Oct 202013
 

As system administrator, or simple user that uses Linux on its desktop sometime you notice that something it’s eating all the memory of your system.
As first thing be sure to understand how Linux manage memory, I’ve be called too many time by scared users that did a free and were unable to read its output properly, in short, don’t worry if the Linux Kernel it’s using your memory to cache file.

< rant on >

To my “beloved” users:

Be assured that the Kernel developers can do a better job than you (and me) in find a good algorithm to cache file and free that memory area when a process need it, so please don’t ask me to put in cron some job that run something like that :

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

After that you’ll have more free memory available on the system, true, but the system will have to re-read all the files from the disk, so in terms of performance this is usually a bad move.

< /rant >

But now let’s take a look at a nice small program that can help us in find which process/users are using, for real, the memory of our systems.

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Oct 122013
 

Sometimes a program or software don’t start for a syntax error, and if you check the files there is nothing wrong..apparently.
There are a lot of characters that usually are not printed if you use a normal text editor, but you can easily check if they are present with your terminal and the command cat.

As first thing let’s create a simple text file with these special characters, open a terminal and run the command:

printf 'testing\012\011\011testing\014\010\012more testing\012\011\000\013\000even more testing\012\011\011\011\012' > /tmp/testing.txt

Now if you open the file with an editor you’ll have different results.
A simple cat will show:

$ cat /tmp/testing.txt 
testing
		testing
 
more testing
 
        even more testing

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Oct 072013
 

eyes-logo
Article by Jem

When most people think of video games on a computer, they assume that all games must be played on a computer running Microsoft Windows. These people forget that there are other operating systems for people to play games on like Linux. This operating system is found to be quite capable with non-gaming tasks and now developers have started to turn their attention to this small, but growing section of customers who wish to play games also. With the new found attention that Linux is gaining, even Steam is starting to support Linux with increasing types of games starting to appear. This includes horror and scary games. One of the games which are making people scream at their monitors is Eyes: The Horror Game.

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Oct 012013
 

steam_os

Some days ago Valve announced it’s new, and not so secret, project SteamOS :

“Thousands of games, millions of users. Everything you love about Steam.
Available soon as a free operating system designed for the TV and the living room.”

In short, soon there will be a new Linux distribution tailored to get the max from Steam and its games,

“SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers. Stay tuned in the coming days for more information”

about manufacturer Valve claims that it’s in contact with different hardware vendors to make “a variety of Steam gaming machines.” All will be running SteamOS and are expected to start hitting retail in 2014.
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