One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

This November, the Unix community has another notable anniversary to celebrate: the 40th birthday of the first edition of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s Unix Programmers Manual, released in ...

Windows users who dive into *nix without first researching the operating system are in for quite a shock. The complete lack of a C:\ drive can send Windows switchers into a tailspin. Thankfully, IBM ...

Linux provides quite a few commands to look into file system types. Here's a look at the various file system types used by Linux systems and the commands that will identify them. Linux systems use a ...

PC lovers tend to collect a lot of hardware as the years roll by. Instead of leaving it to collect dust, why not repurpose it as a file-slinging server? Several free and open-source operating systems ...