Ubuntu votes for people's favorite packages automatically

While ransacking the system files to look for logs and other things, I noticed that cron runs an application called "popularity-contest" every month.

user@ubuntu:/etc$ ls cron*
crontab

cron.d:
php5

cron.daily:
apt find man-db samba sysklogd
bsdmainutils logrotate mysql-server standard

cron.hourly:

cron.monthly:
standard

cron.weekly:
man-db popularity-contest sysklogd


I was curious as to what is "popularity-contest"! The name is interesting! So I ran this application from CLI, and it spitted out a list of packages in Terminal. A quick google search revealed the following:

The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will periodically anonymously submit to the Debian developers statistics about the most used Debian packages on this system.

This information helps Debian making decisions such as which packages should go on the first CD. It also lets Debian improve future versions of the distribution so that the most popular packages are the ones which are installed automatically for new users.

This is a nice and democratic way, but a little creepy for the unsuspecting and new users like me.

How to change your home directory in linux/unix

How do you modify a user's home directory in Unix/Linux?

1. Login as a user with sudo privileges.
2. Enter this command:

sudo nano /etc/passwd

3. Nano text editor opens up. Locate the username you would like to change the home directory of (the last added user is in the end), and just enter whatever directory you would like. For example, the home directory for the user jack is set to /home/jack in this file:

jack:x:1000:1000:Jack,,,:/home/jack:/bin/bash

But I want him to use a home directory of /home/whatever. So I just change the above line to:

jack:x:1000:1000:Jack,,,:/home/whatever:/bin/bash

Now when the user jack logs in, his home directory would be /home/whatever.

Related post for changing home directory in Mac OS X can be found here.