I am using Linux (Fedora Core 6) on a pretty high end hardware (at least when I bought it) - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz (4M shared L2 Cache) with 2 GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia dual-head graphics card for over a year now. And yet a simple change made it at least 20-40% faster. Even my firefox (with 100+ tabs always open) feels much faster. So what is this magic change?

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I tested several file compression programs like zip, gzip, arj, bzip2, jar etc for compressing big files. The corpus constituted 5 POI generated Microsoft Excel documents totaling 298.8 MB. And there is a clear winner!

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Rapidshare is a popular site for sharing files. With free access you can only download 1 file per hour. Here is how you can bypass this limit on Linux.

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Linux comes with automatic setup for dual-monitors like windows. However I found the gnome applet rather buggy and unusable. If you have been lucky in using it (look in System->Administration->Display) then you do not need to read further. However most likely you would still want to glance over the super simple setup for dual monitors on Linux / Fedora Core.

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Microsoft's True Type fonts can also be used on Linux. Not only can they improve visibility, they are essential for proper look and layout if you are using Internet Explorer on Linux for testing etc. The installation is very simple… well almost:

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Are you a developer or QA engineer, in an all Linux workplace, always looking for scarce Windows machines to run Microsoft Internet Explorer for testing your product and services? You could also be the manager who is eager to switch to Linux but cannot do so because of strong requirement for testing on Internet Explorer. You are in luck. You can run Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0, 5.5, 5.1 and even IE 7 on Linux and with better security.

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The Trashcan on your Fedora Core desktop (tested for gnome) is actually located in ~/Trash directory. So a simple commaond as below should clear your trash:
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To monitor CPU temperature in Linux you will need to install lm_sensors package and then install gnome-applet-sensors (assuming you are using gnome) to get a nice graphical display. The devil is in the details. The shipped lm_sensors doesn't work on Fedora Core 6 with 2.6 kernels. It also doesn't support core 2 duo.

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I needed to run Synergy server for my triple monitor setup at startup of Gnome session. crontab isn't going to help here. I found a simple solution in Sessions applet located at System->Preferences->More Preferences->Sessions. It allows you to add scripts to run during X session startup.

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I started using dual monitors (SyncMaster 740N) on Linux (Fedora Core 6) about a month back on my new dream computer. I used GeForce 6200 LE with 256 MB RAM which provides for dual monitors with a VGA and DVI output. I had to use a DVI to VGA converter to attach the second monitor. Getting them to work was a pain on Linux. Finally I solved it with nvidia driver from Livna repository. Here is how I moved from single monitor to using dual monitors and then finally to triple monitors, the third one running Windows XP; all working seamlessly from the same keyboard and mouse and without using KVM. The monitors behave as a single big screen with individual controls. You can even use the techniques given here to use multiple monitors and screens without additional hardware or KVM.

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