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This post is about my open source remote bandwidth usage stats logger project. I have multiple devices at home that access the internet so it is not feasible to install a bandwidth monitor individually on all these devices as I’d still need to add up all logs and many of such devices don’t even have a way to install a monitoring software installed (e.g. my PS3, my TV, my media players, etc). So, I thought of monitoring the usage at my router. It is a smart one (Asus wl-500w) and I can install various linux software on it but then it requires a hard disk to run most of them which I don’t turn on all the time. Moreover, even if I could run the software directly from router flash, it doesn’t have enough space to store the logs (neither is it a good idea to keep writing to the flash often). Hence I came up with the idea of a light weight remote bandwidth usage logger where in the router has to do the bare minimum possible (here, it just has to make a GET call to a webpage with current status of received and transmitted bytes, accomplished by a single line of wget command). The system is completely open source. The logging and parsing is all done on server side and provides various useful things.

Scheduling the classes wasn't easy at first. We wanted to hold the three day, one hour a day classes for every other week. They run from Tuesday to Thursday, 7-8 PM. That would have been a doable thing until Diane suffered two strokes and renal failure. As important as HeliOS is to me, I cannot in good conscious leave her alone when she needs someone there with her. So what were we to do? Thanks to several community-minded folks that have worked with HeliOS in the past, we are able to offer our classes on the above schedule, with a qualified and dedicated instructor for each night. Let me introduce you to the HeliOS Project Instructors.

LXer Feature: 21-Aug-2011

This week's installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Recently, I wrote an article about the lack of acceptance of GNOME 3. I received a private email from Aaron Seigo of KDE in which he took me to task, politely, thoughtfully, and with his usual thoroughness, for focusing on negative news. Since I often debate this issue with myself, with Seigo's permission, I'm summarizing the discussion here.

Seigo begins by asking, "Is it useful to spend time concentrating on the negatives in FOSS when we have not only a tremendous number of positive events occurring but many detractors who are willing to do the negativity thing for us?

Earlier this year Apple introduced Thunderbolt ports on their new systems while more hardware vendors will be offering these next-generation high-speed connections on their systems going forward, particularly when the Ivy Bridge hardware is rolled out. Thunderbolt, which was developed under the Light Peak codename, can transfer data at 20 Gbit/s and offers much potential, but how's the Linux support?

I must admit, results are not exactly what I expected. But they reflect true situation on the KDE "market", I can't object.

Windows is by far the most used operating system, and for many people it works just fine. However, it is not necessarily the best, and you may find that you benefit from going to another operating system.

This tutorial shows how you can speed up your Drupal 7.7 installation on a LAMP stack (Debian Squeeze) with the help of Boost and nginx. Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost makes sure that your logged-in users always get fresh content by not caching pages for logged-in users. In a first step I will show how to make your site faster by enabling Boost on a normal LAMP stack (Apache2, PHP, MySQL), and in a second step I explain how to make your site even faster by using nginx as a reverse proxy sitting in front of Apache and delivering the static HTML pages cached by Boost. nginx delivers static files a lot of faster than Apache and uses less memory/CPU.

No Time To Explain is a platformer game about Time Travel, Big Jetpack Guns, Giant Enemy Crabs and Ribs in People's Eyes. You are taken on a wild adventure of time paradoxes, things that make no sense and more things that make less sense. The game went through a Kickstarter funding project which raised more than $ 26K for the developers though the actual target was only $ 7K. So there was already a huge interest in the game even before its release.

I am writing to announce the update release of my Linux RAM disk kernel module RapidDisk (rxdsk). It is currently at a stable 1.1b release with added support for dynamic resizing of attached rxdsk volumes. More information can be found at http://rxdsk.petroskoutoupis.com.

Ten years ago today, the first post appeared on the mailing list of our project - then still called "OpenBeOS" - officially marking the start of our endeavor. Back then, with the imminent demise of Be Inc., there was an excitement and creative motivation in the air, that lead many to think a first release was only a matter of a few years. As it turns out, this estimation was a bit too optimistic...

Welcome to the 161st issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

Version of Spice-Gtk-0.7 coming from Debian Unstable doesn’t support Gobject-introspection. Original version is not ready to install files like *.gir and *.typelib. It also requires fix for debian/control and debian/rules. Rebuild to enable gobject-introspection has been done in PPA “Building Spice-Gtk-0.7 via Debian Unstable with gobject-introspection enabled” for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

Sometimes, especially on the command line, it happens that you delete a file or directory you didn’t really plan to delete. A second after hit enter you realize what you have done, maybe you are fast enough to stop the deletion process and save some files, but in the most cases it’s already to late, at least for some files. If you have no or a too old backup you’re screwed.

Inkscape is the premier open source vector graphics editor for Linux. Inkscape is cross platform and is available for Windows and Mac OS X for free download. We have dealt with a bunch of really good Inskcape tutorials before, here are even more of those. Following is a collection of 10 of the very best and descriptive Inkscape tutorials from around the web.

OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box.

The mobile device landscape, particularly for those devices running Linux, is quickly evolving. Just in the past few days, Google bought Motorola, Qualcomm open-sourced the remainder of their Gobi API for controlling modems, and HP ended off all their webOS devices, among other changes. But will the future mobile Linux device landscape deal with more open-source drivers, particularly when it comes to graphics?..

An admitted Xubuntu fanboy discovers a whole 'nother way of doing things, and finds a completely new and wonderful philosophy on Linux for the desktop.

It's official! OpenEMR has passed all ONC certification tests as a fully qualified emr that can be used to attest for incentive moneys. The official posting: http://onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert/EHRProductDetail?id=a0X300... appeared on the website 2011/08/19. Congratulations to all involved! OpenEMR 4.1 should be ready for download in a few weeks. This accomplishment is an amazing feat for an open source project, requiring many, many hours of interpretation of standards, coding, bug fixes, testing, and not least of all many thousands of dollars in fundraising to certify a product which has no corporate ownership and no financial return on that investment. It is LAMP based software that is free to use and inexpensive to run; hardware requirements are minimal. If you haven't seen us in a while, please visit at "http://www.open-emr.org" and the supporting organization "http://www.oemr.org" for more information. Jack Cahn MD oemr.org Board of Directors

I had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Bok of The Zod Engine via google talk. Not brand new but not seen before but a lot of lxer visitors!