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.

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.

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.

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)

Download managers, although frowned upon by some, are often useful applications for those of us who download a lot of files, or are on slower connections and want to use a dedicated application (perhaps with some tricks up its sleeve) for the downloading of files.

We see many new Linux distributions released on regular basis. Some are based upon already existing major Linux distributions while others are independent projects. But not all will attract your attention until there is something really unique about them.

The 7z (7-Zip) archive format offers good compression ratios and is an open source format. This and the favored 7-Zip graphical file archive tool for Windows have popularized the format.