A very handy command to see the total size of a directory on a Unix-based computer.

du -sh *

This will show the total size of files and directories in your current working directory. The s flag means to show a summary–which basically just shows the top level directory only, instead of the contents of each and every folder down the file system hierarchy. The h flag shows a human readable file size.

For my home directory, I get the following output:

404M    Desktop
 30G    Documents
6.0G    Library
 32G    Movies
 18G    Music
 11G    Pictures
2.7G    Projects
 16K    Public
166M    Sites

I’ve made a brand new spare PC that I’m hoping my parents can use in their spare room/study. I refuse to install Windows, but as everyone knows, I’m a keen Ubuntu fan.

My younger brother donated me his “old” ATI Radeon X800 GTO graphics card to use in it (I want to eventually get XGL + Compiz set-up on it for all the neat eye candy). Thing is, Ubuntu and the card don’t play nice straight away. Here’s how I got them to dance.

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This howto assumes you’ve already followed my Building Apache 2.2 from source article.

Now we’re going to install Subversion 1.4.0 from source so that it can be access via Apache with authentication.

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