Dear Ubuntu users,

System76 offers free Ubuntu stickers. To get them, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to one of the following addresses. It depends on where you are.

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Install a free diagram editor in Ubuntu Linux

You are looking for a diagram creation program like Microsoft Visio but free of charge. Dia released under the GPL license can meet your requirement. Dia is an editor for diagrams, graphs, charts etc.

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How to install Flash plugin for Firefox

Firstly, you have to check if your Firefox supports Flash player. You can do that by opening directly any page including a Flash like Adobe site to know if it works well. Another way is that you can check what installed plugins in your Firefox. I have run these commands in Ubuntu Linux for checking Flash plugin.

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Linux commands for beginners: List information about files and directories

Now that you know how to move from a working directory to another or to move around the filesystem of your Ubuntu Linux by using cd command. Today, we are going to learn how to list information about files and directories. To do this, we will learn a new command named ls which stands for list.

ls

This is the basic “ls” command, with no options. It provides a very basic listing of the files in your current working directory. Filenames beginning with a decimal are considered hidden files, and they are not shown.

ls -a

The -a option tells the ls command to report information about all files, including hidden files.

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Linux commands for beginners: moving around filesystem

Last command shows you how to print the working directory. Today, I will show you how to change from your working directory to another one. To do this, enter cd (stand for change directory) followed by the pathname of the desired working directory. Pathnames can be specified in one of two different ways; absolute pathnames or relative pathnames.

For examples:

cd /usr
This command moves you to the “/usr” directory and this directory becomes your current working directory.

cd /home/vntutor
Moves you to the /home/vntutor directory.

cd ..
Moves you to the parent directory of your working directory (in this case to be /home directory)

cd vntutor
Moves you to the sub directory of your working directory (in this case, /home/vntutor directory is sub directory of the /home directory)

cd
Issuing the cd command without any arguments moves you to your home directory.

Run Ubuntu Linux on Windows XP using VMware Player

As I have presented in last post, the installation of VMware Player on WinXP is easily done in some simple steps. Today, we will study how to run a VMware appliance on Windows using VMware Player. In this case, I will run the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. At the time when I’m writing this post, the latest version of Ubuntu Linux is Feisty 7.04.

Step 1: download image of Feisty 7.04
In this example, I have downloaded Ubuntu Desktop 7.04 for i386 . However, you can try with any image of Ubuntu Linux from this list.

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How to install VMware Player on Windows XP

An introduction to virtual machines in last post presented some basic terms such as virtualization, virtual machines, virtual hardwares. The function of VMware player was also touched upon. Today, we start to install this free application on our Windows machines.

Step 1: Download VMware Player 2.0
Go to http://www.vmware.com/download/player/ to download the latest version of VMware Player freely. (It takes 10 to 15 minutes for downloading)

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Introduction to Virtual Machines

Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility. This term is divided into two main parts to be named platform virtualization and resource virtualization. Here, we will talk about the first one which involves simulation of virtual machines. As a real machine, a virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. Virtual machines are encapsulated into files, making it possible to rapidly save, copy and provision a virtual machine.

VMware is known as one of global leaders in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. With VMware Player application, you can run any virtual machine created by VMware Server or VMware Workstation which was released in version 6.0 some days ago. Nowadays, a lot of software applications packaged along within an operating system with virtual machines called VMware appliances which are available at the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, an official online library of virtual appliances.

This technology has opened a new approach in software engineering. We have been using this technology to try our applications as well as deliver them to our clients who need to see a demonstration of the application quickly without install any additional packages. I will write more details about this technology in next posts, so please go back to read it.

Resources: VMWare

How to show icons on your desktop

Ubuntu provides a very clean and simple look desktop without any icons. This post will present how to add some icons such as My Computer, User’s Home, ..

Step 1: launch a configuration editor
Hit Alt-F2 and type gconf-editor into Run application dialog and click Run

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How to look up an IP from a DNS in Ubuntu Linux

This is a small tip which shows you how to know an IP address of a given domain name. The commonly used way is command ping. Let’s have a look to how it works.

ping vntutor.blogspot.com

Output:

PING blogspot.l.google.com (72.14.207.191) 56(84) bytes of data.

I can alternatively use another way to do that by using command host as the following

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