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Sometimes it’s useful to know which components you are using on a GNU/Linux computer or server, you can go with the long way, taking a look at the boot message for all the hardware discovered, use some terminal commands such as lsusb,lspci or lshw or some graphical tools such as hardinfo (my favourite graphical tool) or Inex/CPU-G. But I’ve discovered on my Linux Mint, that, by default, I’ve now a new option: inxi

A content management system (CMS is a computer application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content, organizing, deleting as well as maintenance from a central interface. CMS’s are often used to run websites containing blogs, news, and shopping. Many corporate and marketing websites use CMS’s. CMS’s typically aim to avoid the need for hand coding, but may support it for specific elements or entire pages. Some of the most famous open source CMS are Worpress (I use it to run linuxaria.com), Drupal and Joomla, they are (IMO) 3 old and solid CMS that can handle the majority of the needs, but there are much more open source CMS solutions and today I want to show you 4 less known solutions

The command “tee” it’s one of the basic commands that you should find in any system, yet it’s not so popular or use, this command reads standard input and writes it to both standard output and one or more files, effectively duplicating its input. It is primarily used in conjunction with pipes and filters. The command is named after the T-splitter used in plumbing. In short if you want to redirect the STDOUT of any command as well as printing it to the screen, tee is the right tool to use, let’s see some practical use of this command.

Bravada is the new game from Ukraine developers Interbellum Team that features a cheery little story. This game differ from most of the others for it’s gameplay, in short it’s a mix of a vertical scroller with RPG and turn based strategic game.

File compression is an old trick: one of the first (if not the first) program capable of compressing files was “SQ”, in the early 1980s, but the first widespread, mass-know compressor probably was ZIP (released in 1989). In other word, compressing a file to save space is nothing new and, while current TB-sized, low costs disks provide plenty of space, sometime compression is desirable because it not only reduces the space needed to store data, but it can even increase I/O performance due to the lower amount of bits to be written or read to/from the storage subsystem. This is especially true when comparing the ever-increasing CPU speed to the more-or-less stagnant mechanical disk performance (SSDs are another matter, of course). So, for the general use case, lossless compressors are the way to go. But what compressor to use from the many available?

Ever have to check a list of Linux servers for various things like what version of CentOS they’re running, maybe how long each has been running to get an uptime report? You can and it’s very easy to get going with it with the command gsh Group Shell (also called gsh) is a remote shell multiplexor. It lets you control many remote shells at once in a single shell. Unlike other commands dispatchers, it is interactive, so shells spawned on the remote hosts are persistent. It requires only a SSH server on the remote hosts, or some other way to open a remote shell.

Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting. Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources in real-time, you can eg. compare disk utilization in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).

Your server appearing pretty slow could be many things from wrong configs, scripts and dodgy hardware – but sometimes it could be because someone is flooding your server with traffic known as DoS ( Denial of Service ) or DDoS ( Distributed Denial of Service ).

For what I know there isn’t an official google drive application for Linux and so after looking around I’ve found that there are some interesting project that you can use to access your data on Google Drive from your linux, and in particular today I’d like to show 2 of them:

You could have come across the term, “cPanel” if you have been searching around for a shared Linux web hosting or logged into cPanel right now if have got a new hosting account. cPanel is a web-based tool that can help you manage the files on your website, email associated with your domain, and basically manage almost everything about your hosting. It is extremely user-friendly and can enable one to manage their hosting even if you they do not know much about web hosting.

In this article I'll show you 6 things that you must know to start to work with this software.

Many people do not know that there are some excellent opensource applications to improve productivity. Some of them come as standard GNU tools with every Linux based operating system and others are standard parts from every major Linux distribution.

If you want an US VPN service, you should look for the best US VPN service that supports OpenVPN. The intent of the article is to help newbies configure and use their favorite VPN service without going back and forth in Ubuntu community forum and embarrass oneself before the rather patronizing users.

I’ve recently received a fitbit flex as gift, and I love it, this personal device tracks steps, distance, and calories burned. At night, it tracks your sleep quality and wakes you silently in the morning. Just check out the lights to see how you stack up against your personal goal. Flex allows you to set a goal and uses LED lights to show how you’re stacking up. Each light represents 20% of your goal. You choose which one — steps, calories, or distance. It lights up like a scoreboard, challenging you to be more active day after day.

Flex automatically syncs your data to PCs and Macs with Fitbit’s wireless sync dongle (included), many iOS devices and select Android phones without plugging in or pushing buttons. Now all this sound fantastic and really funny if you like to take your stats and see nice graphs, but there is a small (big) problem about fitbit, it doesn’t support officially Linux.

Sure, you can use a compatible smartphone, but in general I like to use the idea of using my Linux computers for anything and with some research and some tests I’ve been able to sync successfully my flex with my Linux Mint 16.

MPD, short for Music Player Daemon, is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.

At the end of 90`s Mandrake Linux was the most popular distribution out there. Most thing that are today said about Ubuntu where first said about Mandrake. It was the number one distro from 1998 util 2004. User friendly, easy to use, easy to install, lot of preinstalled software, most popular by new users and Mandrake made at that point most users to change on Linux. All that is today said about Ubuntu. Yeah, Mandrake had also free shipping for DVDs back then. But soon the empire started to fall apart. In 2004 Mandrake had died. In 2005 Conectiva, the company who bought Mandrakesoft announced and released Mandriva and in 2006 they fired Gael Duval. Duval was the author of Mandrake. The new distribution, Mandriva, was nothing like good old Mandrake and it made lot of users to change their system. Fast forward to 2014 and let us have a look on the legacy of Mandrake Linux. Last stable release of Mandriva was in 2011 and it was not really stable. But in last 10 years Mandriva inspired many users and developers and new distributions popped out. One of them is Rosa Linux. Rosa Linux is a Russian Linux distribution.

I discovered the Linux and open source world around 4 years ago, and from that date I’m trying to know more open source software or projects. I must say that they changed my life both as I started to use different software but the most important thing, in my opinion, is that I’ve discovered a different way to think to software and collaboration, or should I say understand what really means Free software?

A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normally not access) files outside the designated directory tree. The term “chroot” may refer to the chroot(2) system call or the chroot(8) wrapper program. The modified environment is called a “chroot jail”. From Wikipedia.

Why it is required? If you want to set up your Linux box as a web hosting server for its users, you may need to give SFTP access. But they can get access to whole system Linux tree, just for reading but still very unsecure. So it is mandatory to lock them in their home directory.

There are many other applications, it’s just a common example, so lets start its configuration.

Every year or two, I like to look back over my client’s SSH configuration file and assess what I’ve changed. This year’s emphasis has been on a few options that center around session persistence. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road this year, using SSH to log into remote servers over terrible hotel wireless networks. As a result, I’ve found myself plagued by SSH session resets. This can be somewhat distracting when I’m in the midst of a task that requires deep concentration— or in the middle of editing a configuration file without the use of screen or tmux.

youtube-dl_logo In the past I’ve published some articles regarding how to download music from youtube with the program YouTube to MP3, or videos with the programs xVideoServiceThief and flareget, they all accomplish the work with graphical interfaces, and this can be a great plus for many users, but others could prefer a simple command line program that can easily download videos and optionally extract the audio in a specific format: youtube-dl.

Hardware fails, that is a fact. Nowadays, hard drives are rather reliable, but nevertheless every now and then we will see drives failing or at least having hiccups. Using smartcl/smartd to monitor disks is a good thing, below we will discuss how some lesser issues can be handled without actually having to reboot the system – it is still up to a sys admin’s own discretion to judge circumstances correctly and evaluate whether disk errors encountered are a one time incident or indicative of an entirely failing disk.