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Articles in the Linux Administration Category

Internet Goodness, Linux Administration, vi, vim and gvim »

[25 Jun 2007 | No Comment | ]

I came across this link today..the title of it says -15 Years of Vi + 5 years of Vim and still learning
maybe it’s my sick sense of humour but I like it plus it’s a great vim resource I need to keep track of.
The question is, is it a usability issue or is it just that it’s so powerful and so many features that it’s an endless learning curve?
On the topic, there’s a very funny book from 1997 called “The Unix haters handbook” I came across while visiting a local …

FreeNX & NoMachine, Internet Goodness, Linux Administration, Virtualization (Virtualisation) »

[21 Jun 2007 | 4 Comments | ]

Wow.. a great week it has been in the enterprise Linux world.
Last week, we had:

Mindquarry 1.1 released
TinyERP released a web client and a new version
OpenBravo 2.30 released

and while it’s not truly open source, NoMachine released V3 of their NX server and finally, they have introduced
desktop sharing and session shadowing

Now, if your an admin, it’s a no-brainer to set it up – you can either do it from NX Manager (make sure you have V3 also) or you can edit /usr/NX/etc/server.cnf
You can checkout all the directives from the Admin guide …

Linux Administration, Virtualization (Virtualisation) »

[17 Jun 2007 | No Comment | ]

I got a bit tired of recompiling vmware each time Ubuntu upgraded the kernel, so I decided to move to Ubuntu’s Vmware packe.. so I uninstalled my copy and installed from the repos..
The only problem is it asked me for the serial number which were stored in my email and I use imap, and the mail server is in the vmware machine but I needed the serial numbers to start the virtual machine… Catch 22.
So, I had to register for some new serials – now I will receive the vmware …

Linux Administration »

[11 Jun 2007 | 4 Comments | ]

In my last post, I wrote about my search for an OSS (compatible) collaboration product and how I came across three contenders.

Mindquarry
O3Spaces
PengYou

I took a better look at the demos for PengYou and realised that it’s main functions are:

Webdav server
Very nice file manager for the webdav server
Plugin for OpenOffice to open those webdav shares remotely
Plugin for MS Word to open those webdav shares remotely
(From memory), it used subversion for versioning

O3Space would mean I would actually have to fork out some money after I got through testing it and it’s not OSS …

Linux Administration »

[11 Jun 2007 | 7 Comments | ]

I finally discovered there was an answer to my long, lost friend Yakuake that I gave up when I moved from KDE to Gnome. Katapult, of course was easily replaced by Deskbar but I couldn’t find a Yakuake replacement until now.
The answer, as in the title of the post, is “Tilda”
Why are Yakuake and Tilda so great? Well, I keep a terminal window open 24/7 and it’s just another space taker on my taskbar. With  Yakuake and Tilda, the terminal window opens hidden upon startup and when you need it, …

Internet Goodness, Linux Administration »

[7 Jun 2007 | 10 Comments | ]

I originally titled this article “Open Source Collaboration – Stumbling upon Open Source Gems” but I know that I have been searching around using the current title’s keywords, so I thought it would be worthy to use it.
I’ve been in discussion with David Lee from Open Source Green Vehicle about using MediaWiki as the beginnings of a Product Data Management and collaboration platform. You can read David’s article here about the subject. I have been looking for a collaboration platform for myself also. The difference between the two is David …

Linux Administration »

[1 Jun 2007 | 2 Comments | ]

In one of my previous posts, I outlined using VMware as a platform for web development. I’ll just outline some of the advantages of that:

Developing / adding content locally into Joomla / Zen-cart is much faster than remotely
You always have a backup copy if your webhost dies
Once you get more than 2-3 sites, you need a dedicated dev. machine
Vmware doesn’t use any electricity or it’s negligible
You don’t need to reinstall your whole LAMP setup (30 databases, 25 virtual hosts etc) if you reinstall your OS

Anyway if you work this way, …

Internet Goodness, Linux Administration »

[29 May 2007 | No Comment | ]

I run a webhosting business based in Sydney, Australia specialising in supporting open source software and managed / custom solutions for our clients.
A bit off-topic here but for any web hosts reading this, there’s some great up and coming GPL control panels AND billing systems.
Billing Systemhttp://www.ultrize.com/minibill/ (Simple & small but looks good)http://www.solid-state.org/ (More complete and last I looked they had WHM integration in Subversion)
but I digress..
The point is we are migrating from an old custom-written php/mysql billing system written by the previous owner of the business to Modernbill. The …

Internet Goodness, Linux Administration, Python »

[23 May 2007 | No Comment | ]

Two days ago, I was doing my weekly browse of Freshmeat when I came across Pylucid,a CMS that seems to be getting refactored from it’s original Python foundations into Django.
Now, it’s versioning is still 0.8.0alpha1 and yes, it is alpha quality software with many things not working etc. but SOME things really struck me about it.

It’s the first Django released application I have seen that came as an ‘all-in-one’ bundle; meaning I downloaded it, untarred it, clicked the standalone_run.bat and the thing ran on Django’s built-in webserver.
To achieve this, it …

Linux Administration, Windows Administration »

[23 May 2007 | No Comment | ]

Ok, I realise that my title could create a flame-war but I want to pull some heads here to tell me otherwise, to show me some software that I have missed, or features I am not aware in the Linux programs.
I’m a cross-platform guy spending 50% of my time between different *nixes and Windows (albeit Vista).
That said, there’s some very cool Windows OSS that sometimes exceeds it’s Linux counterpart.
KeePass Password Safe is a very good example where it’s the parent of the Linux version KeePassX. Both are password database safes …