Ubuntu Hacks

Chapter 8. Administration

Hacks 74-86

Yes, Ubuntu runs pretty smoothly out of the box, and if you’ve got a system that one person uses, you might not have to do much in the way of system configuration. However, the time may come when you need to add new users or provide tech support to friends and family you’ve turned onto Ubuntu. If so, then you’ll find hacks in this chapter to help you out.

There are plenty of other cases where you may need to wear a system administrator’s hat, and there are hacks in this chapter to help with those, too. Perhaps you need to manage and mount external drives, or mount directories from remote servers. And once in a while, things will go wrong: in many cases, you can peek into the system logs to figure out what happened, but sometimes you’ll need to resort to a rescue disc.

And there’s one system administration task no one can avoid: backups. You’ll find hacks in this chapter for making traditional backups and keeping files between two or more computers in sync.

Edit Configuration Files

When you need to edit a configuration file from the command line in a pinch, use these tips for the ins and (especially) outs of vim.

If one thing is for sure about Linux, it’s that it has no shortage of text editors. This reflects the largely text-based nature of Linux, from the command line, to the source code, to the configuration files that programs refer to. When you are in a desktop environment, you can use one of many graphical tools to edit text files; however, ...