Have you ever been messing around on your Ubuntu box, only to notice some sluggishness or some suspicious spikes in your internet connection, and wondered, “What the hell is using up all that bandwidth?” Or worse, “Have I been hacked?” If so, then NetHogs might be the program for you.

NetHogs is a lightweight Linux terminal-based tool that monitors bandwidth usage, then groups it by process, so you can see which PIDs are using the most bandwidth, and if necessary, kill them with System Monitor.

To install NetHogs on Ubuntu (tested on 9.10 Karmic), you can either use Synaptic or simply apt-get, like so:

sudo apt-get install nethogs

To run NetHogs, simply feed it the internet connection you wish to examine, and sit back.

sudo nethogs eth0

For more information and the full list of options, visit the NetHogs man page.

man nethogs

One of the annoying little setup items on my list of things to do every time I reinstall Kubuntu is changing the bootsplash screen resolution from 800×600 to something more appropriate for my monitor, specifically, 1280×1024. Here’s how it’s done:

sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf

The file should be altered to read:

# Usplash configuration file
# These parameters will only apply after running update-initramfs.

xres=1280
yres=1024

The final step is to update initramfs, the initial RAM disk used by the kernel when Linux first boots up:

sudo update-initramfs -u

If you skip the last step, you will probably only see your new usplash resolution during shutdown and not when your computer boots up.

That’s it!

My first computer was an Apple IIc. I was thirteen years old and, at that age, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It had a gorgeous, green-on-black display screen, 128KB of RAM, no hard disk, and a Slim-line internal 5.25″ floppy drive into which you loaded whatever version of Zork you were in the mood for, and fired it up. All software was written in Applesoft BASIC, and although there was no official term for it at the time, everything was open source.

A simple Ctrl-C (or some such keystroke) was all that was required to break the flow of whatever program you were running and take a peek under the hood. I wrote my first computer program on the IIc. There might have been limits to what that little machine could do, but there were no restrictions. If you could imagine it, you could build it, and if you didn’t know quite how to build it, you just found someone else’s program that did something close, and figured out how they had done it. The Apple IIc was more than a tool, it was a teacher.

In college I used PCs and Macs, none of which I owned, of course — it just wasn’t expected in those days — and I reluctantly deciphered the library’s Unix terminals for the sole purpose of emailing friends with Pine. Until my junior year, by which time I was accustomed to using the university’s computer labs for my paper-writing and other needs, I kept that old Apple IIc around, with a dot-matrix printer, just in case.

It wasn’t until after graduation that I could finally afford (almost) to purchase my own computer. After buying and returning a couple of defective laptop PCs from a big box electronics retailer, I finally decided to go back to Apple, and I sprung for a Powerbook G3. It was beautiful, and it was definitely a Mac, but something was missing.

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Here’s how to get rid of that annoying “Busy Cursor” bouncing icon next to the mouse pointer in Kubuntu.

(1) Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Command dialog box.

(2) Type kcontrol and click Run.

(3) Select “Appearance & Themes” from the left sidebar menu.

(4) Select “Launch Feedback” from the sub-menu.

(5) In the “Busy Cursor” box, select “No Busy Cursor” from the drop down menu.

That’s it! Banished for good!

After a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon,” there are a few extra tasks necessary to get everything set up and running smoothly, especially when it comes to multimedia support and internet tools. This short tutorial will allow you to quickly enable some of the features missing in a vanilla installation.

The goal of this process is speed of setup, so I’ll use terminal commands rather than the more-familiar graphical menu, however I will make an effort to keep things simple and straightforward. Comments are welcome. (You might want to read all the way to the end before jumping into the commands.)

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Login to MySQL:

~$ mysql -u username -p

Create a database:

create database db_name;

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Pretty URLs are URLs that have meaning for human readers, rather than just being seemingly random jibberish only a web server could appreciate. The following is an example of a “pretty” URL:

http://my.blog.com/archive/2007/10/pretty-urls

Note that every part of the URL is relevant for a human reader. For comparison, here’s an example of an “ugly” URL:

http://www.mysite.com/nuke/modules.php?name=Forums&file=posting&mode=quote&p=14488&sid=0293840293840577

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If you want to build dynamic websites, one of the first things you’ll need to do is set up a development environment your local computer, so you can experiment and test new code without uploading everything to a remote web server. In a nutshell, this means LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

With this setup, you’ll be primed and ready to go to run popular content management software on your local box–like Drupal, Joomla or Silverstripe; start a Wordpress or Textpattern blog; or even roll your own community site from scratch using a hot framework like CakePHP.

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Making the commitment to partition your precious laptop’s hard disk in order to install the Ubuntu Linux operating system is not always an easy thing to do. This tutorial will describe in detail how to install Kubuntu on a removable 4GB USB flash drive, and configure the bootloader to boot Linux whenever the drive is connected.

Lately I have been fooling around with Kubuntu on a desktop computer and I really wanted to use it on my laptop. However, I was hesitant to partition my hard drive because I have a lot of documents and pictures and software that I would hate to lose in the event something went wrong. Additionally, I don’t have a tremendous amount of free space on my hard drive to devote to another operating system. So I decided to try to install Kubuntu on a USB flash drive.

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On August 6, 1997, Korean Air flight 801, a Boeing 747, crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam, with 237 passengers on board. The airplane had been cleared to land at Guam International Airport and crashed into high terrain about 3 miles southwest of the airport. 228 people were killed, and the airplane was destroyed by impact forces. Post-crash analysis revealed no mechanical defects with the aircraft (NTSB, 1997).

The National Transportation Safety Board calls this type of accident Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT), in which a functioning airplane is essentially flown into the ground due simply to the pilots’ lack of a clear picture of where they are (Arthur, 2003). According to a study from the Flight Safety Foundation, nearly 80 percent of all fatal airline accidents can be attributed to CFIT or approach-and-landing accidents (North, 1999). Clearly something needs to be done to address this situation and reduce these preventable pilot-error accidents.

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