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Let cron handle your repetitive tasks - an introduction to crontab. A crontab is a simple text file that holds a list of commands that are to be run at specified times. These commands, and their related run times, are controlled by the cron daemon and are executed in the system's background. More information can be found by viewing the crontab man page. We will run through a simple crontab example later.

If all goes according to plan, the first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be released tomorrow. It's not even been one month since the release of Ubuntu 8.10, but this first alpha release will show early signs of what we can expect to see in this next Canonical-sponsored release -- albeit many of the features are still in planning. In this article we will provide a glimpse at what Ubuntu 9.04 should hold in store to captivate Linux desktop users.

A patent represents a grant from the United States government to an individual for the exclusive right to make, use, import, sell, and offer to sell an invention. In order to obtain a patent, an inventor must prove that the invention is new, useful, and not merely an obvious improvement over what was already known.

ono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager, has been hard at work nailing gelatin to the wall. Okay, not literally, but he's putting a lot of thought into how he can best determine the vitality, growth, needs and wants of the Ubuntu community and how they best mesh with, and give back to, the wider Linux and open source communities.

With diff-ext, GNOME users can compare and merge files from within Nautilus. If, instead, you use KDE 3, try out kdiff-ext from the same site, which works with Konqueror. Each utility handles paths to files and directories and invokes an external diff tool to perform the grunt work. With diff-ext you can easily compare two files with different names, from different directories, or whole directory trees.

Chip maker ARM is to get Ubuntu Linux up and running on its ARMv7 processor architcture, part of its plan to get its chips into netbooks and handheld internet devices. It's all about taking the fight to Intel's Atom, of course. The chip giant's processor has become the de facto standard for small, cheap computers. But the handheld tablet side of the story - the MID - has yet to take off, providing ARM with an opportunity to tout its platform's superior power efficiency.

Doing “stuff” on linux is just so easy. By “stuff”, I mean everything from doing some normal day chores, downloading files, customizing things, automating routine tasks, etc. The backbone for this is “the terminal” (not the movie :P). I can do almost anything I want from the console.

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?

Security is based on three characteristics: prevention, protection and detection. Grsecurity is a patch for the Linux kernel that allows you to increase each of these points. This howto was performed on a Debian Lenny system. Thus some tools are Debian specific. However, tasks can be performed with other distro specific tools or even with universal tools (make).

Hi All, Here's my 6th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to encrypt the passwords that are stored in your directory server":..

These may not cover every base, but they probably cover at least one base that you don't see covered much ;) Today's going to be a "fun with awk" day. I figure we should have one now because we never had them in school when I was a kid... The topic, as the title suggests, has to do with columnar arithmetic or, less pompously put, performing arithmetic operations on columns or, even more accessibly, adding stuff up ;) It's somewhat like our older post on doing simple cumulative math with awk, but slightly more confusing.

To great fanfare, Microsoft has announced that it is deploying XO laptops in Quetame and Chia, Colombia, with the Windows XP operations system, what I like to call "Windows XO", thereby claiming that Colombia signs up for OLPC laptops with Windows. This bragging certainly has pissed off Greg Dek, a Red Hat Community Architect working on OLPC. Greg declares that Microsoft bought 10,000 XO laptops in May and can do with them whatever they want, including trumpeted up pilots of Windows XO, and that OLPC builds with Linux and Sugar, and always will.

Last week I talked a bit about the bipolar world of printing on Linux: the best of times, the worst of times; the easiest and the hardest; the most reliable and the most annoying. I raised a number of questions such as why do print jobs disappear without a trace, then reappear days later? Printing multiple copies, if you had hit the print button in frustration multiple times. Is this printer really online and working? Does it have enough toner and paper? If there is a problem, why won't it tell me in a reasonable way? Why isn't there an obvious, easy button for "cancel the print job plz, kthx"?

The iPhone and iPod Touch haven taken the mobile market by storm. Apple's AppStore is full of interesting applications that take advantage of the two devices's capabilities. But what's in there for Linux users? Sadly, GTKPod and Amarok cannot yet transfer files on an iPhone with the 2.x firmware upgrade, but there are other interesting ways your iPhone can interact with your Linux desktop and even servers.

All the time you hear the constant nagging "Backups! Backups! Always have good current backups!" But this is often easier said than done, especially in the world of expensive, restrictive, overly-complex proprietary backup applications. But, as usual, Free software takes a sensible, user-friendly approach to backups and recovery. Deann Corum shows us how to get started with Bacula, the powerful backup and recovery application that supports both tape and disk storage.

Wikipedia is one of the preeminent examples of what can be done in an open setting; it has, over the years, accumulated millions of articles - many of them excellent - in a large number of languages. Wikipedia also has a bit of a licensing problem, but it would appear that recent events, including the release of a new license by the Free Software Foundation, offers a way out.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft Corp. forged its controversial partnership with Novell Inc. that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect SUSE Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft. Just how well has that deal worked out? That depends on who you talk to. Microsoft and Novell paint nothing but a rosy picture of the arrangement. Customers "like the idea that Microsoft and Novell are in the same room," says Susan Hauser, Microsoft's general manager for strategic partnerships.

Here is a fairly new Linux distribution and like many new ones out there this distribution is based off of Ubuntu Linux. The installation was just an easy 7 steps just as most other Ubuntu based distributions. What makes this distribution stand out is the fact that most of the necessary Media Apps and Codecs are already installed for you so you do not have to do that for your self.

p://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/11/php-zend-framework-17-adds-ado.html The open source Zend Framework 1.7 is now available expanding the PHP framework to work better with Adobe Flex and AIR applications. Adobe and Zend announced back in September that they would be collaborating for Zend Framework and now they've delivered.

It's no secret that Digium has recruited executives from ADTRAN, a neighboring networking company in Huntsville, Alabama. But here's another interesting trend: Some customers are starting to use ADTRAN and Digium Asterisk in tandem.