hack

Twitter is a fun micro-blogging service, but I'm not a huge fan of the web interface for it. Fortunately the kind folks at Twitter have made an API available and many third party applications have sprung up to use it.

Twyt is an easy to use and powerful way to work with Twitter from the command line. You can install it from a terminal in Debian and Ubuntu using:

# aptitude update && aptitude install python-twyt

In case you happen to use Drupal 6 on Debian, you might want to check for updates. A few nasty bugs were fixed in the last update (more details can be found at: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1792).

So for aptitude users:

aptitude update && aptitude upgrade

And apt-get users:
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

locate is a great way to quickly find files on your system. It searches using an index created using the updatedb utility so it can find files much more quickly than find can.

This post shows you how to quickly install all the packages on one Debian or Ubuntu system on another.

Adobe makes some very powerful software, but unfortunately their websites tend to be slow loading and difficult to navigate.

To get around this, there are many files you can download directly from their public FTP server. Downloading Adobe Reader is the most common reason why I visit the FTP server.

There are quite a few strong GUI tools for working with media in Linux. However, working from a terminal can frequently be more efficient and this post outlines some of the commands you can use to do this.

A short list of some of the apt and dpkg commands I use regularly. Working in a terminal this way is usually faster and more convenient than using graphical front ends to APT. Users logged in as root don't need to type in sudo where specified.

on the web:

http://ubuntuforums.org

http://ubuntuguide.org

https://wiki.ubuntu.com

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu

http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/linux/ubuntu

http://www.ubuntuhcl.org/

on irc:

#ubuntu at irc.freenode.net