Getting the size of things

If found a decent little guide for using two command line utilities du and df.

• du shows you the disk usage of a folder — that is, how much space the contents of a give folder are taking up.
• df shows you the disk free space of your file system and gives the output in columns that indicate the size, used space, available space, and percentage of used space.

Check out How to find – Size of a directory & Free disk space for the guide.

how to use md5sum to validate your downloads

Using MD5SUM to Validate the Integrity of (Downloaded) Files

rsync

You can use rsync as a means of backing up data:

rsync -avrPS [input directory] [output directory]

How to rsync your Ubuntu home directory to an external hard drive

Use k9copy to rip a DVD to avi

I found a nice, straightforward guide for ripping DVDs to avi files: How to rip a dvd in Ubuntu (as .avi).

Migraing to a bigger hard drive

What do you do when you need (or sometimes, simply want) to upgrade your boot hard drive?  I recently found myself in that position, wondering how to accomplish the job with nothing more than free tools.  It seems like the kind of thing that Linux should definitely have the ability to handle.  As usual in the FOSS world, the question comes down to: just which way do you want to skin this cat?

How to Format a Hard Drive in Linux

I found a great article at eHow that explains how to partition a hard drive and set up the file system on it.

This article explains how to format a hard drive in Linux using the standard commands fdisk, mkfs, and fsck. The procedure described can be used either to format a secondary hard drive or to format a drive prior to system installation.

Check out the full article here.

Adding a new partition in fstab with UUID

I found this article explaining how to determine the UUID of a volume.

You can never go Back to Before … or can you?

Since I’ve had so much bad luck with wireless cards and laptops lately (my last attempt endedup in kernel panic,) I decided to figure out how to back up and restore my hard drive image.  This way I won’t have to keep popping the install CD in and putting my installation back to square 0, thereby losing all my configurations.

Apparently, in Linux, it’s really easy to capture a tar ball of your entire partition and then just unpack the tar ball onto the partition if you break something and need to restore.

Check out this guide on the Ubuntu forums: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

AVI to DVD

Since I discovered the joys of torrents, I have accumulated a few AVI files that I wish I could put on DVD to play back in a regular player.  I found this handy little guide over at linuxquestions.org that helped me accomplish exactly what I wanted to.

Locking a package version

Since the wicd update that borked my wireless management yesterday, I have successfully restored the program to an earlier version (link). However, the update notifier keeps nagging me about the fact that wicd has a new release. Not one for nagging, I poked around until I figured out how to make it stop.

If you find the package in Synaptic Package Manager, select it and the open up the Package menu (in the top menu bar) you will see an option to “lock” the package. Selecting this box will tell Synaptic/Apt that you don’t want to update the package. The icon next to the package name in the main window of Synaptic will change from one with a star (indicating an out-of-date package) to one with a lock (indicating — obviously — a locked package).

Just for good measure, I closed Synaptic and opened the Update Manager and did a check for updates in order to refresh the list (and get the wicd update out of the list). And now my update notifier no longer nags me from the panel.