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Some time ago I liked to play Little Big Adventure (LBA und LBA2) on DOS: It's a nice and amusing game.  Recently I detected both CDs in my shelf and thought it would be great to play these games again.

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nmap is a powerfull tool, which is known to be a port scanner. But there are other useful situations where it can be used:

  1. Query dhcp parameters
    sudo nmap -sU -p 67 --script=dhcp-discover 192.168.178.1
  2. Query registered DNS names in a fritz box
    sudo nmap -sP -PN -R --dns-servers 192.168.178.1 192.168.178.0/24 | grep -i fritz.box
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From time to time a Linux user want's to get a more detailed view about his system: That will be CPU utilization, netowkr information, disks and IO etc. On Linux fortunately there are a lot of different tools available. 

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Everybody working most of the time in the command line can use shortcuts to enter, modify and change commands and will speed up the work.

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It's not convenient to mount remote nfs disks just before using them from time to time. Automounter in Linux solves this issue. Just change into a subdirectory and the remote filesystem will be mounted by magic. Unfortunately there is one drawback: Th directory on the client will be created if you enter the directory by specifying it's name. Therfore you cannot use TAB expansion in a commandline. It's even not possible to open this directory in a GUI. But there is a solutiona available: Symbolic links:
 
Following pages describe in detail how to configure automount and it's very convenient to connect to remote nfs disks.
 
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From time to time there exists a new release of Linux distributions. In order to upgrade you install the new release in parallel to the old one and migrate the user data and system configurations to the new release. Unfortunately you installed software packages in the old release manually. Because they are not standard they are not installed in the new release installation. In general you now have two types of additional software: Software which you like and want to use in the new release also and software which you installed for testing or evaluation puposes only. The distributions offer ways to install all missing software on the new distribution. But it doesn't allow to filter and to exclude test and evaluation packages.
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Here I described how to configure a local mailman server. From time to time a new operating system version has to be installed and the mailman configuration and data has to be migrated to the new installation. Fortunately It's quite easy if you execute some additional steps after mailman installation.
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I wanted to share information with friends about my hobby and mailinglists are a very useful tool to achieve this. Everybody just send eMails to the mailinglist and it will be sent to everybody who subscribed to the mailinglist.
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From time to time you need a Rescue System - because your system doesn't start any more, you had a head crash and want to save your data or you just want to repartition your disks. I like SystemRescueCD. The documentation is available in English, German, French and Spanish. All file systems are supported and a lot of nice tools are available. In particular there is a shell script which easily allows to install the rescue system on an USB  stick. 300 MB is sufficient But if you want to use the stick also as a data repository the stick should have more memory.
 
 
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A screensaver is a useful tool but unfortunately it's annoying when there are active applicatoins like kaffeine or teamviewer and you have to move the mouse periodically just to deactivate the screensaver. Fortunately there exists a nice tool called caffeine. Just configure the applications you want to force to deactivate the screensaver and enjoy to view videose or to have remote sessions with shared screen without any screensaver interuption.
Unfortunatel it doesn't work any mor on Mint Maja with Mate. There fortunately exists a patch.
 
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More and more seniors use a labtop for their work. They commonly want to have larger fonts so they can read the text much more comfortable. On Mint11 just execute the following steps:
 
1)  Menu-> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Details -> Resolution: Increase dots per inch 
2) ALT F2 -> gconf-editor /apps/mintMenu/plugins-> Applications -> increase width. That way the mine menu will become larger and can display the larger text.
3)  Firefox: Edit -> Preferences -> Contents -> Adapt Fonts & Colors
 
References:
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Recently I had to upgrade my IBM T40 from Mint11 to Mint13 with Mate and unfortunately te fan control didn't work any more. The fan was active all the time even if there was nothing to do for the CPU. I posted ma issue in this German Forum (Linuxmintusers.de) and got vey useful tips how to solve the issue. Finally I installed tpfanco. That's a very professional tool to control the fan with software.My T40 fan control now works fine again.
 
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USB Sticks are very cheap and can get much more data than a CD or DVD and it's much faster to crate a rescue USB stick. The right tool on LInux is unetbootin. Just download a LiveISO and copy it with the tool on the USB stick. Voila.
 
A nice LiveISOs is provided by Linux Mint or Linux LiveCDs from other Linux distros ( List of Linux liveCD Distros ) or SystemRescueCD  (German, English, French and Spanish Website). Last one doesn't need unetbootin and is very small (512 MB).