Showing headlines posted by linuxaria

Anyone who knows the world Linux will surely heard of Ubuntu. A distribution that has done so much for Linux and the Open Source world itself! In fact, thanks to the hard work of Canonical, Ubuntu is one of the first user-friendly distributions that have brought many people in the Linux world. Especially those most skeptical! But if Ubuntu is a distribution that has done so much in the past, now we must curb our enthusiasm. In fact, for some time now, this same distribution is becoming a lot more criticized by veterans of the Linux world. According to these, in fact, the distribution of Canonical is becoming more and more into a sort of Windows operating system. Of course, always free, but very similar for both choices regarding the publicity of the Operating system that the choices for the operating system itself. If these choices, however, are much discussed at the same time they are having a big success ! And for this reason that doubts arise and that the same Canonical is criticized by the loyal fans of the penguin!

In our daily activities we may have to manage multiple files from different locations, from which, every now and then edit them. It can also arise the need to synchronize folders over the network and often we do not know how to do it, luckybackup may be the solution for you, a convenient graphical interface for a powerful command line tool like rsync.

I have become a Linux user since 2008 and my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is currently the most popular Linux distribution and when somebody is talking about Linux, very likely that he is talking about Ubuntu. I personally have a very complicated opinion toward Ubuntu, I both love it and hate it. In this article, I will enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu to justify my love and hate for it.

If you are a regular user of Windows or Mac OSX, you will feel like being lost in a strange world in the first time you install and try Linux as the operating system for your computer. In this article, I will show you some tips to help you get accustomed to the magnificent world of Linux as a beginner.

Varnish is a great tool that accelerates the performance of your site with a simple configuration and a low usage of resources, compared to the result you’ll get. Just because Varnish is designed and engineered to be fast by default it does not write any log to disk, outrageous you could think … to be honest the logs are available in a memory segment when this memory is filled, Varnish starts from the beginning and overwrites the oldest data in an infinite loop.

Credit cards, SIM cards, social networking sites and forums are just some of the many services that can give us trouble. That’s right … Each of these, now, requires passwords and codes that you must keep secrets. I can not remember everything for sure! The only solutions are the ones that we all know. Use a general password? too risky! An intuitive and memorable password? Unfortunately also too risky! Also writing them all in some paper is not a good idea … In fact, in addition to being found by others it could even be missed by us! So … what a beautiful mess!

Even this year I was in Bolzano (Italy) for the annual conference organized by Wuerth-Phoenix on Monitoring with Open Source products. I found the conference very interesting, with speakers from around the world that have described several open source products and best practices on monitoring but also on configuration and management tools. A big surprise for me has been the strong push for alternatives softwares to Nagios for monitoring in particular Shinken and Icinga have received many praise.

We all know and love Linux and its distributions. Operating Systems that are lightweight, fast, highly customizable, free, advanced … These are just some of the thousands of qualities that our OS Linux have! But as we are also humble users and Linux users … not cocky, we recognize the limits of our sweet penguin, there is a cons we have to remember that this operating system gives to us! Perhaps this is the only … A penalty that surely does not affect all, me for first ! On our beloved Linux Box, in fact, is really difficult to find games with appealing graphics. Maybe you can find some games, but not one of the highest successful video games like GTA, NFS and so on …

Nginx is an emerging Web server (it claims to power around 12% of the website) and is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Personally I’m using it from 2010 and so far so good, no particular problems, it does perfectly his work and is frequently updated by the developers, I’m really happy of how is performing on my VPS and in this time I’ve learnt some small tricks and tips that perhaps could save you some time in the future.

It’s useful sometime to convert some type of audio files in another, and perhaps you don’t want to search for the correct command to use from the terminal, don’t worry there is a small and nice application that can do this for you: soundconverter

SoundConverter is an audio file converter for the GNOME Desktop. It reads anything GStreamer can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, MOD, XM, S3M, etc…), and writes to WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files.

More than enough for my standard tasks.

Varnish is an open source “web accelerator” which you can use to speed up your website. It can cache certain static elements, such as images or javascript but you can also use it for other purposes such as Load balancing or some additional security, in general most of the people want to try it and test their website to see if it’s really so amazing (IMO yes, but test it yourself).

These small commands are not so known, but i think they can do miracles for you when you have to work from the terminal on text files and you need to compare them, or do operation on lines inside 1 file or merge 2 files applying some criteria.

In this article I’ll show you the most common options for these commands and some practical examples on how to use them.

Today we’ll take a look at Silicon Empire a software that can help us in all our Burning operations. Silicon Empire is set of tools to Burn, Copy, Backup, Manage and … your optical discs like CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray. Silicon Empire is released under GPL and LGPL License version 3 and is available for Linux,Windows and Mac.

In general a file manager is a program that gives some kind of interface to the file system and that show in a graphical or textual way the files and directory, usually a file manager allow to do some standard operations such as delete, rename copy/paste and other typical operations that you can do on files.

I have been looking around lately at all the old hardware I have lying around and thought what could I do with it all? Media center? Web server? Hardware Firewall perhaps? Then I came across Untangle Linux Firewall and thought why not give this a try!! Next thought was why install on the old hardware and increase my energy costs when I can install it on Virtualbox on my main Linux server instead? So I have installed Untangle Linux Firewall on Virtualbox running on a Linux Mint 10 File and Print Server and below will outline how I did it.

Usually I would set up a Linux dhcp server using the dhcp3-server package. With the arrival of Linux Mint 12 the configuration is slightly different. This tutorial will outline the new steps.

i’ve found a new and interesting online service shelr.tv. Shelr.tv allows you to record something interesting from your terminal and share it to your followers.

It is almost the same thing as YouTube but for plain text shellcasts. You can copy and paste everything you see. The nice thing is that you can play the shellcasts back directly on your terminal or in a browser from their website, and when uploading them you can decide to make them public or private.

Usually I’m not so precise and methodical in keeping track of my finance and so I’ve never used a program of this type, but the other day I wondered if Linux had some software in this category, and I was amazed by the variety and quality of software available for our beloved Penguin.

So here’s a roundup of the software in this category.

In my work I’ve not used “Expect” many times, but to do some jobs I’ve learnt how to use it, and I must say that to complete some tasks this program can help a lot and be a valid alternative to more complex solutions, like a complete program in python, php or your favorite scripting program.

Monitoring how much bandwidth is used is a fundamental task to check the status of your servers, or just your desktop, so i always test new tools to see if i find something good. This is the third article of this series and in this one I’ll take a look at Bmon, speedometer and Nload these 3 programs join NetHogs, IPTState, pktstats and IPTraf in my list of useful network tools.