Sometimes a program just hangs up, and you can't get it to do anything. You can stop it by pressing the keys Ctrl+Alt+Esc at the same time, which changes the cursor into a white "x". Then all you have to do is click anywhere on the program screen and it will exit (press Esc again if you change your mind).

You can make your life a lot easier by putting on your desktop links to things you use a lot. Right-click the desktop in an empty area, click "Create New" and look at your choices at the bottom of the list: 1) Location (on the web or on your computer), 2) Application (most are in the /usr/bin directory), or 3) Device (just click on the item).

Using Opera as an example;
1) Left click on Kmenu (start) button.
2) Click Internet and find the entry for Web Browser (Opera).
3) Left click and hold on the Opera entry.
4) Drag it to your desktop, then drop it. In the small window that comes up, left click on 'Link Here'.
5) Left click on new Opera desktop icon, hold and drag it to the kicker panel, and drop it there.
6) Right click the new kicker icon, and in the window that comes up select 'move Opera button'. Slide the cursor to the right or left to where you want the button to be, then left click on the desktop.
7) You should now have a start button for Opera in the kicker, exactly where you want it.

If you sometimes use Konqueror file manager in SuperUser mode, change the default text colour to red. That way, you'll know at a glance if you're in regular mode (black text) or exercising SuperUser powers.
1 - Open Konq with SU powers: KMenu > System > File System > File Manager - Super User Mode
2 - On the Konqueror menu bar, chose Settings > Configure Konqueror
3 - In the Configure window, click Appearance, then in the right pane click the black swatch labeled Normal text color. Change it to a medium-bright red. Click Apply and OK. That should change all the file listings to a red font.
4 - Make it stick: Go to the menubar Settings again and click Save View Profile "File Management".
Done!

Interested in having the “filmstrip” view as an option within Konqueror so you can view photos? This can easily be added by doing the following:

1. Close any open Konqueror windows
2. Open Synaptic package manager by clicking KMenu > System > Synaptic Package Manager
3. Type in your root password when prompted
4. Click the Search icon and type "Gwenview"
5. Mark gwenview for installation and click Apply

Now when you re-launch Konqueror, you should now have a button that looks like a camera on your toolbar. Click this and Konqueror will enter filmstrip view mode, which shows image thumbnails on the left and a larger image on the right.

Sometimes you can't even see the titlebar of an application, so you are unable to move the application's screen. If you hold down the Alt key, then you can move the screen by clicking anywhere in it and dragging wherever you want.

For legal reasons, some types of Linux (like MEPIS) don't include certain software that allows one to play as many DVDs, or certain multimedia files, as they would like. If you are not from a part of the world where these software packages raise legal issues this can be rather irksome. If that sounds like you, then to enable extra multimedia playing capabilities:

• Open Synaptic Package Manager (Kmenu -> Settings)
• At the top of Synaptic, go to Settings -> Repos
• Place a check mark next to the repo as shown in the picture and click OK
• Click the "Reload" button at the top right corner of the screen
• View the new packages: on the right side on the bottom, click "Status" and then above the four buttons click "new in repository", or if time has elapsed since you enabled the multimedia repo, click "Not installed" to see all software (not just multimedia software) that isn't installed)
• Now look through the list and find software packages (such as w32codecs)

Feel free to ask around on the MepisLovers forums to find out just what you need.

If you like the wand feature in Opera for entering passwords for site logins, and want a similar Firefox functionality, get the Secure Login add-on. Like the wand, it automatically logs you in and takes you to the home page.

During the execution of an installer script, you may encounter the following error message:

The compiler used to compile the kernel (gcc 4.1) does not exactly match the current compiler (gcc 4.3). The Linux kernel module loader rejects kernel modules built with a version of gcc that does not exactly match that of the compiler used to build the running kernel.

If you know what you are doing and want to ignore the gcc version check, select "No" to continue installation. Otherwise, select "Yes" to abort installation, set the CC environment variable to the name of the compiler used to compile your kernel, and restart installation.

Abort now?

If such an error message occurs,

1. Immediately abort the installation, but stay in the terminal as root.
2. Execute the following command from the terminal:

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1

3. Retry the installation script.

Note that the error message may identify versions other than gcc-4.1 and gcc-4.3 that are in conflict. When changing the CC environment variable, use the version of gcc that was used to compile the kernel, as stated in the error message.

When doing an install and selecting the option(s) to retain old /home directories you may run into permissions problems when you create a new user and tell Mepis to use the old home directory for the new username. Here's how I fixed it.

Here, I've created a new user name that matches the old /home directory. Using the Mepis User assistant, I have specified that the new user (rich) will use the existing directory (/home/rich) but an attempt to login will fail due to permissions problems so, as root on the command line do the following:
chown -hR rich /home/rich

This will recursively change the 'ownership' of all the contents of the existing directory to the new user id/user name. Obviously, change the user name and /home sub directory as appropriate for your system.

With Debian Lenny being promoted to Stable, people may well be noticing an alarming number of available upgrades if they are still using Mepis 7. To solve this issue and prevent potentially breaking your system start up Synaptic, go into settings and amend the list of repositories to specify etch or oldstable instead of stable.

It's probably worth Mepis 8 users checking their settings too and ensuring they're happy with what their sources list is pointing to.

Here's a pretty simple but reasonably effective way to let remote (Internet) users logon to your computer using SSH. The target audience for this is the slightly more advanced user who knows their way around a bit and is comfortable editing config files.

The first steps are to install openssh-server and fail2ban. You can leave the default settings for fail2ban alone, they should be quite adequate. Next, create a user id that will be specifically used for anyone wanting to login remotely. The user id should be a mix of alpha and numeric characters. It also needs a good password. Again, a mix of characters ideally. Both of these measures should ensure brute force/dictionary attacks won't get lucky. Next we need to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Amend PermitRootLogin no. This is probably a bit belt-and-braces as the next step is to add your user id created earlier to AllowUsers. You can also allow local users to still use ssh by listing their ids but specify the first three places of your local network's IP addresses. So you'll end up with something like: AllowUsers sshl0gin .* .*

Once this is all done, restart SSH. Now, only your specified user will be able to login using SSH apart from your local users in AllowUsers. In addition, you have fail2ban doing it's stuff 'jailing' failed login attempts. So, once you've configured your router to forward port 22 connections to your computer (Or whatever other arrangements you need to make...) the only way anyone is going to get access is if they know your external IP address and your obscure user id/password.