Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean
Design by JeremyD
If I can use Linux without a great amount of difficulty, then it definitely is due to one of my good friends, Kumar Appaiah. Here, I have listed some stuff which can be called tips and tricks for Linux none of which is actually new. But I thought I should put up these things since I got to know these after some googling and this page can help people get them at the same page atleast for the most common stuff.
Installing Ubuntu
Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distro as of now and on Kumar's advice I decided to install Ubuntu instead of Mandriva 2008 on my personal computer. I installed the latest release, Gutsy Gibbon(7.10) released in October and I have already started liking it better than Mandriva 2007. The Restricted Drivers Manager allows one to seamlessly install drivers for hardwares like the NVidia graphics card, Wireless card etc. etc. However, one problem that seems to be common is that it fails to recognise the Intel High Definition Audio(Intel HDA) sound card by default. Thankfully, the problem is easily solved by installing a package using ubuntu's wonderful package manager. More information on this can be found here.
There are a number of things one can do with gutsy and the good news is that nothing requires a great effort from the user's side. Listed are some of the not very trivial things that can be done, with a few instructions to get it working on gutsy.
Getting a 3D Desktop
Mutt
Recently, I made a good decision of using Mutt, to read(and ofcourse send) my emails. I now realise that Mutt is one of the most versatile email clients available. I started liking it as soon as I started using it since there are a number of neat things that one can do using Mutt. I use fetchmail for fetching my mails and procmail for sorting them out. Here is a good manual for getting started with Mutt.
Jabref
Jabref is an open source bibliography reference manager and is platform independent since it runs on Java. It can be used to store the bibtex entries and can be easily imported to a Latex document. Since it can be integrated with google scholar using a set of preferences, Jabref is probably the best way to keep track of references. A good link that explains how to use Jabref can be found here. The bibtex entry of the article can also be obtained using Google scholar making things simpler.