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Every organization must monitor its infrastructure’s uptime and performance. While the popular Nagios application is a good general-purpose monitoring program that you can extend with plugins to handle just about any task, you may do even better by employing Cacti as a graphical front end to RRDTool‘s data logging and graphing functionality. Cacti was developed specifically to monitor and collect performance information, while Nagios is more oriented toward state changes, such as noting whether a daemon is up or down.

RRDTool stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. Cacti provides templates to gather and show information such as system load (CPU, RAM, disks), users connected, MySQL load, and Apache load, all of which can affect the performance of your site.

This guide explains how you can create advanced virtual hosts on a lighttpd web server on Debian Squeeze that are stored in a MySQL database. The method described here does not use the lighttpd mod_mysql_vhost module, and unlike mod_mysql_vhost (which allows you to store only the hostname and document root of a vhost in a database), this method allows to store individual configuration directives for each vhost in the MySQL database.

Recently I have shown that Intel graphics hit a high point with the Linux 3.6 kernel and that Ubuntu 12.10 is faster with Intel hardware compared to the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release. In this article are more Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 12.10 benchmarks to highlight the performance improvements for Intel Sandy Bridge graphics that will be found in Ubuntu 12.10.

In April I installed gitorious for my colleagues, but the installation and the handling of this project were a bit annoying. So I moved our repositories to a new gitolite installation today.

There is a chance that Valve’s visit to the Linux operating system may just come and go. There are a few things that you can do to make sure that this does not happen.

Oracle announced a few minutes ago, August 21st, the immediate availability for download of the VirtualBox 4.1.20 virtualization software for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

My current Debian Wheezy installation is an upgrade from Squeeze, so I was unprepared for what just happened: I'm doing a bunch of installs in between my other work, and I just got around to a traditional Wheezy desktop installation with the GNOME desktop using netinstall image. I was unprepared for the only GUI package manager to be GNOME Package Kit. No Synaptic Package Manager. Not even the "Sofware Center" ported from Ubuntu that shipped in Squeeze.

The official rationale for the new design is that the current “graphical UI is really starting to show its age, both to the users and to the developers. Adding new features (especially for new storage technologies) is difficult, and there’s no apparent overall design to the user experience.” From a purely end-user perspective, I disagree with the “there’s no apparent overall design to the user experience,” because the current UI offers a far more coherent user-experience than this new one.

My oldest daughter needed to use a computer when at my home because hers was not working for some reason, and so I let her use my laptop to check her email and do some banking. After about five minutes of using the computer she said "Dad, what kind of computer is this?"

In 2006, the family computer on which our digital photographs were stored had a hard drive failure. Because I'm obsessed with backups, it shouldn't have been a big deal, except that my backups had been silently failing for months. Although I certainly learned a lesson about verifying my backups, I also realized it would be nice to have an off-site storage location for our photos.

Go's unique approach to OO steps around many problems found in other languages by preferring composition to inheritance.

Surface won’t be more than 2% of market Microsoft is betting big that Windows 8 will revive its flagging fortunes, but the feedback from Dell is that the new operating system will be a consumer release, and it's not expecting too much impact from Redmond's Surface tablets either.…

More than two months ago, we took a look on the 29 new things that this Google summer of code would bring to the Gnome desktop environment and its various components.Today it is the “pencils down” for everyone as we finally reached the end of this magnificent program. Interns and mentors have done a great job providing new exciting things to the Gnome users benefit.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: August 21, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org) and its affiliate, LPI-East Africa (http://www.lpi-eastafrica.org/) will host a "Linux Essentials" exam lab during Software Freedom Day (SFD: September 1, 2012) at Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya. LPI-East Africa is also co-sponsoring an "Open Source Developer Challenge" during the event with the Linux Professional Association of Kenya (http://lpakenya.org/).

The SFLPhone team and Savoir-Faire Linux, a Montreal Open Source consulting company, are pleased to announce the availability of SFLPhone 1.2.0, the first version since the KDE client was moved to KDE infrastructure. Our team is proud of joining the KDE family as part of Playground, and looking forward to being part of Extragear soon. SFLPhone KDE and SFLPhone Qt have been in development for the better part of a decade, aiming to provide the KDE environment with a professional software phone app. Recently, we have been working hard to bring the application to the status of KDE first class citizen. Thank you to the Oxygen and l10n community members for showing such an interest in our application and helping us improve it.

Here is my easy and quick way to install Oracle Java on Debian / Ubuntu.

The following tutorial will teach Ubuntu users how to "unofficially" update their systems to the Mozilla Firefox 15.0 web browser.

HDMI doesn't work with Optimus hybrid graphics chipsets under Linux for most laptops, even if you use Bumblebee, but there is a way to get HDMI to work: by using a separate session.

Did you know that Disney is actually a major player in Open Source?

Neither did I. Read on...

An interview about GNOME OS, the consequences of Canonical leaving, the purported removal of features and the future role of Linux distributions.