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How often do you need to install your favorite Linux distribution in a single year either virtually or using real hardware? How frequently it happens that you just want to test new release of certain Linux distribution so you install it on different partition or simply virtually using your current system as a host. How often do you need to deploy a server which is a complete clone of the one you configured yesterday. The installation part of any Linux system today is a very straightforward process. Nonetheless, the hardest and the most tedious part comes with a fine tuning, customization and configuration of your system's services as well as your own user environment. You can simply copy your custom system configuration files from one system to another but engaging in this concept this task can become quite disorganized, time consuming and most importantly error-prone.

This article describes a method how to use a USB memory device as an authentication token to log in into a Linux system instead of traditional password. This can be accomplished by use of Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) and some sort of USB storage device such as USB memory stick of Mobile phone with SD card attached.

This article describes installation and usage of Google Chrome web browser in conjunction with Ubuntu Linux. The article also touches on some privacy concerns in regard to Google Chrome and its restrictive license. Although, Google Chrome web browser is a multi-platform application this article will be focused solely on Google Chrome and i386 Ubuntu Linux.

This article explains how to download files from a rapidshare using a linux wget command line tool. Using a wget to download from a rapidshare allows you to download multiple files in a single session using simple bash script. It also can be said, that using a bash script and wget to download rapidshare files is somewhat a cheap replacement of jDownloader tool.

What if you want one user to run a command as an another system user without exchanging passwords. For example, you may want an user john to run a find command or custom bash shell script as an user greg or even as a user root ( superuser ) without password exchange. In this case a sudo utility with its /etc/sudoers configuration file will be your friend. The sudo utility is very widely used but at the same time very little understood by Linux users of all levels. This short article describes some basic of sudo usage and explains a format of /etc/sudoers configuration file.

This article is a quick configuration manual of a Linux DNS server using bind. I believe that bind do not need much introduction, but before you proceed with the installation and configuration of bind nameserver make sure that bind DNS server is exactly what you want. Default setup and execution of bind on Debian or Ubuntu may take around 200MB of RAM with no zones added to the config file. Unless you reduce the memory usage of a bind via various bind "options" config settings, be prepared to have some spare RAM available just for this service. This is fact even more important if you pay for your own VPS server.

The best way to memorize all linux commands and techniques used in Linux administration to gain the Linux Professional Institute certificate ( LPIC ) is by practice. The following LPI sample exam should be taken as a middle way between reading a book and practice on command line. It includes questions from all topics required for LPIC 101.

Although FAT32 or FAT16 are very old file systems, which reflects on their poor performance in comparison with other file system alternatives they are still widely used by many electronic devices. Usually, these devices include USB stick's, digital cameras , camcorders and etc. Chances are that you own and store personal data on a device with FAT flesystem is very high as is a likelihood of an accidental deletion of your important data. In this article we will use testdisk utility to undelete files from FAT file system.

Online banking is becoming a very popular way to satisfy our banking needs and this even includes people with no or very little technical background. There are numerous advantages when doing banking transactions online, such as 24/7 bank opening hours, ability to make transactions from anywhere in the world and convenience. The only problem is that we do not take our secured home PC everywhere with us. Consequently, the use of other computer and operating system rather than our own for online banking may involve a great security risk. However, what we can and usually carry on us everywhere we go is some sort of the USB key storage device. This article describes a way of building our own customized Online banking USB live Desktop.

In case you will loose your USB stick, all data stored on it will be lost and what is more important they will be most likely in hands of some unknown person which will then have an access to your private information and use this information in any way s/he sees fit. This is one of many fears of USB stick users. One solution which can be easily applied is to not to store any private information on USB stick, however this will diminish a prime usage of your USB stick to a bare minimum as all non-private data usually do not have to be stored on USB since they can be almost always downloaded anytime and anywhere from the Internet.

Running Linux system inside a chroot environment allows a system admin to decrease an impact on a production server when the server gets compromised. Change root will change root directory to all current running processes and its children to a chroot jail. Testing of various package installations and server configuration in a chrooted environment can be another handy way how to utilize a chroot jail. This tutorial will provide a reader with step by step guide on how to install Debian with ssh daemon inside chroot environment using debootstrap.

Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings. This article will describe some simple to follow instruction on how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall performance. Getting the partitioning part done by aligning each partition can rapidly increase a hard drive's performance.

This article provides few simple scripts to scan and monitor network using combination of bash and ping command. Obviously, these scripts are no match to a full monitoring dedicated software like nagios but they could be useful for a small home brand networks, where implementing sophisticated monitoring system can become an overhead.

This article shortly describes simple steps on how to crack a wireless WEP key using AIR Crack software. This can be done by sniffing a wireless network, capturing encrypted packets and running appropriate encryption cracking program in attempt to decrypt captured data. WEP ( Wired Equivalent Privacy ) is quite easy to crack as it uses only one key to encrypt all traffic.

If from any reason you are not able to install Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Linux from conventional CD/DVD-ROM or you just do not want to walk around with cd's, there is always option to use USB memory stick to do this job. This short tutorial will describe this simple task from preparing your USB stick, load a Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Linux image and finishing with boot process. Although this guide describes this procedure specifically for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Linux i386, it can be used with simple modifications to create Ubuntu USB install stick for any Ubuntu versions available including different architectures.

When you buy a new PC, laptop or server and install a Linux you want to know what hardware is actually in the Linux box and more importantly which piece of hardware is supported by the kernel out of the box and which needs special tweaking with modules to get it work. Here is a list of commands which should help you to troubleshoot your hardware and find some information about it. This is not a ultimate troubleshooting guide but certainly will serve as a good starting point.

RAID has still not been adopted by most end-users despite its inherent quality such as performance and reliability. Reasons such as complexity of RAID technology (levels, hard/soft), set-up, or support may be given. We believe the main reason is that most end-users own a vast amount of heterogeneous storage devices (USB stick, IDE/SATA/SCSI internal/external hard drives, SD/XD Card, SSD, etc.), and that RAID-based systems are mostly designed for homogeneous (in size and technology) hard disks. Therefore, there is currently no storage solution that manages heterogeneous storage devices efficiently. In this article, we propose such a solution and we call it PROUHD (Pool of RAID Over User Heterogeneous Devices). This solution supports heterogeneous (in size and technology) storage devices, maximizes the available storage space consumption, is tolerant to device failure up to a customizable degree, still makes automatic addition, removal and replacement of storage devices possible and remains performant in the face of average end-user workflow.

There are more and more Laptops nowadays which do not have a CD/DVD-ROM facility build in but are able to boot from USB memory stick. This small guide provides all needs on how to create a bootable USB memory stick to install a Debian without a need for CD/DVD drive.

The purpose of this document is to help a reader to get started with Computer Vision library OpenCV on Linux system. OpencCV is a multi-platform library, but this article will be focused only on OpenCV using Linux operating system. ( although, just the installation of the OpenCV library and video camera is platform-specific, all examples in this article should compile on any platform where OpenCV is properly installed such as Mac OS, MS Windows and etc.) Reader will be guided through a step-by-step guide on how to install and use some of the basic functions of OpenCV library such as displaying images, playing a video or using a video camera to process a video input stream.

This guide will provide all necessary steps on how to create, bundle, upload, run and connect Debian ETCH AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For this guide we have used a Ubuntu 9.04. However, any other Linux distribution can also be used as long as it contains java and ruby packages.