Just type the following in Gnome Terminal:

sudo apt-get install fortunes-ubuntu-server -y

Now execute below command several times to get really useful Ubuntu command line tips:

ubuntu-server-tip

Here are some examples:

Use lsof to find out which process has open handles for a file. ‘lsof +D /path’ will find all processes for the given path. This is useful for unmounting media.

If you know you typed a command or password wrong, you can use ctrl + u to delete the whole line or ctrl + w to delete just a word.

If you are using a PostgreSQL database, use “ptop” to monitor real time usage.

Browse the command line history with ctrl-r and then type a few characters that you know are part of the command you are looking for.

A for loop in bash syntax: ‘for i in * ; do echo $i ; done’.

To make a backup without typing the full path twice: ‘cp /long/path/to/file/name{,.orig}’ to create a copy with the suffix .orig

This post is a part of series of Ubuntu Command Line Tricks posts in which I try to share really useful CLI commands — as it comes from terms “terminal command”, “console command”, they are to be executed in Terminal: Ubuntu Main Menu –> Accessories –> Terminal.

Need to print part of text file, e.g. the lines starting from 20th to 30th? It’s no need to use bash scripts or other things like python for that anymore! Here you go:

sed -n '20,30p' /etc/passwd

This command just outputs the line range from 20 to 30. Damn it, I was using the long bash equivalent for the same task for years

This post contains portion of quality Christmas wallpapers for your Ubuntu. Every background presented here has resolution of 1280×1024 pixels so should fit almost any screen. Click ‘Save Link As…’ to save any wallpaper.

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This is multipage post dedicated to best of Ubuntu Icon Themes. Feel free to download and then apply any of them to make your Ubuntu look even better. If you wish to share something here — just contact me via e-mail and your icon theme will appear here soon.

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If you are fan of command line like me and agree that in many situations it’s better/easier to use terminal than graphical interface, you should try terminal plugin for nautilus file manager. This smart plugin makes it possible to open popup terminal in any directory you opened in nautilus and use it for file manipulations or anything you want. If you still don’t have it installed you definitely should.

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A few days ago the media exploded with astonishing news that OpenOffice.org developers created fully independent The Document Foundation and developed new fork of OpenOffice.org suite — LibreOffice. Moreover Mark Shuttleworth said that “Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu”. So it’s time to see how LibreOffice looks like and get it installed on your Ubuntu!

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The latest stable version of the most inspirational music player for Ubuntu has been finally released. Banshee 1.8 comes with dramatical list of improvements, changes and bugfixes including official support of Amazon MP3 store, Miro Podcasts, reworked Apple devices support and much more. See below for more details.

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Small utility utube2mp3 makes it possible to download mp3 from youtube in one easy step — just point it to certain youtube clip and get mp3 file as the output. I like this simple and elegant tool.

In order to get started you have to download utube2mp3 binary, make it executable and create Desktop shortcut. Open Ubuntu Menu –> Accessories –> Terminal and type the following commands:

cd ~/Downloads/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/utube2mp3/files/utube2mp3_0.1.2/utube2mp3_linux_x86.tar.gz/download
tar -xvzf utube2mp3_linux_x86.tar.gz
chmod +x utube2mp3
ln -s ~/Downloads/utube2mp3 ~/Desktop/utube2mp3

From now you can start utube2mp3 youtube conversion utility from your Ubuntu Desktop. Just copy/paste URL of youtube video you wish to get mp3 from, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8 (Led Zeppelin — Stairway to Heaven) and press “Get mp3!” button. You will be prompted where to save resulting mp3 file to be retrieved from certain youtube video and in a few minutes you will see .mp3 file there.

This is a quick tip showing how to move window controls in your Ubuntu from left to right… Just execute the following command in Terminal to change controls position:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

If you ever decide to revert to default window controls position (left) type the following command:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "close,maximize,minimize:menu"

Looking for equivalent of wget’s –limit-rate option for apt-get/aptitude? No problems, see below how to set download speed limit to either apt-get or aptitude. Rather bearded Ubuntu hint but still handy if you don’t have 100 Mbps Internet connection (I don’t).

aptitude -o Acquire::http::Dl-limit=25 safe-upgrade

Above command starts upgrade of your Ubuntu and makes aptitude to download new packages at up to 25 kB/s (kilobytes per second) that equals to 200 kbps (kilobit per second).

Mentioned command line option for aptitude also work for apt-get:

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::http::Dl-limit=25k upgrade

Moreover, if you wish to set up certain download limit permanently just add the following line to /etc/apt/apt.conf:

Acquire::http::Dl-Limit "25";

(don’t forget to change 25 value according to your needs)

Hope it helps somebody!