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I recently had to move from one machine to another about 50 GB of data, divided into hundreds of thousands of small files, and i had no additional space on the machine to make a zipped tar and then move it comfortably, I tried a scp, but after 45 minutes it had moved around 2 GB of data, too slow. And so I started looking at the options a bit more advanced of tar.

Today I present you an interview with Bertrand Florat the creator of Jajuk. “Jajuk is software that organizes and plays music. It is a full-featured application geared towards advanced users with large or scattered music collections. Using multiple perspectives, the software is designed to be intuitive and provide different visions of your collection.” Jajuk has many interesting features and being developed in Java is available for Linux (it’s available as package in the main distribution), Windows and Mac OS X. I found this great project some time ago (I’ve been the first Italian translator), but my work and laziness brought me away, today I’ve met again with Bertrand and he’s been so kind to give me some of his time for this interview.

Recently I discovered a new kind of Linux: DoudouLinux. It is not a new distribution, but a version of Debian tailor-made for children, the designer Jean-Michael says that is usable by children two years old and above. By starting this live meta-distro you get a rich and colorful menu from which childrens can choose what to play. Intrigued by the project, I asked Jean-Michel for an interview and he very kindly accepted, this is also a good chance for him to introduce his project in Italy and other countries where it still is not widely known.

As the last article on the methodology “Getting Things Done” I want to present the site Remember The Milk and some Linux tools that you can use to interface with this service. Remember the Milk is an application service provider for web-based task- and time-management.

In one of my article i made a roundup of 3 tools to organize your time: Getting things Gnome, Tasque and Basket note pads. These are 3 good programs that can help you in task management, and i was surprised when in the comments someone told he’s using a tool from the command line to accomplish this: Task warrior. And so i tested it.

OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. The core library (written in the C programming language) implements the basic cryptographic functions and provides various utility functions. Wrappers allowing the use of the OpenSSL library in a variety of computer languages are available. Versions are available for most Unix-like operating systems (including Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X and the four open source BSD operating systems), OpenVMS and Microsoft Windows. IBM provides a port for the System i (OS/400). Today we will see some practical uses of programs that rely on OpenSSL.

Time is a precious commodity, especially if you're a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do? The answer is time management.

Every day we read of new Linux distributions (GNU/Linux to be correct), and sometimes happen to want to try them “on the road”, even those who do not have a live version. The first program that comes to mind, I think, is precisely Qemu. But I also think that there is also an attempt to find a more friendly alternative. The second choice I think is VirtualBox, a Qemu-based solution that gives to you at once and without effort everything you need. But is it really necessary to use a program that adds to our Linux machine other useless processes? For me no. Of course, to switch from Virtualbox to Qemu I think, all of these tasks should be accomplished by a graphical interface “mouse-proof” and the terminal should not be used.

inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals. The original developers of inotify were John McCutchan, Robert Love and Amy Griffis. It has been included in the mainline Linux kernel from release 2.6.13 (June 18, 2005), and could be compiled into 2.6.12 and possibly earlier releases by use of a patch.

We often hear that there are no games on Linux, or that are much worse than their counterparts for windows, so today I want to show some unusual games that run perfectly on our favorite operating system. Caph Caph is a sandbox game, based on physics. The game target is to make contact red object with green object. You can use various objects, solid, wire (rope), and bendable objects. Gravitation will help you.

The Arduino is a small programmable device that can hold a small program and perform tasks such as reading temperature sensors, turning on or off switches, and can even serve as the ‘brain’ for a robot. I have used the Arduino (actually freeduino) for projects related to HVAC and hydroponics automation.

Snort is a very powerful IDS that in later versions can act like an IPS. Snort is free to download and use in the personal enviornment as was as in the business environment. In fact Snort is used by many Enterprises as a very effective option for their business because not only is it free but it is one of the most powerful IDS’s out there is you know what you are doing when you configure it. Snort can be created as a program that you run when you want on a personal computer or it can be setup to run when your OS starts and protect all computers on your network from attacks.

Maybe today I’ve finally found an acceptable way to listen to web radio. Often I like to work with music, but after listening for the umpteenth time my favorite CD of Nirvana or Foo Fighters I want to switch to a bit of Web Radio, and here is my doubt “how?” You can go to the website of the radio and probably find the link “listen live”, or equivalent that will start a nice flash player, not so easy right?

In the previous article we looked at what’s the use LVS, to have a system of load balancing built into the Linux kernel. As mentioned, however, LVS was born to be good in one thing: the load balance, but does not provide additional options, such as monitoring the progress of the machines on which we are balancing service and in case of trouble in one machine remove it from the active machines. To accomplish this goal and many more wel” take a look at ldirectord

Linux Virtual Server, LVS is an advanced load balancing solution for Linux systems. It is an open source project started by Wensong Zhang in May 1998. The mission of the project is to build a high-performance and highly available server for Linux using clustering technology, which provides good scalability, reliability and serviceability. The major work of the LVS project is now to develop advanced IP load balancing software (IPVS), application-level load balancing software (KTCPVS), and cluster management components.

Usually I work only with the software, I’m not an expert of the hardware, but the excellent presentation by Riccardo Lemmi made me want to read a bit of material on the world of open hardware in general and Arduino in particular. Open source hardware ( OSHW ) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software (FOSS). Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e.schematics, bill of materials and PCB layout data) in addition to the software that drives the hardware are all released with the FOSS approach .

As well as documentation for those interested, I sincerely hope that it can raise awareness of the non-security of “electronic mail” and help users to take the appropriate implementation tools. Let’s start with this basic idea: “Email is not a secure media for transmitting information.”

In a previous article we saw how to install and configure zsh, today we’ll see in detail the options offered by the zsh for globbing or how the shell use some special characters to auto-complete our commands. Please note: most command you’ll see here could be accomplished with particular switch of the command, for example ls with -r do a recursive search, but the goal of this article is to just use the shell, so our goal will be to accomplish the same result but just with the power of zsh globbing.

The Wiimote is a revolutionary game controllers created by Nintendo for its Wii console and changed the concept of making the game player at the center of the physical interactions of the video game. While in the normal game controller maximum interaction with the game were the buttons and force feedback, we have motion and aiming sensors in the Wiimote, so the console ”know” what they are doing and where is the player in relation to the TV. So it is: For the player: a game controller For the geeks: a concentration of technology

XKB and Xmodmap First, I must say that Linux (Unix) uses two approaches to configure the keyboard layout (they are both independent of each other): XKB and Xmodmap. XKB is an extension of X, many people say that it is better, but too robust and perhaps less understandable by beginners. Xmodmap is one of the oldest ways how to configure your keyboard layouts – a little easier approach, especially good for experimentation, but no only that.