I was approached a month or two ago by Packt Publishing to write some Ubuntu related articles for their online article network. I guess they found me by way of my Ubuntu Tutorials blog, which I’ve maintained for more than three years now. I have to say, it sure does make all the time spent blogging feel a little more worthwhile!
I recently published my third article for them, Ubuntu User Interface Tweaks. In this article I talk about documenting your user interface customizations for easy, even scripted, replication in the future. The GNOME desktop environment makes it very easy to make customizations to your desktop. It then takes this one step further by way of the gconf-editor, which is a GNOME configuration editor tool. With this tool you can find and toggle values for nearly every aspect of your desktop environment. The part that I find the most appealing is the fact that you can use the command line to automate these customizations in the future. If you find yourself spending time reapplying desktop customizations on each new installation, you’ll definitely want to read this article!
The previous article was about Creating a Local Ubuntu Repository using Apt-Mirror and Apt-Cacher. These tools are both very useful if you have multiple Ubuntu installations in your network. In a nutshell, these tools allow you to download packages and updates once and then share them within your local area network. This allows you to conserve bandwidth and provide a local cache of packages. If you have multiple Ubuntu machines within your network this is likely something you’ll find very useful.
Finally, the first article that I published for them was regarding FreeBSD. FreeBSD has been a recent research project of mine, and I have to say that I’ve been very impressed with a lot of the technologies that I’ve come across. One in particular is FreeBSD’s concept of Jails. Jails are secure, chrooted environments each defining their own users, ports and services. I’ve implemented FreeBSD Jails and I very much like the way that I’ve been able to secure my many network services. If you’d like to learn more about segregating and securing processes and services I think you’ll find this to be an interesting read.
I have some more articles in the works. Some of the topics that I have upcoming in the queue are:
- Firewalling with UFW
- Using SELinux on Ubuntu
- SELinux vs AppArmour
Check back here or subscribe to our feed for more articles. I’m sure we’ll you’ll like what you find.
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