I’ve been using Fedora (Core and all) on and off for a few years now and its parsimonious attitudes to codecs notwithstanding, the thing that always reduces me to a whimpering, pleading wreck is watching Yum installing a piece of software. I can forgive its tendency to handhold and even to confabulate, but Yum moves with all the speed of a treacle flow at the North Pole. Apt-get has already done its stuff and gone home for tea but Yum is still setting the table and polishing the silver. Once you’ve used Yum for a while you will know why it puts the V in verbose.

This article will tell you how to install and use Webmin, a web user interface mainly used for administering servers. If you are not a sysadmin, don’t run away: Webmin can also be used on a single desktop too. You may struggle to remember all the command line operations to manage, say, run levels or various daemons and prefer to do it the GUI way. One of the best reasons for using Webmin is to circumvent the sheer number of command line variations from distro to distro and the different locations for configuration files that you would otherwise require to memorize (manpages notwithstanding).

Quentin Crisp, the infamous, bohemian Englishman, said that he never cared much for dusting. “Why bother”, he observed, “after four years, it doesn’t get any worse”. If only the accumulated detritus of the digital dust on our computers could be treated with such cavalier contempt. Ignore it at your peril and you might just have to call in Kim and Aggie to sort out your cruft!