Apr 142013
 

Sometimes can be useful to have a small program that you can run from the command line and able to do a screenshot of your desktop or just a portion of it, for this task the perfect software is: scrot

Scrot (SCReenshOT) is a screen capture utility using the imlib2 library to aquire and save images. scrot has a few really interesting options, detailed below. The basic usage is to specify a [file] as the filename to save the screenshot to and scrot will take a screenshot of the whole desktop.
The latest release (0.8) has almost 10 years, still this small program can be useful for his ability to be run completely from the command line and so you could use it to concatenate other commands or just because it’s really lightweight and easy to use.

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Apr 102013
 

This is an easy and simple solution based on the article by Umair, first posted on http://www.noobslab.com.

it’s common that, if not you, one of your familiar or friends forget his login password, and if this is the only account available on the system this means that he’s usually locked out from his computer, luckily this is not a big issue if you have physical access to the console of a Linux system, as we can use the recovery mode available from the grub menu of most distributions (if not all).

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Apr 072013
 

On many occasions, you might want to resize a PDF to send it by Email or put it on the web, today I had more than 50MB of PDF to be put as attachment of an article, and that was really too much. Using Linux you just need the program ghostscript to do everything and with a few commands you’ll have your resized documents.

For example my 50MB of documents become 15MB once I resized the PDF keeping a good quality, much better,

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Apr 032013
 

Sata

SATA is the most common bus interface on desktops and on many servers, so it’s important that you know some basic concepts about it, from the always informative Wikipedia:

Serial ATA (SATA) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Serial ATA replaces the older AT Attachment standard (ATA; later referred to as Parallel ATA or PATA), offering several advantages over the older interface: reduced cable size and cost (seven conductors instead of 40), native hot swapping, faster data transfer through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O queuing protocol.

Revisions
Revision 1.0a was released on January 7, 2003. First-generation SATA interfaces, now known as SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, communicate at a rate of 1.5 Gbit/s, and do not support Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

Second generation SATA interfaces run with a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 3.0 Gbit/s is double that of SATA revision 1.0.

Serial ATA International Organization presented the draft specification of SATA 6 Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008 and ratified its physical layer specification on August 18, 2008. The full 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009. It runs with a native transfer rate of 6.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 4.8 Gbit/s (600 MB/s).

In short they are usually referred as:

SATA revision 1.0 – 1.5 Gbit/s – 150 MB/s
SATA revision 2.0 – 3 Gbit/s – 300 MB/s
SATA revision 3.0 – 6 Gbit/s – 600 MB/s

So which revision are you using on your computer ?
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Apr 022013
 

More and more games are published for Linux and so it’s becoming more important to have a good performance with our beloved system, but some of the Desktop Environemnts can really slow down your gaming experience.

There is an interesting report about this on Phoronix in the article: Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and these are their conclusions:

Overall the results were interesting from the range of Linux OpenGL benchmarks conducted under Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce on Ubuntu 12.04. There are some exceptions, but across the driver configurations the desktops to commonly perform the best were Xfce 4.8 and GNOME Shell 3.2.2.1. The default Unity desktop was a mix in terms of performance across the different OpenGL workloads.

So there are good chance that you can speed up your graphics performance, how ?
Use Fsgamer
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