Riccardo | Linuxaria

Linux Games: Left 4 Dead 2

Jul 142013

Some days ago Left 4 Dead 2 has been released on Linux on Steam Gaming Platform.
The game was released on 2009 for many gaming platforms such as Xbox and Windows, but if like me you like to play games on your Linux box, this is a good opportunity to play one of the most famous FPS cooperative survival Zombie games.

This game is a co-operative single or multiplayer action horror FPS that takes you and your friends through the cities, swamps and cemeteries of the Deep South, from Savannah to New Orleans across five expansive campaigns.
You’ll play as one of four survivors armed with a wide and devastating array of weapons. In addition to firearms, you’ll also get a chance to take out some aggression on infected with a variety of carnage-creating melee weapons, from chainsaws to axes and even the deadly frying pan.
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Monitor your Bandwidth on Linux with vnstat

Guides, Reviews 3 Responses »

Jul 112013

On server it’s useful to monitor, and collect, data about the use of your bandwidth, in the past I’ve wrote an article about “Monitor your bandwidth from the Linux shell” and I’ve also presented 4 useful tools that you can use to have a real time monitoring of the bandwidth:

IPTState : This software is a top-like interface to your netfilter connection-tracking table. Using iptstate you interactively watch where traffic crossing your netfilter/iptables firewall is going, sort by various criteria, limit the view by various criteria. But it doesn’t stop there: as of version 2.2.0 you can even delete states from the table!

pktstat displays a real-time list of active connections seen on a network interface, and how much bandwidth is being used. Partially decodes HTTP and FTP protocols to show what filename is being transferred. X11 application names are also shown.

NetHogs is a small ‘net top’ tool. Instead of breaking the traffic down per protocol or per subnet, like most tools do, it groups bandwidth by process. NetHogs does not rely on a special kernel module to be loaded. If there’s suddenly a lot of network traffic, you can fire up NetHogs and immediately see which PID is causing this. This makes it easy to indentify programs that have gone wild and are suddenly taking up your bandwidth.

IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.

They are all good I suggest to read my old articles to have a small introduction about them, today I want to show you vnstat, this small program has something more than the others, it can show real time statistics, but the feature that this small program shines it’s its ability to collect data over a long period of time.
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Linux Shell: DF and DU report different values

Guides, Pills 1 Response »

Jun 282013

Sometime it happen that the command df and the command du report different results such as:

df -h /tmp
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vzfs             16G   12G   4G  75%  /tmp

While a du command show somethign different such as:

du -hs /tmp/
10G	/tmp/

There are usually different reason when this happen.
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4 Text Editor for Linux

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 13 Responses »

Jun 232013

Today I want to do a roundup of the available text editor for our Linux computer, in particular I’ll take a look at the graphical text editor, so no vi, emacs, nano or joe today.

I’ll post what are in my opinion the pro and the cons of some of the text editor I’ve used in my day by day works, I’m not a programmer but sometimes I’ve to write some shell script or php functions and these software can really help you in these activity.

So let’s take a look at Gedit, Geany, Sublime text and Jedit
Some of these could be classified as IDE, but in general I’ve used them to just do some small text works, for this reason they are present in this article.

Linux Shell:Timeout

Guides, Pills 3 Responses »

Jun 192013

Sometimes it’s useful to write a bash script that do something like “Do this job, if it’s still running after XX second kill it”, how to implement this in a normal bash environment ?

Nothing simpler: Use the timeout shell command to achieve this.
From its info page: