This article will show you how to change your DNS servers from your default servers to the DNS servers run by Google, specifically while you’re using Lubuntu. If you’re not using Lubuntu, the process is likely fairly similar. Either way, it should be a nice and fun article, and we’ll even do it in the GUI instead of the terminal.
So, what is DNS? DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’. As you know by now, machines are identified by their IP address. It’d suck to have to remember numbers instead of names. It’s also possible to route multiple domain names to the same IP address. So, we have domain names and use those domain names to resolve to IP addresses.
If you’re like most people, right now the DNS servers you’re using have come from your ISP – the folks who provide your internet service. This means that they can see which sites you visit, based on the requests you make to the DNS service.
Some folks don’t like this and prefer to find another DNS provider. (There’s also Secure DNS which this article will not be touching on.) One of those companies that provides free DNS servers is Google. Like them or not, their DNS servers are robust and consistently updated, often making domain propagation quicker for you.
This article is for Lubuntu, as stated above, but you may very well be able to follow the same exact steps with your distro of choice. And, now that you have a general idea of what’s going on, let’s learn how to…
Change Your DNS Servers:
To get started with changing your DNS servers, you need to find your networking icon in your system tray. It’ll be down on the right, not far from the clock. Once you have found it, right click on it so that it brings up the menu to let you “Edit Connections”. It will look something like this:
Of course, your version won’t have the nifty arrow.
You’ll want to click the gear icon. That’s why I put the arrow there!
That will open another window. This window will have tabs you need to worry about – or a tab you need to know about. You probably shouldn’t need both. The tabs you’re interested in will look like this:
You should need one of those, probably not both of those…
Now, you should only need to edit one of those. If you’re still using IPv4 then you use that tab. If you’re using IPv6 then you’ll obviously want to use the appropriate tab. For example, the IPv4 would look like this:
This would be the tab you’re looking for, pretty much…
Now, where that arrow is is where you want to enter the new DNS server information. You separate them with a comma, though you can use a comma and a space – there will need to be a comma.
For Google’s IPv4 addresses, your choices for 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
For Google’s IPv6 addresses, your choices are 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844.
Note: The ifconfig or ip addr will help you tell if you have IPv4 or IPv6.
When you’re done, be sure to click the save button to ensure your new settings take effect. Remember the screen and changes, should things go pear shaped. You can undo this easily enough.
This will, of course, work with any set of DNS servers out there. You can use it with other servers if you aren’t a fan of Google. This can serve as a general guideline for other servers, should you wish.
Closure:
Yup… There it is. You have another article. This time, it tells you how to change your DNS servers if you use Lubuntu. Again, it’ll work for other distros, but I’m only including pictures/vouching for it with Lubuntu.
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Today, we’re going to learn to clear the terminal screen. This is generally done for privacy’s sake. You don’t want people to be able to scroll up and see what you’ve been reading in the terminal. This probably isn’t as important if you’re the only user and you’re in your house, but you may still like to keep things clean and tidy.
We’ll go ahead and cover two ways to clear the terminal in this article. They’re both rather easy commands and you’ll find this article is definitely not all that complicated, or even very long. This is pretty much one of the first things folks should have learned when they started using the terminal. We might as well cover it here.
Rather than make this long-winded, we’ll just make this into a short and easy article to read. Let’s all learn how to…
Clear The Terminal:
To be clear, this just erases the text in the terminal. It clears the scrollback content so that folks can’t scroll up and see the previous terminal contents. Again, it’s a good idea to do if you’re in a multi-user environment where people may have access to your screen and you don’t want them to know what has been written to the terminal.
Obviously, you need a terminal for this article. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.
I suppose we’ll need some content, so let’s try using this command:
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ls -la
That should fill your terminal up.
Now, to clear it you can use either of the two following commands:
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clear
Or you can also use:
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reset
(Though reset may leave a little text at the top, it still removes the terminal’s scrollback history.)
Both of those will do the job, with ‘clear’ being the obvious winner = but it’s nice to have options. They’ll clear the scrollback in the terminal, preventing folks from scrolling up to read what has previously been written there. Of course, they could potentially still press the arrow up button and see what commands you’ve written, so you can try to prevent that as well.
Closure:
See? I told you that it’d be a quick and easy article. It’s not all that taxing to learn how to clear your terminal and that’s all that this article is meant to cover. Both of the two commands have a man page, but they’re not very useful commands for anything else but clearing the terminal. Have an easy day, a day where you can (maybe) say you learned something and not have to read a long article. After all, it was a quick and easy day for me!
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Today’s article is about one of my favorite terminal emulators, Terminator.Terminator is one of my favorite terminal emulators, and I’d like to use this opportunity to expose more users to it. For lack of a better category, we’ll say this is a review. Why not? It’s my site, I’ll call it a review if I wanna! I’ll make it a review!
So, we call it a terminal emulator because it emulates the terminals of old, back when terminals were the main way for a person to interface with their computer. They are not true terminals, but they perform similar functions. Long gone are the days of just green-screens. Today, we have graphical user environments and there’s less focus on the terminal for some folks. From here on out, I’ll just be calling it ‘terminal’ for simplicity and brevity sake.
There are some die-hard folks who still cling to the terminal – and I’m one of them, at least for certain tasks. At any given moment, I have at least two terminal instances open, each a different piece of software. One of those is usually Xfce4 and the other is often Terminator. Today’s article is about the latter.
Chances are good that you can install Terminator with ease. It’s likely in your default repositories. For example, on Ubuntu you’d install it with this command:
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sudo apt install terminator
Go ahead, give it a shot… If not immediately available, you can look here for more information. If you’re really energetic, you can read the documentation. In this case, it’s going to be a positive review (obviously), so I’d not recommend it (such as I am) if I wasn’t a fan… So…
Why Terminator:
You’ll not be even remotely surprised when you open Terminator for the first time, and that’s a good thing. You’ll see your standard terminal looking thing, complete with a title bar. Truthfully, it’s kinda ugly looking until you make it your own (more on that in a minute). It looks like this:
Terminal (terminal emulator) without any customizations.
What you’re looking for is in the right mouse-button click – the preferences menu. Once you open that, you’ll see all sorts of options.
Once in the options, you’ll start to understand why I like Terminator. You can make it visually appealing, use multiple tabs, group tabs, auto-run commands when opened, and have all the various profiles you could possibly want. If you’re working on multiple servers at the same time, this is definitely a great help.
You have infinite theme options, but there are a number of them that are built in – the standard types like solarized dark or light. If I’m not taking screenshots, I like mine to look like this:
As I’m often in a dark room, this is excellent for my eyes.
That is so much nicer on my eyes. And, if the Terminator theme didn’t clue you in, yes I am using a computer that I don’t normally use. It’s a long story, but nothing is broken beyond my ‘net connection. But, that’s why the screenshots look different. I am also using Flameshot instead of my beloved Shutter.
So, that’s not enough? Seriously – go through and check the preferences. You have global options and then you have all sorts of preferences that you can pick – each contained in their own distinct profiles. When you get to the profiles, you’ll see how much customization is really possible. Allow me to show you:
As you can see, there are a whole lot of options with Terminator.
What does Terminator offer? A whole lot… Not only are there tabs, you can set it up in a more traditional grid fashion. These layouts can be moved with drag-and-drop. The list of keyboard shortcuts is extensive – and you can probable tell I’m just reciting the documentation. Layouts are even saved from session to session.
But Wait, there’s more!
Anyhow, all those preferences, not just layouts, can be saved from session to session. Once you get it configured the way you want, it’ll let you retain those settings. Many of these are all extensions of the profiles feature, so it’s highly customized if you want it to be.
I especially like the individual profiles – not seen on this computer’s screenshot. If I paid a bit more attention, I could just copy the config from ~/.config/terminator, but I’m slacking and this situation is temporary. (I’m amazed that I’ve still been able to keep up my publication schedule!) I did not, so you get a different set of screenshots.
If you want, you can even find plugins for Terminator. You can write your own, if such is your desire. If you click here, you’ll see a bunch of plugins that you can use to extend Terminator even further. (Quite a few plugins exist, so do check the link.)
As I said, there are quite a few plugins and some of them are quite useful – especially for system admins and programmers, or DevOps folks I guess. They’re universally free, in every sense of the word. They’re also easy to install – just drop them into ~/.config/terminator/plugins/ and they’ll be available to enable from the preferences menu.
If nothing else, go ahead and install Terminator to see if you like it. I dare say that you won’t be disappointed, unless you’ve got some weird edge-case and even then it’s about the best you’re going to get.
Rating Terminator:
Terminator does everything you can want in a terminal, more or less. If it doesn’t do what you want, plugins are easily developed and someone else may have scratched that itch for you already.
I honestly can’t think of anything it’s missing that I personally need or want. It can be a bit boxy and the look is dated, but it should match your theme fairly well, or better if you do some work customizing it.
I appreciate how easy it is to configure it to work with my eyesight. I’m partially colorblind (not the way you’re probably thinking) and have difficulties with the spaces between the primary colors. I can see green, but yellow-green may appear as either yellow or green to me. So, some of the themes (again, you can customize them as much as you desire) are wonderful for my eyes.
Yeah, try as I might, I just can’t think of anything bad to say about it. I’m reluctant to give anything a 10/10, but this is really close to being the perfect application for the task it is designed for. I’d even go so far as saying that it’s feature-complete, but some folks must not agree ’cause they keep writing plugins and that means they want more features.
So, I’m going to give this a 9.5 out of 10. That’s the highest I’ve ever rated anything on this site and I’d not expect to see that score for anything else. I knock the 0.5 because obviously people expect more from it – options they feel should be defaults. A few of the plugins are indeed handy (even to me, a simplistic user). Yeah, I’ll knock off the points for that. That sounds good. It gets a 9.5/10. That’s pretty much a gold medal winner, right there!
Closure:
And there you have it… You have another article – this one a review, and a review of not just one of my favorite pieces of software but of a piece of software I use many, many times a day. Even if you have a favorite terminal, give Terminator a try. You won’t be disappointed – probably… If you are, you’re just weird!
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In today’s article, we’re going to explore a couple of other ways to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s going to be a pretty easy task and one most everyone can learn from. It shouldn’t even be a very long article.
Weak passwords are easy to crack. You don’t want that, for obvious reasons. If you want to see how approximately how long it’ll take to brute force passwords, you can check sites like this one. Remember that the time given by that is more or less the maximum time it could take, and your password could be brute-forced (by repeated guessing) much sooner than that.
I’ve previously written an article about generating a sufficiently complex password. That’d be one way to generate strong passwords, but this article will cover a couple of other easy ways to generate strong passwords in the Linux terminal.
Generate Strong Passwords:
This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.
With your password open, we’re first going to use GPG to create a strong password. Everyone should already have GPG installed, so there’s no reason to cover that in this article. So, to do so, you’d use a command something like this:
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gpg --gen-random --armor 1 16
It’ll have an output similar to this one:
Obviously, you don’t want to use that password specifically! Use your own!
You can change the 16 to any length you want. It’s obviously the number of characters.
You can also use OpenSSL, which you likely have installed, to generate a complex password. It’s actually pretty easy and the command is:
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openssl rand -base64 24
Again, you can change the 24 to anything you darned well please. Sometimes sites will have a maximum password length, which might seem kinda silly – as I think I recall there being a hard limit of 256 characters that the kernel will accept. Either way, the output would be similar to this one:
That one is 24 characters long. Yay!
Feel free to mess around with changing the length. OpenSSL is likely installed by default and you don’t have to install pwgen. Both of the tools in this article will likely be installed by default.
Closure:
And there you have it! Another article said and done. This one is about teaching folks how to generate strong passwords in Linux. It’s an easy enough task and this article shouldn’t be too complicated for even the most n00b of the n00bs!
Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.
Today’s article is going to tell you how to unzip a .zip file in the Linux terminal. It shouldn’t be too complex, nor will it take a great deal of time to learn how to unzip a file.
In the Linux world, we don’t really see the .zip files all that often. We have other ways to compress files, but .zip is still there and you’ll sometimes come across them in your travels.
If you’re unaware, the .zip form of data-compression is actually a ratified standard. The format has been around since the late 80s and is one of the compression methods that supports loss-less compression. There are all sorts of compression formats and methods, but .zip has been around since forever and will probably exist long into the future.
If you want to unzip a .zip in a GUI, I’d say that you need look no further than PeaZip. It’s easy enough to compile from source, or you can find pre-built PeaZip packages for most distros. This article, on the other hand, is how to unzip a zip in the Linux terminal.
It’s not all that daunting and should be a pretty easy article for even a beginner to follow. Though, I suppose, any well-written article should be easy enough for a beginner to follow. Were I something other than a basic keyboard smasher, I’d probably be able to do that!
The headline clearly mentions doing this in the terminal, so you’re going to need an open terminal to continue. That’s relatively simple. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.
With your now-open terminal, let’s first make sure you have the ability to unzip a .zip file. To do that, let’s use:
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which unzip
That should return something akin to:
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which unzip
/usr/bin/unzip
If you do not get a result, you’ll need to install unzip from your system’s repositories. Trust me, it’s in there – unless you’re using a really, really basic distro.
Assuming you get results indicating that you have unzip, it’s actually easy to unzip a .zip in the Linux terminal. You just navigate to the correct directory and run:
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unzip <file_name>
Which, I suppose, is mostly all you’re going to need. I should also mention that when you’re attempting to run this command, you can generally type the first few letters of the file name, and then press TAB to auto-complete the file name, saving you some typing time and just generally making the whole thing easier.
Obviously, there’s more to the unzip command. You can check the man unzip page, but the more useful flags will get covered here. Seriously, check the man page. The command is absurdly complex, with tons of options for obscure uses.
For example, to unzip a .zip to a different directory, you just use the -d flag, like so:
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unzip <file_name> -d /desired/path
If you need to enter the password, you can just use:
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unzip -P <password> <file_name>
When you want to list the files without decompressing them, you just use the -l flag, like this:
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unzip -l <file_name>
If you want to test the ,zip file to see if it’s corrupted, you can use the -t flag.
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unzip -t <file_name>
Normally, it’ll extract the files and overwrite the existing files (if any). You can avoid that with -n flag:
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unzip -n <file_name>
When you unzip a .zip, you will find out that it happily creates new directories. You can avoid that with the -j flag, like this:
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unzip -j <file_name>
Do read the man page! There’s a zillion options.
Closure:
Seriously, read the man page. Learn how to unzip a .zip file – and then all the many, many options included. Of all the man pages out there, this one is one of the most complex ’cause this one little application has a ton of options. Even if you don’t intend to learn it all, read the man page!
Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.
