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Most Linux desktop environments have its own GUI that allows users to configure user-specific auto-start programs or services. This tutorial describes how to start a program automatically in various Linux desktop environments.

In the era of "big data", large text files (GB or more) could be commonly encountered around us. A typical text editor may not be designed to deal with such large text files efficiently, and may simply get choked while attempting to open a big file, due to insufficient memory. If you are a savvy system admin, you can probably open or touch an arbitrary text file with a combination of cat, tail, grep, sed, awk, etc. In this tutorial, I will discuss more user-friendly ways to open (and possibly edit) a large text file on Linux.

In a Network Operation Centre (NOC) environment, setting up alerts is extremely important. As one of the most popular NOC monitoring systems, Nagios features powerful alerting services. Alerts generated by Nagios can be sent out in various means, so that they can be acted upon immediately. Email notification is the most common option used. This tutorial presents two other ways to send out Nagios alerts: (1) audio alerts via web browser, and (2) audio/vibration alerts via an Android app.

Cross-platform development has several cons; poor platform integration, inflexible design, etc. On the other hand, we can reach a wider market with more consumers, and can offer uniform look and feel for our app across various platforms. Today, almost all modern mobile platforms provide object-oriented APIs. Thus there is no reason not to build multi-platform apps. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of cross-platform development.

You don't have to be a professional photographer, nor need specialized equipment to create dramatic panoramic pictures. In fact, there are quite a few picture stitch apps (online or offline, desktop or mobile), which can easily create a panoramic view of a scene from two or more overlapping pictures. This tutorial explains how to stitch photos together on Linux, by using panoramic photo stitching software called Hugin.

In Linux, there are several ways to access Google Calendar natively, such as by using email client plugins (e.g., Evolution or Thunderbird) or calendar apps (e.g., Sunbird or Rainlendar). These solutions, however, typically involve installing unnecessarily bulky software which you will probably not need. If all you want is to access and get reminded by Google Calendar natively on Linux, then you can consider Google Calendar command line interface (or gcalcli), which is much more light-weight. Even better for Linux desktop, you can use gcalcli together with Conky, so that you can integrate Google Calendar into your desktop theme transparently.

Nagios is one of the most powerful network monitoring systems, which is widely used in the industry. It can actively monitor any network, and generate audio/email warnings and alerts when any problem is detected. The check types and alert timers are fully customizable. This tutorial explains how to install and configure Nagios on Linux.

Conky is a light-weight system monitoring tool combined with a fully-customized desktop theme, which can completely change your Linux desktop experience. Using Conky, you will get a fully personalized desktop theme, populated with an eye-catching smart clock, current date and time, as well as the current status of your Linux system such as used/free HDD space, RAM and CPU utilization.

SNMP (or Simple Network Management Protocol) is used to gather data on what is going on within a device, such as load, hard disk states, bandwidth. These data are used by network monitoring tools such as Cacti to generate graphs for monitoring purposes. This tutorial describes how to monitor Linux servers with SNMP and Cacti.

The default Raspbian system for Raspberry Pi is set up to get an IP address automatically from the network via DHCP, whether for wired Ethernet or wireless WiFi (via a USB wireless dongle). Raspbian can support both IPv4 and IPv6. IPv4 is ready for use by default, and IPv6 must be enabled manually. In this tutorial, I will explain several ways to configure an IP address on Raspbian-powered Raspberry Pi. IPv4 will be used in this tutorial.

Apache2 is the default webserver used by many Linux installations. It is not the only one available, or the best for all circumstances, but it covers many usage scenarios. This tutorial describes how to set up a security Apache web server on Ubuntu server.

Once thought of as outdated art forms, animated GIF images have now come back. If you haven't noticed, quite a few online sharing and social networking sites are now supporting animated GIF images, for example, on Tumblr, Flickr, Google+, and partly on Facebook. Due to their ease of consumption and sharing, GIF-ed animations are now part of mainstream Internet culture. This tutorial describes how to convert a video file to an animated GIF image on Linux.

Any system admin working in a service provider network would certainly agree that Cacti is one of the most widely used tools in network management solutions. It is open source, has built in user authentications and user permission features, shipped with frequently used graph templates like bandwidth, 95th percentile, hard disk usage, CPU usage, load average, RAM statistics and many more. This tutorial describes how to install and configure Cacti on Linux.

You flashed an SD card with Raspberry Pi image, and plug the SD card into Raspberry Pi. Then what next? The first thing to do after booting Raspberry Pi is to configure your Raspberry Pi. Each Raspberry Pi system comes with its own software configuration tool. For example, use raspi-config for Raspbian, firstboot for Pidora, etc. This tutorial explains how to perform initial configurations on Raspbian-powered Raspberry Pi by using raspi-config tool.

A typical Linux server runs in a command line interface (CLI) environment, preloaded with bare essential tools needed to install and configure various headless services. If you are used to GUI-based environment, however, you may wonder whether there is a GUI for Linux server. A typical Linux desktop environment like GNOME, KDE, etc. will probably be too resource-heavy for what it's worth, and not as secure simply because there will be more code subject to potential security vulnerabilities. This tutorial describes how to manage and configure a Linux server with Webmin's web-based GUI.

Ghost is a relatively new blog publishing platform which started out as a £25,000 Kickstarter project. While WordPress is still the dominant blogging tool on the web, it has now evolved into a general content management platform with tons of third party developed features, and over time has become increasingly cumbersome and complex to maintain. On the other hand, now only a couple of months old, Ghost promises to remain as a pure blogging platform with slick user-centric publishing interface. This tutorial describes how to set up Ghost blogging platform on Linux.

As a default file manager of the GNOME desktop, one of Nautilus' notable features is its extensible interface, where users can add arbitrary actions to its context menus by using scripts or configuration GUI. Nautilus-Actions is a Nautilus extension for configuring context menus via GUI.

There are several well-known commercial flowchart and diagram software available, e.g., Visio on Windows, OmniGraffle on MacOS X. Then what about Linux? In fact, there are a couple of reasonably good Linux alternatives to Visio or OmniGraffle, for example, yEd, Dia, LibreOffice Draw, Pencil Project, etc. This tutorial describes how to create flowchart or diagram with yEd graph editor on Linux.

If you have a program you use regularly on Linux desktop, you may want to create a "desktop shortcut", so you can launch the program by simply clicking on the shortcut. While most GUI programs automatically create their desktop shortcut during installation, some GUI programs or terminal applications may require you to set up associated shortcuts manually. In this tutorial, I will describe how to create a desktop shortcut or launcher on various Linux desktops.

If you want to set up a stripped down Ubuntu desktop, a clean approach is to first install Ubuntu server on your hardware, and then manually add desktop component to it. This tutorial describes how to install minimal Ubuntu desktop.