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Everyone in the Gnu/Linux world (or so i think) has been worried by the news about Microsoft buying Skype, the standard de facto about VOIP.

But perhaps there is a hope for a future more open on this software ?

Skype 5.5 beta support now the protocol XMPP, this has been added mainly to talk with facebook, in fact the leader of the social networks uses this protocol for his chat, but this could open a lot of possibility for Skype also for other things.

Do you want to test how your new site work under an heavy load ? Put it under siege !

Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server “under siege.”

First off, let me say that I am not one of those terminal loving Linux fans. I think it is cool and all, but I tend to save the command line for things that either require doing a massive batch job, or when I need to do something really specific. Other than that, I stick to the Gnome GUI, and work within the parameters that various menus offer me. That works for 99% of what I need done.

Untangle it’s a software appliance (based on Debian) that can help you in managing your network from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center. Untangle is a privately held company that provides an open source network gateway for small businesses. They offer the core modules (12) as GPL software and others at payment, the cost depend on number of “client” and which modules you want to install, to start (or for home use) the Lite Package (free to download and use) is enough.

In one of the first articles of Linuxaria i’ve posted a complete how to in how to make a DVD slideshow with Linux and the main program to do this was Imagination, a software that i really like for his simplicity of use. Imagination is a lightweight and simple DVD slide show maker for Linux and FreeBSD written in C language and built with the GTK+2 toolkit. Imagination has been designed from the ground up to be fast, light and easy-to-use. It requires the ffmpeg encoder to produce the movie file and libsox to handle the audio and nothing else, there are no other dependencies.

In a previous post i’ve presented you 3 space games, today i add one to that list: Oolite. Oolite is a space sim game, inspired by Elite, powered by Objective-C and OpenGL, and designed as a small game that is easy for users to pick up, modify and expand upon. Almost every aspect of the game can be changed by using simple, free graphics packages and text editors.

I’ve received some information from Jean-Michel regarding DoudouLinux a project he’s leading, you can read an interview with him and more info on Doudou in a former article.You probably know that my project DoudouLinux is still alive and, much more than that, really active! Indeed we have just released our first version officially tagged as stable (not that previous ones were unstable ;) ). Its name is DoudouLinux 1.0 Gondwana and it is available in 15 officially supported languages, using 5 different alphabets.

Today post is by Juan Valencia, originally posted on his blog, i’ve found it really interesting with in deep articles regarding rsync,ssh and other commands. When you receive and need to handle multiple text files that use characters that are not natural to the English language, you may run into the problem that is dealing with different character encodings. This is particularly noticeable in websites, where if the browser try to interpret the text file with an encoding that differs from the actual encoding that the file is using, we can see strange symbols where this characters were supposed to show, but it is not limited to websites, any program that is made to work with languages other than English may present a similar problem if it is not appropriately handled.

I use iptables by many years and used it also for complex solutions and only recently i’ve discovered ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), the ubuntu version, or better developed to ease iptables firewall configuration, ufw provides a user friendly way to create an IPv4 or IPv6 host-based firewall. By default UFW is disabled.

On my site I had a small problems with feeds, I’ve them managed with feedburner and I have one feed for every language, so you can choose to have the feeds in English or in Italian. The problem is that I would like that when a user types http://linuxaria.com/feed it land on my feedburner page for English while typing http://linuxaria.com/feed?lang=it, should land on the Italian feed page. I’ve tried with the wordpress plugin for feedburner, but that it’s good only if you have 1 feed, because it blindly redirect everything to 1 feedburner address, so it’s not a good solution for my 2 bilingual feeds. And so I’ve done it with a rewrite in Nginx.

I think that sudo is become a wide used command with Ubuntu, where you don’t even have a root password, before that probably it was used only in some data-centers to restrict access to some commands.

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file.

In this article I will show some uses a little less common for this command, for a general description of the command you could read the page about sudo on wikipedia

If you are in charge of some services probably you have set up some monitoring system to notify you if something go wrong (email, sms or a Tweet), and so you can fix it quickly. But do you really want to be always available 24×7 every day of the year ? I’m not for sure, so let’s see Monit, a fantastic tool that can manage some problems for you and let you enjoy your free time.

At the moment my favourite way to do (simple) elaborations and conversions of multimedia file is FFMPEG. But i understand that is not exactly the most user-friendly tool around, so if you don’t want to open the terminal and read the man page of FFMPEG perhaps you could take a look at Yakito. Yakito is a free and open media files converter, using the benefits of the project FFMPEG to achieve maximum compatibility with most multimedia formats and codecs.Unlike other solutions, Yakito is not intended to be a simple frontend interface to manage an installation of FFMPEG, but uses this engine to convert/encode video in an independent way (FFMPEG it’s integrated in the executable itself, so it’s transparent).For this it relies on Jave , another free software project.

While searching for some new software for my multimedia files I’ve found UMplayer. And after 1 days of use i must say that this could become one of my favorite software.

Why ?

It’s based on mplayer, so regarding audio and video you have the same feature of this software, BUT, there is also a native integration with Shoutcat to search for radio station and listen to them, and a search engine to search video on youtube.

After all the motto of this software is ”UMPlayer plays everything!”

Sometimes is useful to run over and over again the same command until something happen, for example you could do a ls -lrt until a file has reached a certain dimension or is created, how to do it ? Sure you can use bash history and use up arrow and return over and over again, or perhaps write some line of bash to get an infinite loop that run the same command, but there is a smarter approach to this : watch .

In a former article I’ve talked about the XMPP:Jingle protocol to find a good replacement for Skype. Some people asked me about Ekiga, is this a good software or not ? and how you can use it ?

Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant Messenger application over the Internet. It supports HD sound quality and video up to DVD size and quality. It is interoperable with many other standard compliant softwares, hardwares and service providers as it uses both the major telephony standards (SIP and H.323).

Ever heard of Anki ? No ??? Well, get ready to see a great open source program for learning, I’ve started using it and I’ve been amazed by this little gem. Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

xmonad on the official website there is a phrase that strikes you and takes you to devour each page of the documentation or makes you close in a flash, the browser tab : “In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows.” If you recognize yourself in this sentence xmonad is for you.

For Wikipedia: A cheat sheet or crib sheet is a concise set of notes used for quick reference. “Cheat sheet” may also be rendered “cheatsheet”. People working in informatics in general and on unix terminals in particular know that is not so easy remember every single command and so it’s usual to have “Cheat Sheet”, a collection of the most useful commands in a single A4 page for a particular program or environment. And this is my small collection.

In this article i’ll show you how to select the best mirror for your favorite distribution. Debian Netselect-apt is very helpful to find which Debian mirror is the fastest one to download the latest packages or to install ones very quickly.