linux

Using the command line to interact with a printer is surprisingly straightforward. You configure your printer by IP address, and then use it. Simplicity itself. Surprisingly, I’m even finding it more convenient than fighting with GUI printer setup systems.

I have recently discovered a feature of the apt package manager that smooths over almost all of the annoyances that I’ve had with point-release distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). apt provides a simple and effective way to install newer packages than are included in the release version that you are running. And it isn’t even hard to get set up.

I have previously written an article on setting up Outlook/Exchange email on Linux, in which I discussed setting up DavMail. Unfortunately, not long after I wrote that article, Microsoft rolled out an update that broke the authentication scheme I used. This article describes how to fix the problem.

Did you know that your shell probably has some very convenient editing keyboard shortcuts built right in, that will mostly work regardless of your terminal emulator, whether your logged in via a TTY, ssh, etc.

Employers and universities are fond of using Microsoft Exchange/Office 365/Outlook as an email provider. And, because Microsoft is Microsoft, these services do not support standard IMAP/POP/SMTP interfaces. This makes getting them set up on Linux a royal pain (unless you’re content to use the Web interface, anyway). That is not to say that it is impossible. There are several different ways to connect to your Microsoft email account using a Linux desktop email client. In this article, I discuss two of them: evolution-ews and DavMail.

Vim is a monster of a program, and it isn’t alone. Linux is chock full of incredibly powerful applications like Vim, emacs, sed, awk, or even bash itself. And learning to use any of these tools well requires a lot of time investment.

roff is classic Unix document formatting language that is readily available for Linux systems in the form of GNU roff (groff), troff, and nroff. In this article, I discuss how groff works, and how to use it to format simple documents.