Yearly Archives: 2009

How To List The Installed Packages on a Debian Based System

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In this tutorial I’m going to show how to list the installed packages on a Debian based operating system, (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Sidux, CrunchBang, etc.) I got this gem of a command line one-liner from the Sidux website.

This command is useful if you want to replicate a GNU/Linux installation from one computer to another.

For those who are impatient, I’ll cut right to the chase. This command will create a file in your home directory called installed.txt that contains the listing of your installed packages. Open a terminal and enter: Continue reading →

Command Line Basics: Bulk Rename Files With rename

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Sometimes you get a bunch of files that are named in an annoying way and you’d like to change the naming convention for all of them. Maybe you forgot to change the settings on your CD ripping software and it ended up creating a bunch of long file names that you don’t like.

I recently received a bunch of files that stupidly had names starting with spaces and hyphens; ( – ). The files looked something like this:

linerd@laptop:~/demo$ ls -1
 - File number 1.txt
 - File number 2.txt
 - File number 3.txt
 - File number 4.txt
 - File number 5.txt

Starting a file name with a space is just stupid! For 5 files it’s no big deal to go in and manually rename them. I had many more files, so I was in search of a tool that could change many files all at once. The aptly named rename terminal command turned out to be a great solution. Continue reading →

Command Line Basics: Cut Fields With awk

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There are times when you will want to trim some information from the output of a command. This may be because you want to feed that output into another command. Whatever the reason for wanting to manipulate the output, awk is one of many tools available in GNU/Linux to perform this task.   Continue reading →

Remove Old Kernels in Ubuntu

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Edit: Oct. 2, 2010 – I’ve written a new post that shows a bash one-liner command that will remove the old kernels from your system in one step. You can check it out here.

If you’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for a while, then you probably have a number of Linux kernel updates that have been installed on your system. (I’ve got a total of 3 kernels in my Karmic system already.) In all likelihood, these updates get installed and you boot into the latest kernel, never to use the older kernels again. But these old kernels are still hanging around on your system, cluttering up your grub boot screen and taking up space on your hard drive.   Continue reading →

Use The Chrome OS Start Page

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The web has been abuzz this week with the news that Google has released an early version of their new Chrome OS. This early version is actually the open source Chromium OS. If you really want to get a feel for this new operating system, you can follow the directions on the Chromium OS site to compile and build the OS to make your own flash drive image or VMware image. I was unable to get my VMware image running, but my flash drive image does work. Continue reading →