Showing headlines posted by linuxaria

For most of us, the end of year brings performance appraisals and reflection on the year’s setbacks and accomplishments both professional and personal. In the glass bowl of life, I ask myself if I’ve made a difference, earned respect, have I grown from where I started the year? Technology has brought us innovation to hack our lives and measure our personal success through metrics. For example measuring sleep, weight, and activity. For example, I can see how much I slept, how fast I biked to work this morning, how often I biked, and the steps forward (or back) towards my goals. There is a dearth in tools available to measure personal work growth and effectiveness.

Today I want to do a roundup of the available text editor for our Linux computer, in particular I’ll take a look at the graphical text editor, so no vi, emacs, nano or joe today.

I’ll post what are in my opinion the pro and the cons of some of the text editor I’ve used in my day by day works, I’m not a programmer but sometimes I’ve to write some shell script or php functions and these software can really help you in these activity.

Sometimes it’s useful to write a bash script that do something like “Do this job, if it’s still running after XX second kill it”, how to implement this in a normal bash environment ? Nothing simpler: Use the timeout shell command to achieve this. From its info page: timeout runs the given COMMAND and kills it if it is still running after the specified time interval. Let’s see how to use it.

Version 4.0 of LOO still suffers from the issue of cross file compatibility to Microsoft Office. However, the good news is the pain is less than ever before and we now get the ability to open Visio and Publisher files! Personally, I have not used either of these Microsoft programs in years so I cannot attest to how well they are handled. Prior to LO V4, you just did not have the support to run the size of the operation you do. LO has given you the tools to make a solid business case.

Thanks to all the Indie games, Steam and Humble Bundle recently the market of games for Linux has become most active than ever and so I’ve bought some arcade/action/platform games. Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t like too much to manage around 10 different keys on the keyboard and remember all the combo that I've to do with them, a joypad it’s a much simpler way to play that kind of games, and what’s the best joypad around?

The new version of Linux Mint has just been released. The developers have arrived at version 15, the nick name of this version is Olivia. A lot of the changes are specified in the release notes. Among the most striking a new managment for the proprietary drivers and the repository. Olivia is proving to be all that Linux Mint has tried to be since it was born. A stable operating system, elegant and easy to use. Rejecting the desktop environments of the latest Ubuntu and Fedora that have so divided the Gnu/Linux community, Linux Mint makes simplicity and comfort its true strength. If you want to find a downside, with Cinnamon the load times at startup are a bit slower than when we were using XFCE, but nothing to tear his hair. GNU/Linux has never been so beautiful.

For today’s computing platforms, ease of access and openness is essential for web based communications and for lean resourced IT Management teams.

PDFtk or The PDF Toolkit is an open source cross-platform tool for manipulating PDF documents. pdftk is basically a front end to the iText library (compiled to Native code using GCJ), capable of splitting, merging, encrypting, decrypting, uncompressing, recompressing, and repairing PDFs. If pdf is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and x-ray-glasses.

Recently a colleague of mine should run multiple parallel jobs on a server (around 20 in our specific case), every job does “an elaboration” and this can take a time longer or shorter in respect of the others, once a job finishes its task it must read from a text file the first line that indicate the ID of a new job, it removes that ID from the top of the text file and starts to elaborate it. Problem: On a long run (a run of 50K+ jobs) it happens “frequently” that 2 jobs finish at the same time and so both take the same ID causing problems to the whole process. The solution was to use the bash function flock.

Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) number eight is been released and this is the list of games that you’ll find this time: Dear Esther, Capsized, Awesomenauts, Thomas Was Alone, and Little Inferno. If you choose to pay over the average, you’ll also receive Hotline Miami and Proteus!

Over the past few years, a handful of different encrypted messaging systems have cropped up and gained prominence, notably Cryptocat and the OTR specification. Now a newcomer to the scene proposes a different way of thinking about encrypted communication, one that borrows from its more well-known older brother, BitCoin.

A project has been started that intends to recreate BitCoin’s decentralized P2P model for seamless message encryption and transmission. BitMessage was started by Jonathan Warr en late last year and has now made it up to version 0.2.4. One of the most prominent strengths of the BitMessage system is how it enforces anonymity. Similar to how BitCoin allows one to send money to anonymous recipients without advertising metadata to others, BitMessage communicates via simple addresses generated from public keys, which need not be tied to a specific user’s identity.

Some days ago I’ve published an article about copy.com, a service similar to Dropbox where a copy of one of your folders is synchronized on the cloud, this is true for any computer where you install the copy.com/dropbox/ubuntu one applet and so you can easily share your documents among your computers and have a copy on the cloud. But what if you don’t want to share a copy on the cloud of your documents but you need to quickly share a document among your computers? Usb stick is usually the best option, but there is also an alternative that use the local network to send data among computers: NitroShare

Some time ago Mark Hadley (AgentParsec) created a game that captivated gamers around the world.Slender: The Eight Pages, available for free on Windows and Mac this was a short, experimental game that helped to breathe new life into the horror genre through its use of pure, uncensored fear.

I’m already an happy customer of Ubuntu One and Dropbox, I use them for different things such as website articles on one and photo and documents on the other, but why don’t try a new service that offer 15 GB for free and a native Linux Client ?

Copy.com it’s a relatively new company that at the moment is offering the biggest cloud space for free accounts, in these days they offer 15 GB for free

Goal of this how-to: Step to step guide on how to setup OpenDKIM with postfix on Debian GNU/Linux to send signed email from your VPS. There are numerous methods or techniques that you can use to achieve email message signing. Good examples are DomainKey as well as DKIM which is an abbreviation for DomainKeys Identified Mail. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit. The organization is a handler of the message, either as its originator or as an intermediary. Their reputation is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery. Technically DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.

Edit the menu of grub is not the easiest thing to do, and if you do some mistakes there is the risk that you are not able anymore to boot into your Linux, for these reasons it’s usually suggested to use some tool to edit grub configurations, today I’ll show you Grub Customizer.

Grub Customizer is a graphical settings manager for GRUB2 and BURG that allows anyone to easily set the boot options.

Check constantly your disk or its partitions is one of the essential things in a linux system. Today users usually checks this through graphical tools, but the real Linux old-timers use a terminal and the command “df“. Today I want to show you how to use “dfc“, similar to df but with the addition of colors and a percentage bar. You know, sometimes the eyes wants their part!

While looking at the top 10 download of Ubuntu app center for the month of April 2013 I’ve discovered a new software available for Ubuntu : YouTube to MP3. It’s not a secret that on youtube there are a lof of music videos and also some full albums, and so with this software you can download them as mp3 file and listen them in a second moment or on a mp3 player. YouTube to MP3 allows you to download and convert multiple videos into audio files, to do this you have simply to enter the URL of the video on youtube by clicking the Paste button or dragging in the window.

The equivalent of Comics for computers are the Comic book archive files that mainly consist of a series of image files, typically PNG (lossless compression) or JPEG (lossy compression) files, stored as a single archive file. Occasionally GIF, BMP, and TIFF files are seen. Folders may be used to group images.