Showing headlines posted by linuxlala

Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management systems today. Unfortunately the default Drupal installation often requires a lot of customization to meet an organization's needs, so you have to rely on Drupal's thousands of extensions to tailor the software to do exactly what you want, and that takes time. It would be easier if you could install Drupal with all the extensions that you want to use straight out of the box – and you can do just that by using Drupal distributions.

Little escapes the notice of the all-knowing, all-seeing system administrator with Zabbix at his disposal. Zabbix' enterprise-class monitoring software provides distributed monitoring with a centralized web administration interface.

Learn how to employ some of Apache’s most useful and effective modules to restrict access to your Apache-powered website.

Evolution vs Thunderbird vs KMail vs Claws Mail vs Zimbra. There are various factors you need to consider when selecting a client. What type of user you are and how you want to use it are the most critical.

The default Drupal install is rather bare, but thousands of available add-on modules can help you turn the vanilla Drupal installation into a data-serving masterpiece. From making your site more friendly to visitors to improving your search engine standings, there’s a Drupal module for just about everything. Here are six of the most useful modules for businesses.

One of the most important tasks an administrator has is to set up and maintain storage resources and let users share files across the network. FreeNAS, a NAS server based on FreeBSD, makes implementing NAS simple. With FreeNAS, you can share files among the Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Unix machines on your network. What’s more, FreeNAS provides incremental backups and supports LDAP user authentication, among its many features.

When I first ran my Linux distribution almost a decade ago, there weren't many places I could turn to for help. Whatever mailing list you tuned into, everybody seemed to be concerned with improving the Linux kernel or some other gibberish task. If ever, my newbie queries always returned back with a single word -- RTFM. That's until Jeremy Garcia fresh into his first full-time Linux job, decided to give something back to the community. His website, LinuxQuestions.org, soon became the one-stop source for all Linux-related user queries.

Juggling files between Windows FAT filesystem and Linux's EXT2 filesystem was especially time consuming as Windows failed to recognize my Linux partitions. That's when I discovered Explore2fs (http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs), a little utility that enables one to easily locate and transfer files from an EXT2/3 partition into Windows. In a chat with Packt Columnist, Mayank Sharma, John Newbigin shares the status of Explore2fs and his other hacks, talks about his involvement with the CentOS project, and gives some good advice to budding FLOSS hackers.

If you've ever burned or copied CDs from under a Linux distribution, chances are you've used K3b. Put simply, K3b is a CD and DVD burning application. It allows creating Audio CDs, Data collection CD/DVDs, Video CDs, and Movix CD/DVDs. It can also copy CD/DVDs, rip audio tracks and transcode them into various formats like OGG or MP3, rip Video DVD titles and transcode them into formats like xvid, and do lots more. Packt Columnist, Mayank Sharma, interviews Sebastian Trueg (Maintainer and Lead Developer of K3b) to find out how K3b has survived competition and discusses the importance of the community around it.

Is a glass half full or half empty? This eternal question sums up the challenge of interpreting a software license. So how does one avoid the pitfall of a wrong interpretation? Here is my thumb rule — never ignore the spirit in which the software license was created in the first place.

Ever since the word (neigh, rumors) got out about a possible new version of the GPL being worked upon, people have been restless. There were talks about the issues this new version might and should address even before any official announcement was made by the Free Software Foundation. that GPLv3 was a possibility. Now that two drafts have been released, there are still talks, people are still fuming about the issues this new version addresses and the way it does so and discussing the need for all the trouble.

Just as the sun over the northern part of India gives way to the clouds and rains, comes one of the major annual conference on free software, FreeDel. Organized in the capital of the country by the local Delhi-Linux Users Group, FreeDel is a two-day event showcasing the best the Free Software world has to offer. This year the event will be held on the 16th and 17th of September, at the Bio-Informatics Center of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

From the days when installing a Linux distribution required a 300-page bible, to the days of Live CDs, the question "How do I learn Linux?" doesn't seem to have a ready answer. That's probably because the question itself is a little vague. If you want to learn how to use a Linux distribution, trying out one should help you. If as a network or system administrator you want to learn how to manage one, the SAG and NAG guides should get you started. But if you want to learn how a Linux distribution works, how it interacts with all the pieces of free software internally, then you need to lock yourself in a room for a weekend with a copy of Linux From Scratch.

Do you fancy keeping those MP3s into their own partition? Want to copy data residing in one disk onto another? Crave for an easier way to mirror partitions? Long for a simple solution to reorganize your disk and create space for a new Linux distribution? Look no further, GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net) will do all this and much more. And did I mention, all this, keeping your keyboard finger-free? Find out more in Packt Columnist Mayank Sharma's interview with Patrick Verner.

One of India’s leading universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has launched a 6-week workshop to expose more students to the benefits of FOSS. The program aims to partner student programmers from local Delhi colleges with bio-informatics experts from JNU to come up with a complete suite of open-source software for bio-informatics.

Free/Open Source Software has always been about innovation, writes Packt columnist Mayank Sharma. We have come from resolving dependencies to unique point-and-click package management, from text-based installations to graphical ones that are easy to follow, from a lack of desktop-oriented applications to a surplus. But the desktop and window managers still feel like they did initially. Does the buck stop here? Not if SymphonyOS can help it.

An interesting interview with the developer of the minimalistic yet mighty Puppy Linux. The focus is on the features that make Puppy great.

Heard of ODF? Sure you have. Since the Open Document Format got ISO approval, earlier this month, it’s been getting a lot of incomplete and inaccurate media attention. It’s about time someone set the record straight.

An interview with people from the PC-BSD development team after the recent release of the first stable version 1.0. The guys talk about their pre-release journey, features unique to PC-BSD and where the project goes from here.

Almost no site seems complete these days without an image gallery, which displays thumbnails of many images in on a single main page. When you click on any image, you bring up a page with a larger version of the image. My favorite way to create image galleries is by using shalbum, an elegant shell script that uses ImageMagick to generate Web albums.