Here is a cool trick to make your bash prompt look like a dos prompt. Why would you do it? You shouldn’t; unless you have something for dos prompts. But you could always do this to fool your coworkers or friends and give them a moment of, “WTF”? (I know I will)

chage changes the number of days between password changes and the date of the last password change. This information is used by the system to determine when a user must change her password. The chage command is restricted to the root user, except for the -l option, which may be used by an unprivileged user to determine when her password or account is due to expire.

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months.

I have been using Linux in one capacity or another since I first downloaded a Red Hat ISO a number of years ago. What finally allowed me to go full-time with my chosen distro was not so much the progression of hardware detection and self-mounting partitions but the applications. Today, I would like to share some of my personal favorites with you.

If you spend any length of time on the Internet, then you know how helpful a broswer's bookmarking feature can be. If, like many of us, you practically live on the Internet, you know bookmarks are essential. Firefox 3's revised bookmark system is great, but if you still need more than it offers, you've got plenty of other options.

It's been nearly three years since Sun Microsystems kicked off its OpenSolaris project by releasing most of the code that comprises its Solaris operating system under an open-source license. And yet, it's only just now, with the release of the first official distribution of OpenSolaris, that the project begins in earnest.

Continuing the series of trying to come up with reasons for choosing an operating system, FreeBSD will be discussed. Although FreeBSD is not Linux, it is Unix-like, nonetheless. I have never used FreeBSD and all things discussed here are second-hand knowledge.

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS.