In the good old days, USB file-transfer between your laptop and smart-phone used to happen through the much easier "mass storage" mode which works just as if you had inserted an external pen-drive. But these days, most smart-phones and tablets have shifted to the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). Unlike a … Read More

Conventional git commit messages are not just nice to have but great to have. In fact, once you get to know them, you'll start feeling that they are essential in any serious programming project. Consider the difference between following two commit messages for instance: git commit -m "added social login … Read More

Xubuntu is my favorite distro, hands down and the default Greybird theme is just wonderful! There used to be a time when I liked Ubuntu-MATE too, but not so much since they took the road to GTK+3! Coming back to the topic, XFCE works great but it has a … Read More

Though I'm not a distro-hopper exactly, I keep trying live versions of popular linux distros like debian and ubuntu every now and then, and while I generally use the "dd" command which works right out of the box, today I thought that instead of burning a new ISO image each … Read More

The indicator plugin in XFCE panel has been a very useful but also a very controversial plugin! The reason is that its the only plugin on the XFCE panel developed in GTK3 (whereas rest of the panel is developed in GTK2) and this causes some theming issues. Specifically, only those … Read More

Xubuntu is one of the most popular among the "lighter" distros as it hardly consumes 200MB when idle and even older machines are able to run with acceptable performance. Ubuntu-MATE which is based on MATE Desktop (a GNOME-2 fork) is also a similar competing distro though its debatable whether its … Read More

Linux is all about simplicity. Simple and time-tested tools like iptables, netstat and rsync can be called for help for basic tasks instead of untrusted third-party tools as happens in case of Windows. If you are a desktop user, then taking frequent backups of your data to a pen-drive or … Read More

One of the most boring things we need to perform in life is using the Google Drive. On one hand, so useful is this tool provided by Google (so many cloud GBs for free, yay!) but on the other hand, the web interface to access those files is not quite … Read More

The usual advice you get when seeking a more resource conserving distro is to use a lighter spin-off such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc. However, not many people know that even a "heavy" distro such as Ubuntu LTS with the default Unity Desktop could be made much lighter by uninstalling some … Read More

Today, I installed the Daily Build of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 in VirtualBox and gave it a try. This was supposed to be the first one that replaced Unity Desktop with GNOME. After having used 16.04 LTS for a long time, I felt that this version is quite … Read More