Linux Tutorial Blog

My short solution to convert flac to mp3 caught a lot of attention, and uncovered a demand for a more sophisticated solution. Therefore, after all the scripts posted in the comments, I decided to go on and write an extensive script that should be able to offer all the requested functionality (and more). This post contains a script and installation instructions to allow you to convert both individual files and directories, keep the tags of the files fully intact and enjoy an easy-to-use drag 'n drop interface. (More)

If you use bash for scripting you will undoubtedly have to use conditions a lot, for example for an if ... then construct or a while loop. The syntax of these conditions can seem a bit daunting to learn and use. This tutorial aims to help the reader understanding conditions in bash, and provides a comprehensive list of the possibilities. A small amount of general shell knowledge is assumed.

Difficulty: Basic - Medium  (More)

Whether this was caused by global warming or by the many visitors that kept on coming during the time Linux Tutorial Blog was frozen we'll never know, but this blog is melting. Featuring a new tutorial and some upcoming changes, LTB is once more a place to keep watching, a "regular Linux tutorial source". I hope you will enjoy this new breeze of activity!  (More)

After a whole afternoon of struggling, I finally found how to get a Gravis GamePad Pro to work correctly (with all ten buttons enabled) on Linux. Because this took me so much effort and the information on it was so scattered and incomplete, I decided to break the frozenness of Linux Tutorial Blog and write a post about it. (More)

Linux tutorial blog is no longer frozen!

Well, I don't like to bring this message, but I guess I have to. I simply do not have the time to keep this blog updated anymore. You probably already expected something like that, seeing that there haven't been any posts for over two months... Anyway, the site will stay online so the knowledge that's already on it will not be lost, and all revenue will still be donated to the good cause. Maybe I will find the time to write in a vacation somewhere, but I'm not sure. Thanks to all the readers for their comments and support, thanks to Youmakemusic.com for hosting this website, and thanks to God for blessing me so much, both on this site and for the rest of my life. Goodbye, and maybe 'till the next post.

No matter how stable the Linux kernel is, things like hardware failures can still lock up your system quite effectively. If you ever encounter a case like that, rebooting is pretty much the only option. However, there is rebooting and rebooting. This solution describes a way to reboot your system that will do things like terminating all processes, syncing the remounting the disks, in order to prevent damage as much as possible. This can save you a lot of fscking and data loss. (More)

This solution contains some options for the mencoder command that will result in an mpeg video file that will play on pretty much all players, even Windows Media Player. (More)

Sometimes you'll want to crop the same area from multiple images (think of taking the contents of the same window from a load of screenshots). Of course, you could fire up your favourite image editor to select and crop over and over, but, as usual, there is a better way. This short tutorial describes an efficient way to do this for a theoretically infinite amount of images.

Difficulty: Basic - Medium (More)

Sometimes you need to convert a load of flac files to mp3's, for example when wanting to listen them on your mp3 player. This solution contains a single line of bash that'll convert all flac files in the current directory to mp3's, keeping the flac files. (More)

Many Linux distros usually start a lot of daemons when booting, resulting in a long wait before you can get to work after powering on your machine. Some of those daemons are rarely used (or even not al all) by the majority of users. This tutorial describes how to disable unused or rarely used daemons in a proper way, resulting in faster boot sequences and less CPU load. (More)

All seems to be working again, so I consider the upgrade to the new Lifetype version finished. If you stumble upon something that doesn't seem to work as it should, please leave a comment on this post.

In a few moments, I'll start moving to the newest stable version of Lifetype. This will probably screw some things up, so please be patient. I hope to finish soon. I'll post a success message when everything seems to be working again.

Edit: The blog is up again and the basic things seem to be working. I lost my .htaccess files, though... Currently busy getting permissions back to their old state.

This article tells about FLAC: what is it, why use it and how to use it? (More)

I recently discovered a very useful tool: xrandr. This command allows you to reset your screen resolution, which comes in very handy when some buggy app changes you screen resolution and doesn't set it back. It saves logging out and in again or even having to use Ctrl + Alt + Backspace! (More)

The bash shell is just amazing. There are so many tasks that can be simplified using its handy features. This tutorial tells about some of those features, explains what exactly they do and learns you how to use them.

Difficulty: Basic - Medium 

 (More)