How to add swap file in Debian or Ubuntu

Swap is used to allow operating system run in fail-over mode, meaning that if it's running out of RAM, it will start swapping some memory pages from RAM into the swap file, on disk. The best way to create swap - is to mount it into partition. But if you don't have a swap partition, or don't have time to create it, you can also add swap using a regular file. Below I will show how to add swap file in Debian based Linux distros.

MySQL how to reset root password in Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)

In case you've forgotten or lost your root password from MySQL server, there is a way to reset it. Below you will find detailed guide on how to do it in Linux. In particular, all instructions and commands were tested with Debian 8 and MySQL 5.5, but they should also work on most of other distributions. So let's get started.

How to install python from source in Debian/Ubuntu

There are multiple ways of installing python in Linux. First you can just install it from your distro repository, for example in Debian you need to use these commands (depending on which version do you need):

sudo apt-get install python2.7
sudo apt-get install python3

Debian xscreensaver very old. What's an alternative?

If you're Debian user you must have noticed that every time you login to the system, xscreensaver shows a warning message informing that xscreensaver is very old. But what is an alternative?

Of course, you can go to xscreensaver official website, download latest version and install it instead of the repository's one. But that solution is not ideal, because you'll lose your repository updates and will need to update your xscreensaver manually.