Back in August 2008, at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, the big buzzword was "Cloud Computing". It's a neat concept, but after a week of hearing folks talk about "in the cloud", I was about at the end of my rope.

If you try to unmount a partition and get a message like this: # umount /media/usbdisk/ umount: /media/usbdisk: device is busy use the lsof command to find out what programs are using what files:

One of the comments to my last post about adjusting the fan speed on your NVidia graphics card was that what was needed was a script to adjust the speed based on the temperature. The script presented here does just that.

If you need to transfer an entire filesystem from one machine to another, for example, when you get a new computer, do the following steps. 1) Boot both PCs with any Linux live CD (for example, Knoppix), and make sure they can access each other via the network.

The OpenMoko project recently released a much-needed update to the official software stack of the Neo FreeRunner. I've had a FreeRunner for a few months and during that time I have used it to run everything from Debian to Qtopia (now known as QT Extended), so when OpenMoko announced the OM2008.9 update I eagerly upgraded to see what it had to offer.

Let's do Desktops a bit differently this time: instead of looking at what's on our Desktops, let's get underneath the desk and see what's going on.

Recently I needed to create a script that processed two input files. By processed I mean that the script needed to get a line from one file, then get a line from the second file, and then do something with them. Sounds easy enough, but it's not that easy unless you know about some of bash's extended redirection capabilities.

Part of an ongoing series of on open-source geographic information system (GIS) programs, this article offers an introduction to uDig GIS. uDig is for GIS users of all levels, from beginners to advanced.