Articles by Bill Toulas
About Bill Toulas
Over five years of experience writing about Linux and open source software on blogs and news websites. As part of the community, this is my way to give back as well as to promote what I perceive as the most amazing development in the area of software and operation systems.
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Linux: How to burn a CD/DVD through the command line
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: linux, shell •
Comments: 0 Carrying out common daily tasks such as burning a DVD through the comfort of a user-friendly graphical interface is, of course, a good thing, but unfortunately things don't always work as expected. When this is the case, Linux users can revert to the good old terminal to get things done no matter what. On this quick tutorial, we will see how Linux users can utilize the terminal to burn audio CDs, data DVDs or ISO images on a disk.
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How to use Stellarium's Oculars plugin to match your optics
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: desktop •
Comments: 4 The Stellarium virtual planetarium is one of the most widely used open source specialized tools in the world. It features a captivating dome that counts over 600000 starts, hundreds of constellations and asterisms, planets with their moons and realistic sky effects like atmospheric scattering, shooting stars and supernovae simulation. It can serve as an educational tool, telescope guidance software, position calculator, or even as a rendered for fish-eye projection on domes.
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How to install and set up multiple chess engines on XBoard
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: arch linux, centos, debian, desktop, fedora, linux, suse, ubuntu •
Comments: 2 XBoard is an open source graphical chess interface that was made to be compatible with the X window system and that can accept mouse moves, support countless chess engines and even allow the playing of chess variations. It can also serve as a front-end for local game analysis, net server based games, or even email chess (auto-parsing of received mail moves and auto-sending of mail when move is done).
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How to secure your PDF documents with passwords (and how to crack them if needed)
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: centos, debian, desktop, opensuse, security, suse, ubuntu •
Comments: 9 Documents safety is a particularly sensitive matter due to the typical usage nature and possible value and importance of the contents. That said, users should be extra careful when sharing documents that shouldn't be leaked to other parties.
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How to record from JACK with Ardour on Linux
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: centos, desktop, fedora, opensuse, ubuntu •
Comments: 0 With all the madness that prevails the Linux audio engines and complex inter-related frameworks and subsystems, it is very easy to get lost and overwhelmed when you want to do something as simple as to record yourself playing an electric musical instrument. Recording from JACK is imperative in that case, as using a “mic to speaker” arrangement will introduce unwanted noise to the recording, no matter what.
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How to edit your kernel boot parameters on Linux
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 2 Changing or editing your kernel boot parameters is very important when you want to fix an issue that causes errors during boot, or test a new feature, activate a different driver, or disable a feature on your system. These parameters are stored as text, in the boot loader's configuration file which the kernel parses during the init process.
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How to repair your Grub 2 on Ubuntu
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: desktop, linux, ubuntu •
Comments: 5 Grub v2 offers a powerful rescue mode. Now using this mode, may not be exactly a walk in the park for most inexperienced users out there, so here's a guide on how to easily fix your Grub with the Boot Repair tool.
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How to edit Movie Subtitles on the Linux Desktop
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: centos, debian, desktop, suse, ubuntu •
Comments: 0 Here's is a quick guide on how to load and edit subtitles on GNOME Subtitles and Subtitle Editor. The movie that I will be using for this tutorial is a documentary called “The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard” released in 2013 under a Creative Commons (CC) license.
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Sound Recording and Editing with Audacity on Ubuntu
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: desktop, linux, ubuntu •
Comments: 4 In all the years I have been dealing with both Linux and sound recordings, I have never found a simplest and more powerful tool than Audacity to get the job done. This open source sound recorder, editor, analyzer, generator and effect applicator is surely one of the most useful and important tools ever to be produced by the free software community.
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How to defrag your Linux system
Author: Bill Toulas •
Tags: arch linux, debian, fedora, linux, ubuntu •
Comments: 21 There is a common misconception among GNU/Linux users that our systems never ever need to be defragmented. This stems from the success of the journalized filesystems used by most distributions including EXT2,3 and 4, JFS, ZFS, XFS, ReiserFS and BTRFS. Fragmentation though can still be an issue though, especially for users that use space limited disks that may not offer many file allocation options.
