Topic: tech

If you've come across a file with the .bz2 extension or a .tar.bz2, you may be wondering what it is and whether it's safe to open. The bz2 format is a less usual type of compression, so it's understandable that you might not have anticipated getting a file in this format.

Microsoft Excel is a pretty good spreadsheet and graphing program, but its subscription can be costly. If that's a concern for you, there's a solution: there are several free, legal Excel alternatives which can read and write files in Excel format. This means that if you have existing Excel files, there's no worries - these free spreadsheet programs still work with your existing Excel files.

The Firefox browser is able to fill out forms for you automatically, including your passwords. This illustrated tutorial shows you how to set up autofill for Firefox. We also explain the risks of autofill and when you should and shouldn't use it.

Yes, there are free, legal alternatives to MS Word available. Best of all, they can read from MS Word format and write to that format also. So you still have the ability to read, edit and save your existing Word documents when you use these free word processing programs.

This is ideal if you've recently gotten a new computer but understandably don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee to install and use MS Office. That's right, you can get the same word processing functionality for free.

Yes, you can edit files directly from the Webmin file manager. It's not immediately intuitive how to do it though, so here is an illustrated tutorial.

If you're familiar with cPanel or another Linux server control panel for VPS, Webmin's interface isn't quite as clear but rest assured it's easily possible to edit files in Webmin. You won't need to download and upload files or install any additional software on your server.

You've installed Webmin, you can log in and out as root, but you don't want to do everything as root. It's better for both security and convenience if you can log into Webmin as your non-privilged Linux user. The problem: even though you've already got an existing Linux user on the server other than root, that user doesn't show in Webmin. Don't worry, this is completely normal for a new Webmin install.

Here is an illustrated tutorial for how to allow an existing Linux user to login to Webmin.