Software

What this chapter covers

Software is what makes the system work. Without software, a computer system would be useless. We cover important software issues here, and how small programs found on remote Web sites can solve most of your problems.

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100 Linux Tips and Tricks

Tip 1: Background image in X Window

By default, the background in X Window is a grey background. Some window managers have their own options to set other backgrounds, and some don't.

A program you can use to set your background is a program that comes with most Linux distributions. It's called XV, and you can specify which background image you want with this line:

xv -quit -root image.gif

This will set the background to be the image.gif file. You can add that line in your .xinitrc file, in your home directory, so it is executed each time you launch X Window.

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100 Linux Tips and Tricks

Tip 2: Customize Netscape Communicator

Netscape Communicator has one nice feature that few people use. When you download it, it has a Personal Toolbar with buttons that most of us may not find really useful, so we either turn it off or don't look at it.

I found it to be a much more useful tool than the Bookmarks. What appears on that bar is simply what's inside the Personal Folder inside your Bookmarks.

You can ceate folders in it for news sites, Linux sites, etc and move your bookmarks into them (with the Edit Bookmarks option).

You then have your own personal portal in your browser:

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100 Linux Tips and Tricks

Tip 3: POP3 in Pine

Many Linux users use Pine as their mail client. Lets see how you can use Pine both with local mail and with POP3 mail, without using fetchmail or some other tool to get POP mail first.

First you will want to use multiple config files:

pine -p localmail pine -p popserver1 pine -p popserver2

You need to configure Pine to use your POP3 server. In the program go to Setup, Config. You'll want to set something like this in your inbox-path:

{pop.server.com/pop3/user=myid}INBOX

Now restart Pine and it will ask you for your password and connect to the remote server, and use it just like if you were accessing local mail.

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