how to fix sudo command in zenwalk 6

What you wait from sudo command is that it gives you the power of root for a single command. But you'll notice that it does not work properly in Zenwalk 6. To fix it;

check your group by opening your start menu > system > control panel > user profiles > list users > your_username > hit ok > note groupname value

open Terminal

type

su

and login (then you become root)

type

mousepad /etc/sudoers

edit the line after

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands

comment as

%your_groupname_value ALL=(ALL) ALL

and save. Voila.

remove last login information from zenwalk start-up

I have a new toy called Zenwalk and I'm using auto-login as usual for buying some time. But there's something bothering me with my new toy; in every boot, it shows me my last login's time and date and there's no way to get rid of this thing through zenwalk's settings. For removing this annoyance, you have to follow these steps:

1. open Terminal
   
2. type

   su
   

   and login
   
   
3. type

   mousepad /etc/pam.d/system-auth 

   and add

   #

   to the beginning of

   session    optional   pam_lastlog.so

   line.
   
4. save and quit mousepad
   

take one line notes easily in linux with touch (of evil)

You're reading some comics or watching some serie and you want to take note of the last book/episode you read/watched so, few days later, you can continue from where you have left. One of the most practical ways of doing that is to put a reminder in the comic/serie directory. No need to create a text file named "tome-11" or "scrubs-s05-e11", you can create an empty file with the desired name in a single second. We can do it by using touch (of evil) command. Usually, touch command is used for changing access and modification time of files but also it is an easy way to create an empty file. Just open the terminal and write

 touch yourNote

in the comic/serie directory.

find the process id of an application in linux

In one of my previous posts, I talked about killing unresponsive processes in Linux. It is pretty straightforward to find the process ids of applications if you're the only user, but if that's not the case you have to find a clever way. Assume that we want to find the process id of bash. We write

ps -A

to the terminal for seeing all active processes but we don't have 1 hour to inspect all processes. We just want to see the process id of bash. We will use the pgrep command which's basically a grep variant for processes.

pgrep bash

will give us the process id (PID) of bash.

distros with xfce

As I wrote previously, Xfce is the best choice as desktop environment for older PCs. Planete Beranger reviews several distros that comes with Xfce. It's rather thorough. Check this distro review.

ready to kill some processes/applications in linux?

In Linux -as in all modern Operating Systems-, applications become unresponsive and you may want to kill the process pertaining to them. To do this, open the terminal and write this:

killall applicationName

If that does not work try

killall -9 applicationName

If you don't have an idea about the application name, you can take look at the current processes by writing

ps

then to kill the processes you want

kill processID

If that does not work then try

kill -9 processID

Another possibility is to use xkill (for applications with gui). The window of the application waiting to be killed should be visible. Then, open Terminal and type

 xkill 

and later choose the window of the application to be killed.

better touchpad performance in linux mint

After some time with Linux Mint I realized that I'm not fully satisfied with the behavior of my touchpad and thought about downloading a program which will allow me to tweak it. I downloaded gsynaptics thru synaptic package manager and edited xorg.conf for gsynaptics to work. First you should open xorg.conf with a text editor. There's a text editor called Mousepad that's bundled to Linux Mint. So all you have to do is to open Terminal. Then write "sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and press enter. Then find the section below:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"

Add the line

Option     "SHMConfig"     "true"

as the last entry (just before EndSection). Save the conf file and reboot. Later, open the Terminal and write "gsynaptics" and configure your touchpad. Voila!

my quest for the greatest linux distro

Well, I can't tell that I found THE linux distro, but I tried Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and their performance can't match with Linux Mint (Xfce) on my three year old laptop. Linux Mint is Ubuntu-based, so we got the advantages of Ubuntu which's Debian-based and it is lightweight thanks to Xfce which is a desktop environment lighter than gnome (should I compare with Kde?). Furthermore, Linux Mint is user-friendly and I think that it is a good distro to start your linux adventure.

linus torvalds' blog

Linus Torvalds begin recently to blog. Check it here.