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Passive Checks and NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor)
6 minutes ago
Nagios is a very powerful platform because it is easy to extend. A great feature that Nagios offers is the ability for third-party software or other Nagios instances to report information on the status of services or hosts. This way, Nagios does not need to schedule and run checks by itself, but other applications can report information as it is available to them. This means that your applications can send problem reports directly to Nagios, instead of just logging them. In this way, your applications can benefit from powerful notification systems as well as dependency tracking. In this article we will see how this mechanism can also be used to receive failure notifications from other services or machines—for example, SNMP traps. -
Jackalope Rising: Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 1 As Early As Tomorrow
36 minutes ago
The Ubuntu project says that the initial alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the "Jaunty Jackalope") could be available for testing in less than twenty-four hours. Yes, that's a little less than a month after the current, stable version, "Intrepid Ibex" was finalized and formally released. -
How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go?
1 hour, 6 minutes ago
While I remain in agreement with many observers who see the economic downturn as potentially very positive for open source, I have to wonder whether we're going to see some of the leadership open source companies swallowed up in all the financial carnage. Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems are all companies that I'd like to see continue their open source leadership without the meddling of huge corporate parents, but one has to wonder how cheap these companies can get in the public market before their independence is threatened. -
64-Bit Linux Adobe Flash Player: Surprisingly good
1 hour, 36 minutes ago
The first alpha release of the 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 is amazingly stable and fast. -
85% Of The Enterprises Use Open Source? Math Is Right But Needs To Show Work.
2 hours, 6 minutes ago
The Gartner numbers seem positive, and encouraging -- especially in light of the acknowledgement that the remaining 15% are planning to move toward more open source software in the near future. Then Gartner drops the bad news -- cases that Moody says don't end badly (they are usually remedied with a polite phone call) or even happen terribly frequently (12 or so cases a year) -- that 69% of companies have no formal method of evaluating and cataloging their open source applications, leaving them at risk of intellectual property liabilities. -
FashionYourFirefox: Mozilla's (Partial) Effort to Push Extensions
2 hours, 36 minutes ago
In an effort to coax more users to take advantage of the many extensions for its Firefox browser, Mozilla has just launched FashionYourFirefox.com. The site is divided up into categories, which cater to individual interests and "online lifestyles," according to Mozilla's announcement. The site looks like a good idea for extension novices, but I don't see some of my favorite extensions, and some of the categories have a pretty sparse number of extensions. -
Mozilla revenues hit $75 million -
3 hours, 6 minutes ago
Mozilla Chief Wrangler Mitchell Baker today reported Mozilla's financial position which shows 2007 revenues of $75 million up by 12 percent from 2006 revenues of $67 million. Though Mozilla is on the upswing, Baker's report shows some areas of potential future financial concerns. -
Boxee Media Center App Gets $4 Million in Funding
3 hours, 36 minutes ago
A few days ago, in a roundup of open source media center applications, I covered Boxee. It's an open source mashup of a sophisticated media center application that can run and organize videos, photos and more on the Mac, AppleTV, Windows (soon) and Linux, and a social networking application. I mentioned that it's one of the most compelling media center applications I've seen, and it appears I'm not alone. Boxee has announced that it has secured $4 million in first round funding, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Here's why I think Boxee is going to become a household name. -
Ubuntu at the Crossroads of System Logs and Community Feedback
4 hours, 6 minutes ago
Jono 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. -
Laid Off? Top Ways to Find Opportunities in Open Source
4 hours, 36 minutes ago
While it may seem illogical that making free contributions to free products is a good idea when the pink slip pops up, they make some good arguments for how it can improve both job and pay prospects. You'll find some good ways to improve your odds here. -
Microsoft, Novell See Profits in Partnership
5 hours, 6 minutes ago
Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers. "I was surprised at the number of over 200 customers, so I actually went back and double checked it just to make sure," Susan Heystee, General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Novell told InternetNews.com. "That represents over 250 percent growth in terms of the number of customers that are part of the partnership which is really great. A real positive surprise has been the great customer momentum." -
Multimedia processor plays H.264 video
5 hours, 36 minutes ago
Texas Instruments (TI) is accepting orders for a Linux-ready DaVinci multimedia SoC (system-on-chip) targeting digital photo frames, IP network cameras, and low-cost digital video recorders. The Ethernet-equipped TMS320DM357 has a 270MHz ARM9 core, and a DSP core supplied with royalty-free codecs for -
$7 ARM9 SoC gains mainline support
6 hours, 6 minutes ago
Rousset, France-based semiconductor firm Atmel announced that the Linux 2.6.27 mainline kernel release has added support for its AT91SAM9G20 system-on-chip (SoC). Equipped with an ARM926EJ-S core clocked to 400MHz, the AT91SAM9G20 is offered with a Linux v2.6.27 kernel, patches, drivers, demos, and the Angstrom/OpenEmbedded development environment, says the company. -
Open Source is Good in a Recession, but Thought is Still Required
7 hours, 6 minutes ago
While I agree wholeheartedly that open source software is a great option for businesses (regardless of economic climate), there is more than cost to consider. "Just switching everything to Linux" likely will save money in the long term, but it might not be right to do, right now. -
Mini-ITX board has HDMI port
8 hours, 6 minutes ago
Advantech has introduced a mini-ITX motherboard that targets embedded information and entertainment applications, such as information station kiosks and lottery machines. The AIMB-221 supports single- or dual-core AMD processors, and offers an HDMI A/V port, for connection to multimedia displays such as high-definition televisions. - More News
Linux.com : Features
Using external commands in Nagios
System monitoring tool Nagios offers a powerful mechanism for receiving events and commands from external applications. External commands are usually sent from event handlers or from the Nagios Web interface. You will find external commands most useful when writing event handlers for your system, or when writing an external application that interacts with Nagios.
SoftMaker Office 2008 focuses on compatibility with Microsoft Office
The free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org might be a killer app for many, but its inability to properly display documents created in the proprietary Microsoft Office formats hinders its widespread acceptance in multi-OS business environments with many legacy .doc and .xls files. If changing over to an open document format is not an option, try SoftMaker Office. It's no OpenOffice.org-killer, but it's a full featured office suite that has great compatibility with Microsoft Office. Sure, it costs $80, but you can increase your karma by running it on Linux.
Speed up your Internet access using Squid's refresh patterns
Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth.
Sun wrestles itself with StarOffice 9
StarOffice 9 reminds me of the classic Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman wrestles himself. Although StarOffice is being aggressively presented as an alternative to Microsoft Office, it seems to be equally marketed and bundled to compete against OpenOffice.org, the free software project that is sponsored by Sun and that shares a common code base with StarOffice. The trouble is, the differences between the two have diminished with each release, until, with StarOffice 9, you have to wonder who the potential customers might be.
Manage your music with ID3 tag editors
The Linux desktop comes with a variety of multimedia players, such as Xine, MPlayer, and Amarok. Yet all digital media players are only as good as the files they have to work with, and preparing those files requires the best tag editor you can find. I checked out half a dozen of the more popular and stable graphical ID3 tag editors available for Linux. I found that going from no tags to great tags requires keeping more than one of these editors on hand.
Doing a diff without touching the command line
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.
iPhone applications for the Linux user
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.
sK1 vector in on good illustrations
From its name, you'd never know that sK1 is a good vector graphics drawing program, in the same category as better-known names like Inkscape, Dia, and OpenOffice.org Draw. Moreover, sK1 includes a feature that other Linux applications lack: it can read CorelDraw's CDR files and convert them to Linux-friendly formats.
Treat your C code like scripts with C Cod
C Cod is a front end to your C, C++, or Objective-C compiler that lets you treat C more like a scripting language. C Cod comes with C Server Pages, which provides support for CGI so you can write Web applications in C or C++ and have them automatically compiled on demand.
Slumberland rests easy after move away from proprietary Unix
In 2005, when Slumberland faced end-of-lifecycle replacements of its proprietary Unix platform, its warehouse management system (WMS) vendor suggested a move to Red Hat Linux and commodity x86 servers. Seth Mitchell, the infrastructure team manager at the large furniture retailer, gladly agreed. Upper management wasn't quite as quick to jump on the open source bandwagon, but once the cost savings started rolling in, everyone agreed that it was a profitable decision.
Crafting offers and invoice documents with Kraft
Kraft helps you keep track of business offers and invoices and can generate PDF files to help you easily issue these routine documents to third parties. Since Kraft is a KDE application, it can draw contact information directly from your KDE address book, so you don't have to duplicate or sync your contacts in order to generate an invoice.
Enrich your Joomla! site with image extensions
Several extensions can help you work with photographic images on your Joomla! content management system. Here are some of the best.
Bug Labs creates open source Lego for software engineers
Most of the new breed of open source hardware centers on specific products. Bug Labs is taking a different approach. Instead of developing particular devices, Bug Labs' goal is to provide a Lego-like collection of open source hardware and software that customers can use to build their own devices. According to CEO Peter Semmelhack, the result should be not only a higher degree of innovation, but also a forerunner of the hardware business of the future.
Set Mantis to track your bugs
Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.
Back-of-the-napkin calculations with Frink
Linux users have a myriad of calculators and unit conversion tools at their disposal. To set itself apart, Frink aims to track units for you and give you a way to quickly perform little conversions and real-world calculations without burdening you with needless details.
Ace Suares: A big Linux advocate on a small island (video)
The word "big" has two meanings here. Ace Suares is not only a big-time GNU/Linux and FOSS advocate, but he is close to 2.5 meters tall and built like a football lineman. He lives on the island of Curacao in the Netherland Antilles, where he and his wife run a small Web design and hosting firm that (of course) runs Linux servers. But trying to convert other IT people on Curacao to the FOSS cause has not been easy, and has caused Ace plenty of frustration over the years. Somehow, he keeps going; arranging conferences, holding LPI Certification classes, and generally talking up Linux to his clients, friends, and even to strangers whose businesses or government agencies might be made more efficient by using FOSS instead of proprietary software. Now we'll get out of the way and let Ace tell his story directly to you in the following video. (It's about 13:20 long.)
Clone your Ubuntu installation onto a new hard disk
Just upgraded your system with a shiny new hard disk and want to make it your new book disk? Cloning Ubuntu to another hard disk is easy. In fact, Ubuntu provides tools to clone the entire hard disk -- including the Windows partition, if there's one on there. This is the kind of fundamental task that Linux excels at, in fact.
Tidy up your mailboxes with Archivemail
Over time, people tend to accumulate a large number of messages in various email accounts, most of which they never bother with again. The problem is particularly acute for administrator accounts that receive routine notifications of events that are viewed, if at all, no more than once. The archivemail tool lets you easily archive these old messages and thereby free up some disk space and improve your mail client's performance.
Portrait: FOSS legal leader Andrew Updegrove
Attorney Andrew Updegrove specializes in technology, intellectual property, and standards. While other lawyers can make the same claim, few have his credentials -- maintainer of an online repository about standards consortia, former board member of the Linux Foundation, and progenitor of a major open source license.
Splashtop moves into netbooks
The Splashtop instant-on Linux environment is included in the new Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook, marking the product's first appearance in that form factor. That news should come as no surprise, since netbooks' ultra-portability is a natural match for Splashtop's instant-on.
