Format an USB pen drive on Linux

Do you want to format an USB pen drive on Linux, but you do not know how to do it? GParted is the solution.
Format an USB pen drive on Linux is highly recommended because it offers several benefits:

  • it will erase all previous data – important if you stored sensitive data (that you don’t longer need);
  • it allow you to choose a file system that better suit your need;
  • it can reduce the file fragmentation on the disk and therefore improve the performances of the pen drive (this requires to copy the files elsewhere first and copy them back after the format).

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Enable Firefox hardware acceleration on Linux

Despite its past, Mozilla Firefox browser is now as fast and agile as its rival Google Chrome, but there is one aspect where the open source browser still loses a few points: the GPU hardware acceleration support on GNU/Linux. With this guide we will see how to enable Firefox hardware acceleration on Linux and therefore improving its performances.
The guide has been tested on Ubuntu LTS 14:04 with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and Mozilla Firefox 34.0, but it should be valid for all distribution of Linux and newer versions of Mozilla Firefox.

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Setup a network proxy on Ubuntu

With this guide we will see how to set a network proxy on Ubuntu. We have already seen how to setup Mozilla Firefox to use a proxy, how to setup Google Chrome to use a proxy, and how to setup any browser to use a SSH proxy, but by setting a network proxy on Ubuntu, all network applications will automatically use it.

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