“You use Linux everyday, whether you know it or not…”
The Linux Foundation
“Ubuntu could have stayed relevant if Canonical hadn’t tossed aside its user base to pursue Unity and tablets.” Barbara Hudson shares her doubts about Canonical’s apparent strategy for Ubuntu.
“As a lifelong Windows user, system builder, ex-gamer, and performance freak, I’m not drinking anyone’s Kool-Aid. I just want the most amount of control over my system as possible, and at this point in time, Ubuntu is the best follow-up to Windows XP.” Adam Overa walks the Windows user through the Ubuntu installation process from downloading the CD image to finding help online.
“Many people discover LaTeX after years of struggling with wordprocessors and desktop publishing systems, and are amazed to find that TeX has been around for over 25 years and they hadn’t heard of it.”
Peter Flynn
LaTeX is a free document preparation system that enables you to create beautifully typeset pages. It implements a set of commands designed to control TeX, the typesetting engine developed by Donald E Knuth. LaTeX stores the information about your documents as plain text, thus avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in and ensuring that your documents will still be editable twenty years from now. LaTeX processes the plain text data and, with pdfTeX working in the background, generates PDF output of the highest typographic quality—perfect for viewing on-screen or printing on paper. LaTeX runs on many platforms and is included as standard with most Linux distributions. Ready-to-run LaTeX systems are also available for Windows and Mac OS X.
“Umpteen number of reports have been published telling people why they should consider switching to the Mac OS now that Vista has failed.” Prosenjit Bhattacharyya suggests Ubuntu as another alternative.
“If you’ve flirted with the idea of switching your desktop operating system to Linux but never took the leap, the time is now.” Kevin Purdy highlights key features of the latest Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release.
There are many different tools that you can use to edit configuration files. Because of its simplicity, I personally like to use Nano:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo nano /path/to/the/fileYou can change the default settings for nano by editing its configuration file. For example, to stop nano from wrapping text simply make the following changes to /etc/nanorc:
## Don't wrap text at all.
set nowrapConsider the implications of enabling the root account, and then proceed with:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo passwd rootTo disable the root account again, use the following command:
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo passwd -l root