10 Most Popular Linux.com Stories in 2011

Here it is, 2011 is almost at an end. As we get ready for 2012, we wanted to take a look at the stories that were most popular with Linux.com readers in 2011. We've pulled together a list of the 10 most popular stories from the year for you to enjoy over the holidays.

To get this year's top 10, we looked at our site statistics and pulled the most popular original pieces published in 2011. The winners were not too surprising, but do help us figure out what kind of stories to line up for next year. Without further ado, we present the 10 most popular pieces published in 2011.

Earlier this month, we took a look at the 10 most important open source projects of 2011. It looks like Linux.com readers were quite interested in the results.

Another popular post from 2011 was Brian Proffitt's look at the best 7 Linux distributions for desktops, laptops, enterprise, and more.

We also looked at the best netbook Linux distributions from 2011. Though netbooks weren't quite the hot property they were in previous years, lots of Linux folks seem to love their netbooks.

Choice is one of the things that makes the Linux desktop great. Our round-up of alternative window managers for Linux was a huge favorite when we published it early in 2011. Long live FVWM!

Nathan Willis took a good, long look at GNOME 3.0 in March. Though Willis wasn't entirely pleased with what he found, Linux.com readers seemed to be deeply interested in the new GNOME.

SSH is one of the most-used tools on Linux, so it's little surprise that a piece on OpenSSH tips and tricks cracked the top 10 for 2011. I still use the FUSE trick for mounting remote filesystems on a regular basis.

The Fedora is strong with the Linux.com community. Carla Schroder's Fedora 16 preview drew quite a bit of attention when we published it in early November. That might have something to do with the slew of new technologies and refinements (like GNOME 3.2) that were shipped with F16.

Another winner from Carla, a IPv6 "crash course" published in April. Carla took a look at the advantages of IPv6 and some tips and tricks for working with IPv6 on Linux.

Calendar clients are easy to find on Linux. Calendar servers? That's a bit trickier, but Nathan Willis gets it all sorted out. Can you believe a FOSS project from Apple makes the list?

The first new version of LibreOffice shipped in early 2011, and Brian was there to put it through its paces. LibreOffice has come a long way since then, of course.

There you have it, the most popular stories of 2010. What about 2012? Tell us what kind of stories you'd like to see in 2012, and beyond.

By the way, if you're curious about last year's top 10, check out the top 10 from 2010 too.

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10 Best Linux.com Tutorials of 2011

One of my resolutions for the New Year is usually “learn more” about things I’m interested in. Of course, that includes Linux. If you’re looking to learn more about Linux this year or next, you might want to check out some of the tutorials that we published throughout 2011.

Every year, we try to line up topics that will be useful to the Linux.com audience. That includes new users who’ve never touched a command line before, as well as expert users who have a lot of experience under their belts. Now, in no particular order, I present some of the best tutorials from 2011. Enjoy!

Nathan Willis provides a little advocacy for his favorite editor, GNU Emacs. The GNU Emacs 101 explains why users would want to try Emacs, and gives basics to get you started.

Carla Schroder explains how to take advantage of “one of the best features of virtualization” with Linux KVM, how to do live and offline migrations with KVM.

As Carla writes, “we had a System V (SysV) type init daemon to manage Linux system startup, and it was good. It was configured with simple text files easily understood by mortals, and it was a friendly constant amid the roiling seas of change. Then came systemd, and once again we Linux users were cast adrift in uncharted waters. Why all this change? Can’t Linux hold still for just a minute?”

No, no it can’t. Sorry. But at least we have a great intro to systemd from Carla to help deal with the new init hotness.

You might use GNU grep all the time, but glark is an alternative that may be better for you in some situations. If you’d like to learn more about glark, we’ve got a short tutorial on glark to get you started.

Networking problems can just ruin your day. Whose fault is it? Carla provides a tutorial on figuring out where network problems lie.

In a follow-up to the troubleshooting tutorial, Carla digs into figuring out who is on your network using Linux tools. This includes popular utilities like Nmap, fping, iperf, and more.

Don’t want a “fancy GUI” to manage your task list? You’re not alone. But what if you want to sync your CLI app with your Android device? In that case, take a look at Nathan’s tutorial on using todo.txt in conjunction with Android.

These days, there are a lot of reasons for users to want to be able to browse the Internet anonymously. Nathan provides a really good tutorial on browsing anonymously with Tor on Linux.

As a follow-up to the first Tor piece, Nathan provided a second tutorial on running invisible services and bridges for those who need more privacy than Tor does by default.

They say that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it — but if you don’t know how to use your history in Bash, you’re just not making the most of your system. If you want to learn how to use your history, we have five tips for working with GNU Bash history on Linux.

Have some topics you’d like to see covered in 2012? Let us know in the comments!

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The Best of Linux.com Weekend Project from 2011

Weekends are for relaxing, spending time with friends… and tackling those tech projects that you never have time to get to during the week. The weekend project is one of the most popular features here on Linux.com, and we had a bumper crop of excellent projects in 2011. Here’s 10 of the best from 2011, which include everything from better ways to upgrade your system, to getting a leg up on Web projects.

Reproducing your current environment on when you upgrade isn’t always easy. Nathan Willis undertakes a from-scratch reinstall, and provides valuable lessons that you can use when you tackle your next migration.

Debian developer Joey Hess starting writing etckeeper after unsatisfying experiments with other people’s attempts to shoehorn /etc/ into a Git repository. A few people had done so successfully, but ran into two major problems: what to do when a package installation made changes to the directory or a file (i.e., and the user could not enter the usual log entry), and what to do about metadata changes like file permissions. This weekend project shows how you can control your configuration with etckeeper.

Ever had a Web project in mind, but got stalled at the prospect of having to worry about the site design? If code, and not design, is your strong point you’ll want to take a look at Twitter’s Bootstrap.

For the security conscious, there is always room for another weapon against attackers. Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, packet sniffers – all are important pieces of the puzzle. So too is Honeyd, the “honeypot daemon.” Honeyd simulates the existence of an array of server and client machines on your network, including typical traffic between them. In this weekend project, you’ll learn how to use HoneyD on Linux to fool attackers.

If you’ve ever needed to edit one or more files to make quick changes, you’ve no doubt found that doing it using a text editor can be a slow slogging process. Linux, thankfully, has a number of tools that make it easy to do this non-interactively. One of the best is sed, a “stream editor” that can help you make quick work of filtering and transforming text. Use this weekend project from 2011 to get to know GNU sed.

One of the keys to using GNU sed successfully is knowing how to use its regular expressions. If you look over sed scripts without knowing regular expressions, the effect can be pretty disconcerting. Don’t worry — it’s not as confusing as it looks. If you’ve read the “get to know GNU sed” piece, step up your sed game with an intro to using sed regular expressions.

Just about every program has spell checking, but what if you’re grammatically challenged? Most apps don’t have a grammar checker built-in, even though they should. Want to get a leg up on your writing? Learn how to get grammar checking for your open source office suite. Note that After the Deadline not only works with LibreOffice, it also works with tons of other apps – including my favorite, Vim.

The Gentoo-based SystemRescue CD/USB is one of the very best rescue distros, packing amazing functionality into a 350MB image. It can rescue Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows systems, and recover data from almost any media. With this weekend project, you’ll learn how to create a SystemRescue live USB stick, and recover data from failing drives.

Ubuntu switched to Thunderbird a while back, and Linux Mint has defaulted to the Moz mailer for quite some time. If you want to make the most of Thunderbird, though, you should check out this weekend project from July on adding conversations and calendaring to Thunderbird.

Have a book you want to publish? Ready to self-publish that Great American Novel that you’ve been tinkering with since high school? These days, the barriers to publishing a book are lower than ever. All you need is a manuscript and an open source application like Sigil to tame the text and massage it into EPUB format. If writing and publishing is on your resolution list for 2012, learn how to write and publish eBooks on Linux with Sigil.

Have some ideas what you’d like to see on the weekend project for 2012? Give us a shout in the comments. Happy New Year!

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