This is a how-to for updating the BIOS of Dell Studio 15 Laptops without having Windows installed. It works with a Core i7 Studio 1557 but it will probably also work with other models - but be warned: It may brick your machine and if something goes wrong I will not take any responsiblity ... You're on your own.

My machine is Linux-only. BIOS updates for recent Dell Laptops unfortunately just come with a Windows Flash Tool (WinPhlash) which requires a native Windows installation in order to work.

My solution is a bootable FreeDOS USB Flash Drive containing all required BIOS files and tools to flash the BIOS without Windows.

I've used loads of Linux distributions in the past. Each of them had its advantages and disadvantages - there's simply no "perfect" OS...

Gentoo and Debian basically don't have any "releases" - updates come in frequently. When you wake up, turn on your computer, it tells you that there are updates, you install them and want to start working - and bang, one of theses updates breaks your apache/ssh/ruby/you-name-it. Pretty bad for your productivity.

Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE do have time-based releases. Updates come in once or twice a year and you know that in between only security fixes will be deployed to your machine. That's nice since the probability of an update breaking your installation is minimal.

I'm on Ubuntu right now and it gives me a stable system. But sometimes it feels "out-of-date" and I'd like to have a more recent version of an application, escpecially if it's non-critical for work.

Ubuntu has a very neat feature for this: Specialized repositories for different programs hosted on launchpad.net called PPAs (Personal Package Archives). You enable a PPA by appending the sources.list contents shown on the PPA page to the file /etc/apt/sources.list.

So, here's the list of my top 10 PPAs:

If you work on multiple Apache-based Web projects in parallel you probably know this problem: You have to set up a virtual host configuration for every single project on your development machine. It would be very nice to reduce the steps required for this to a minimum. My favorite solution:
Have a directory in your home directory containing symbolic links to your projects - where the names of the links are your local host names.

The following instructions assume you're on Debian/Ubuntu - but "translating" them to other distros or even Windows shouldn't be that hard.

rsnapshot is my favorite tool for doing automated distributed backups on Linux machines. It saves you a lot of headaches - and it finally replaced all those hundreds of hand-made backup scripts I previously used.

rsnapshot itself is easy to use. But setting up the infrastructure for it - namely password-less ssh logins and database dumps - always requires some work. Here's how I do it.

Do you also do the same thing every time a new kernel ends up in your /usr/portage? Here's a Ruby script that does all required steps automatically for you:

• The kernel symlink gets updated to point to the latest kernel in /usr/src/.
• An existing .config file gets copied from the previously used kernel.
• genkernel is used to compile the new kernel.
• The kernel gets installed on your /boot partition.
• /boot/grub/grub.conf gets updated (please check manually before booting) to use the new kernel.