Author: Gayan

“GRUB” is the default boot loader of Ubuntu Linux (including almost all other GNU/Linux distributions). Whether you only use Ubuntu or dual boot it with Windows, or, if you’re a bit of a wild geek 😉 who have installed more than two operating systems in your PC, then GRUB is the small utility that lets you choose your preferred operating system at the very beginning of your PC’s startup process (just after BIOS does its thing ;-)). Although the installation of GRUB is pretty much automatic as the OS takes care it for you (from detecting other operating systems to…

Let’s say that you wanted to create the lyrics of a song, but if its tempo is a bit high (faster playback), then unless you’re like the world’s fastest typist, it ain’t gonna be an easy task ;-). So the best solution is to slow down the playback speed (tempo) but without destroying the “pitch”. Otherwise as you’d see in movies, the audio output gets distorted thus, you’ll have a hard time figuring out the vocals). So in that sense, if you’re looking for an audio player that lets you stretch the time (change tempo, without distorting the playback) and…

Having a Dead or a Stuck pixel (they’re different from each other) on your LCD/LED panel is a nightmare. And I don’t know why, but I never had that much luck with LCD/LED screens and have had the pleasure of being struck by Dead and Stuck pixels on more than one occasion. My old Laptop ended with huge number of stuck pixels and the new Dell Vostro V131 also has a single stuck pixel in it!. What is a stuck pixel? In simple terms. A “stuck pixel” is a bright pixel (can have a color of Red, Green or Blue),…

If you’re a power user, then having the ability to put your CPU under a bit of stress can be quite useful. For instance, let’s say that you’ve just over clocked (running it in higher speeds than recommended, yikes!) the CPU and wanted to know if your fan or the cooling system in general could handle the new speeds (= generating more heat etc). Now under MS Windows OS you can find a lot of tools, however, in GNU/Linux or Ubuntu (as in this case) there aren’t that many you can use (or at least as far as I know).…

In the recent past, I’ve written few touch typing tutors that can be used in Ubuntu Linux such as; The awesome Klavaro, TIPP10, Ktouch and dvorak7min (a special one, optimized for the Dvorak keyboard layout), nlkt and Typespeed (a typing game). But, since adding another one wouldn’t have hurt ;-), plus I think most do know about it already because it’s the official touch typing tutor of the GNU project, if you haven’t heard about it then it is known as the “gtypist” (GNU Typist). It’s a command-line tool, but uses the “curses” library thus, as you can see from…

If you’re a huge fan of the WebKit based, fast loading Google Chrome web browser, but a bit dissatisfied by the fact that it has some proprietary libraries and also the original Chromium having a few different licenses to itself (MIT, LGPL, BSD etc) including few non-free ones (according to Wikipedia) and looking for a fully open source WebKit based web browser as a result, then perhaps you might wanna try “QtWeb”. It’s a simple web browser but at the same time gives you a decent amount of options too. Doesn’t need any installation, so you can easily use it…

QWriter is a simple source code editor that can be used in MS Windows and GNU/Linux. The UI is written using the Qt toolkit and it uses “Scintilla” as the back-end for source code editing and supports various computer languages. Unlike with many other similar tools, QWriter may not have a huge amount of features, but it’s a pretty decent open source utility but most importantly, it’s portable (works out of the box in Windows but the portability in GNU/Linux can be a bit troublesome though, more below). Also due to its simple nature, it can be a pretty user…

Of course LibreOffice Writer or the LibreOffice in general is one of the best & free office productivity suites available, and heck ya it’s awesome too :). However, I hardly use it and due to my needs, I usually end up using Gedit instead. And when I’m using the command-line, sometimes I use the “nano” editor. But using “nano” for instance, can be a bit hectic because, while accessing functions such as saving, exiting, deleting etc has to be done using built in commands rather than through a menu. Then again, we can use the keyboard shortcuts or use other,…

DAPlayer is a multimedia player for the MS Windows platform. It’s a proprietary application, but is completely free to use, supports almost all the popular audio/video codecs out of the box and is pretty user friendly too. Although one won’t finds it that often with proprietary tools, but DAPlayers also bypasses all DVD region code requests (like VLC). A beautiful looking skin (two actually), audio equalizer, few video enhancing filters, playlist … it’s all there. The developers claim that it’s pre-optimized for Blu-Ray/HD video playback on never CPU architectures thus the power consumption should be also somewhat lower too (due…

“Speedometer” is a command-line based (pretty darn easy to use though!) utility that has the ability to monitor the current download/upload speeds of the network connections plus, the speeds of the file systems (while copying something). Although it’s not a network benchmarking tool (can be used as a file system benchmarking utility!) in a way, you can use it as such a tool as well (more below). However, Ubuntu comes with a system monitor that shows you the current network speeds and while copying a file, Nautilus shows you the speeds too. But “speedometer” is a graph based tool that…

If you want to copy something using the command-line interface in GNU/Linux, then “cp” is like the universal tool ;-). Although it’s a quite powerful utility, but it has few drawbacks of its own as well. For instance, unlike with the file managers and their user friendly file copy/move tools, “cp” won’t output a lot of details while copying a file. However, we can use the “-v” attribute to get some basic info, such as the file being copied and the saved file name. But let’s say you were copying a large file, then other than looking at the LED…

In GNU/Linux, there are decent amount of tools with graphical interfaces that make file encrypting a breeze. However, there are also command-line based ones (few!) that let you easily encrypt/decrypt your data as well. Other than not having the ability to use the mouse (plus if you’re not a touch typist), most people don’t like command-line tools because they make you type a bit ;-). But if you’re willing try a command-line based tool, as long is it lets you easily encrypt/decrypt data (without having to type a lot of commands), then you might be interested in “ccrypt”. “ccrypt” only…