One of the biggest things holding back GNU/Linux adoption is the fact that most people haven’t tried GNU/Linux. That’s where SLAX comes into play.

There are many ways to take screenshots and most KDE and Gnome users will be familiar with the GUI tools bundled with them: Ksnapshot for KDE and Take Screenshot for Gnome. They are good at what they do. However, sometimes you just need to take screenshots quick and dirty without the overheads (especially if you are using a lightweight windows manager on a relatively low-spec machine).

I decided to do something new. I used countless live CD’s in the past, but it actually never occurred to me to try something more persistent. So I dug out my old 2GB USB stick and installed Slax.

Guake - Quake-style terminal for GNOME
A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

You should backup many things: the files in your home directory, configurations files in /etc, (and there are many excellent graphical tools to do the job) but one of the simplest and best things you can do is to backup your boot master boot record (MBR).

SLAX is a minuscule version of the well-known Slackware Linux distribution. It is a LiveCD operating system that does not need to be installed on a computer’s hard drive as it can boot and run from either a USB or a CD drive. There is also an option to run SLAX from RAM. It is now time to take a microscopic look at this tiny distro. But first, some SLAX facts...

With regular expressions you can perform some mighty fine-tuned search-and-replace in text files, such as changing all the US-style date references (09/22/09) to UK style,(22.09.2009). Juliet Kemp open her vast tips and tricks toolbag to share a number of useful and excellent examples.

We know all about how powerful the GNU/Linux terminal is. However, it’s a pain to have to fire up a terminal emulator like Konsole or gnome-terminal, wait for a few seconds for it load, and then have to keep Alt-Tabbing to it.

How to dual-boot Windows 7 and Debian 6 is the latest in the series of articles on dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux and BSD distributions. When attempting to dual-boot Windows and a Linux or BSD distribution, one of the most important decisions you will have to make is where to install the bootloader.