in a similar way to the Windows desktop: there’s the equivalent of the Start menu, Taskbar and Notification area at the bottom of the screen, with desktop icons providing shortcuts to key locations. Click the Menu button and up pops a menu with easy access to all your programs, grouped into categories. Speed things up by typing the first few letters of the program you’re looking for into the Search box and it’ll appear in the list of results, just one click away. On the left-hand side of the menu you’ll see some other handy shortcuts – at the top key programs like Firefox…

Your favourite Linux distribution isn’t an individual unit in itself. On the inside, it is made up of various apps, libraries, modules and toolkits. On the outside, it’s part of a much larger and very vibrant ecosystem that sustains several other distros. Also part of this larger Linux ecosystem are very active user communities and various support infrastructures that help nourish the distros and other projects. Over the course of their lifetime, the different elements of the Linux ecosystem interact with each other as well as with their environment. They collaborate, exchange ideas and features, and sometimes swap resources for their mutual benefit as well as for the enhancement of the ecosystem. The Linux ecosystem fosters the development of innovative projects and products. However, since the environment can only sustain…

Another distribution that has played a crucial role in shaping Linux’s DNA is Red Hat Linux, which was created in 1994 by Marc Ewing. Bob Young and his ACC Corporation bought Ewing’s business and created Red Hat Software. The company went public in 1999 and achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. It rode on the success of Red Hat Linux to became the first open source billion dollar company. Over the years, some of the biggest and brightest Linux developers have worked with Red Hat. Soon after it went public, it acquired Michael Tiemann’s Cygnus Solutions which had authored the GNU C++ Compiler and worked on the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. One of Red Hat’s most influential pieces of technology is its…

In 1992, Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr founded Software und System Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). The company started out as a service provider but the founders later decided to have a distro of their own that would cater to the enterprise user. The distro was named SUSE, after the acronym of their company, and it was a stock Slackware release that was translated into German and developed in close collaboration with Slackware’s Patrick Volkerding. For building its very own distribution of Linux, SUSE used the now defunct Jurix distribution. Jurix was created by Florian La Roche, who subsequently joined the SUSE team and began to develop YaST, which is the distro’s unique installer and configuration tool. The first SUSE distro that included YaST was released…

Gnome Tweak Tool Not satisfied with the stock Gnomedesktop? Use the Gnome Tweak Tool to customise several aspects, including the appearance settings of the desktop. With this tweak app you can also change the behaviour of the Windows and Workspaces, manage extensions and you can even circumvent the design philosophy of Gnome 3 by placing icons, files and folders on the Gnome desktop. http://bit.ly/GnomeTweakTool digiKam One of the best photo management tools for Linux is digiKam and it has features that’ll appeal to all kinds of users. It recognises all major image file formats and can organise and sort images based on metadata. The app also has plugins to export images to various online services. www.digikam.org K3b Although it’s designed for KDE, the K3b optical media burning utility is one…

What is a computer if not a portal to the internet, these days? Accessing the online world is absolutely essential, and Linux is not short of web browser options. Many of them will be familiar if you’re used to going online in other operating systems, some are variations (based on the software, but not exactly the same) and some are fairly unique, unusual browsers to try as well. The good news if you’re fairly established with your current browser is that it’s usually rather easy to transfer your bookmarks over, so you won’t lose those vital links. So before we look at your options, let’s back these up from another system so that we can import them later on. Backing up bookmarks In Google Chrome, click the three-lined hamburger menu…

We’ve all seen PDFs, haven’t we? They’re neat little document packages which contain all the fonts and layout information required to display exactly what the creator intended, without requiring any of the software that was used to make them. They’re also, usually, incredibly small. Hence the name Portable Document Format: universally supported on just about any system, almost always displayed correctly, and – at least these days – outputtable by just about any creative software. But there’s a problem: PDFs tend to be one-way streets, documents designed to exist in a read-only state. Editing a PDF is not an easy task. But, as we’ll discover, there are ways around these restrictions; ways to get information out of PDFs, ways to tweak existing documents, and ways to create brand new PDFs…

Word processors have their uses. You can certainly crack out LibreOffice Writer and its ilk if you want to construct a beautifully formatted document, but when it comes to constructing unformatted plain text – be it coding for the web, assembling traditional programs, or just writing in an environment unsullied by font frippery – traditional text editors come into their own. With a lot of the fuss and unnecessary elements removed, they’re usually able to run with a much smaller memory footprint and therefore load faster, take up fewer system resources, and help you focus on the task at hand. If you’ve used Windows, compare the likes of Microsoft Word with Notepad. The latter doesn’t have many advanced features, but it certainly has its uses. On macOS, TextEdit fills the…

Seven hundred and thirty billion. That’s how many photos are uploaded to Facebook every year. And that’s just a fraction of all the photos that are taken worldwide every 12 months. To put that in perspective, back in 1999, Kodak estimated humanity took 80bn photos a year. We take a lot of photos. And even if every single one isn’t a ‘keeper’, the chances are that your digital library is far more complex and vast than the cardboard box full of ‘albums’ that’s mouldering in the attic. Fortunately, there are more than a few tools to help you sort through your library. Shooting to Shotwell By default, there are two ways of managing your photo library in Ubuntu. The first is to use the stock file browser. As long as…

There are plenty of great media players available for Linux, capable of finding, organising and accessing your digital media library wherever it is on your hard drive or around the house. But the ultimate media player, which turns your PC into a set-top box, is Kodi. Originally developed for the Xbox (and formerly known as Xbox Media Center), Kodi is an application that puts digital media into a “10 foot interface” for viewing with a remote on large TV. It’s truly cross platform – there are versions of Kodi available for Windows or macOS, but Linux is its spiritual home. Kodi is brilliant. It can be used to playback digital media, and can also play CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and more, plus it has an extensive library of add-ons put…

These days, it’s almost mandatory to have a printer and scanner attached to your PC, but getting them set up in Linux can be a little tricky. Don’t worry, though, because armed with the right drivers and tools you can quickly get things up and running. There are two core tools built into most Linux distributions (distros) that help simplify the process: CUPS for printers and SANE for scanners. CUPS provides a centralised management tool for adding and configuring your printers while SANE allows you to interface with your scanner in much the same way, as well as providing the tools you need to preview and scan images. We’ll be focusing on these for this tutorial, coupled with some useful tools that mean you don’t need to go into the…

We’ve seen how Linux identifies the drives attached to your PC, and you’ve also discovered that Linux treats everything as a file – including folders (which is basically a file listing the files that make up that folder’s contents). But how are these files organised on your hard drive, and how do you access them through Ubuntu’s graphical file manager, Nautilus? Let’s start with the raw basics. Linux organises files in a tree-like structure that’s a little bit similar to Windows, the major difference being that while Windows physically separates drives into individual trees, with the drive letter at the top, Linux lumps everything together in a single file tree, with a top-level root (/) directory and everything else – including drives – placed relative to that directory. This can…

Sharing files between PCs on your network is a fundamental function of modern computing, and the good news is that Ubuntu makes file sharing relatively straightforward thanks to its support for the SMB (also known as SAMBA) sharing standard. Ubuntu also supports another standard – NFS – but that only works with other Linux machines, so for the purposes of this tutorial we’re focussing on SMB file sharing, which allows you to both access shared folders and share files from your own PC with other computers – Linux, Windows and Mac – on your network. Connecting to other computers is as easy as opening Ubuntu’s Files tool from the dash and clicking ‘Browse Network’ – after a short pause you should see all visible computers on your network appear, along…

Today’s multi-core PCs are built to run multiple tasks simultaneously, and what better way to tap into all that power than through virtualisation? Virtualisation, and in particular hardware virtualisation, is the process of splitting a single physical PC (known as the‘host’) into multiple virtual PCs (referred to as ‘guests'), each capable of working and acting independently of the other. Virtualisation software allows the host to carve up its memory, processor, storage and other hardware resources in order to share individual parcels with one or more guests. If your PC is powerful enough, you can run multiple virtual machines in parallel, enabling you to effectively split your computer in two to perform different tasks without having to tie up multiple PCs. Virtualisation isn’t simply a means of dividing up computing power,…

Locking access to your computer (and the data it holds) with just a password doesn’t cut the mustard any more in this age of multi-core processors and easy to use password cracking tools. If you’re really concerned about unauthorised access to your computer, you should definitely add an additional layer of authentication. One of the easiest mechanisms to implement such a two-step verification is the Google Authenticator service, which issues a time-based authentication token to supplement the existing password challenge. Once you’ve integrated the service with your Ubuntu login, in addition to your user password, you’ll be prompted for one of the quickly expiring tokens before being allowed to log in. Google Authenticator will generate these OTPs on your Android device once it’s been configured for every user on your…

Installing software Q I’m new to Linux and cannot see how to install software. On Windows, I go to the program’s website, download an. exe and run it. What do I do? A Software installation works differently in Linux. Programs are generally provided as source code and the individual distros create program packages from this. That means you know the program is compatible with the rest of the software from your distro. It also means you use the distro itself to install. Look for a program called Software Manager or similar: this will let you search for and install any software you need. It will also take care of any dependencies (other programs needed by the one you are installing) and notify you when updates are available. There is no…

The terminal is an incredibly important part of your Linux desktop. It doesn’t matter how wedded you are to point and click over the command line, at some point you’re going to have to dip your toe in the terminal’s dark expanse and use it. Don’t worry, though, because the terminal isn’t as scary as it might appear, and if you take the time to learn the basics you’ll discover it can be a far quicker and more effective way of getting certain tasks done. As you’d expect, a terminal effectively gives you access to your Linux shell, which means it works in exactly the same way using the same language (Bash). This means you can do anything in the terminal you’d normally do at the command line, all without…