Dec 302012
 

On the 21 of December Linux Mint 14 Xfce has been released, codename Nadia.
This release of Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and shipped with the XFCE desktop environemnt as my readers probably know I’ve installed Mint 13 XFCE on my new desktop and so I’ve decided to upgrade my installation to this new release.

As first thing, do I suggest to upgrade to this release ?
Yes and no, Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 that is a Long Term Support distribution, this means that like other LTS releases 12.04 will have updates for 3 years, and will include point releases that bundle updates to shorten downloads for users installing the release later in its lifecycle. The point releases and dates are: 12.04.1 (23 August 2012), 12.04.2 (31 January 2013), 12.04.3 (15 August 2013) and 12.04.4 (24 January 2014). There are no further point releases scheduled after the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

So if you are happy with your software and all your hardware works you have no strong reasons to do this.

On the other hand, if like me you have a D-LINK N 150 aka DWA-125 or some other hardware that don’t work perfectly with your Kernel an update could help you, spoiler: This upgrade helped me in removing all the proprietary drivers in my installation.
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Dec 282012
 

I’ve just recovered 2x 500 GB sata disks from an old installation, so I opened up my new Desktop and connected them to my main Linux machine, these 2 disks have been used for around 3 years on the the other installation, so I prefer to use them in a mirrored configuration, or RAID 1, so everything that is wrote on a disk is copyed automatically also on the the other, and there is no loss of information if 1 of 2 disks broke up.

At the moment I use a Mint 14 XFCE edition, that is totally compatible with Ubuntu 12.10, and in my point of view for some aspects much better, so in this guide I’ll use commands that are compatible for Mint , Ubuntu and Debian, for other distributions you’ll have to search for your packages, but the configurations and commands will be the same.

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Dec 222012
 

Mass renaming files is no possible with the standard linux command mv, but it’s possible to achieve this goal in many different ways, from some bash magic, to programs that do exactly this, in this article I’ll work with both the terminal and with graphical tools.

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Dec 172012
 

linux hardwareOn a former article I’ve presented 3 command line commands that you can use to get information on your Linux box: lsusb, lspci and lshw, they are really good and I use the first 2 in a lot of situation where I want to check if all my devices works correctly.

Today I’ll propose to you another software that has become popular in this genre: hardinfo, a software designed to be a System Profiler and Benchmark tool, easily usable by everyone and shipped by default by some of the mainstream Linux distributions.

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Dec 152012
 

Since its initial introduction into the business world in 2005, Google Apps has been available to small business users for free. Even when the premium version was launched in 2007, Google still maintained a free standard version for individuals and small organizations, this was great for small website, they could have their emails managed by the Big G.

But as you can read from the official blog this has come to an end:

For Businesses, instead of two versions, there will be one. Companies of all sizes will sign up for our premium version, Google Apps for Business, which includes 24/7 phone support for any issue, a 25GB inbox, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime. Pricing is still $50 per user, per year.

This is not doable for small websites that have their own domain but don’t need this service for 50$, so a good solution in these cases is to set up on your VPS a postfix server that can forward all the emails to another email.

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