Riccardo | Linuxaria

My Top 10 Linux Games 2013 – Part 1

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 5 Responses »

Dec 212013

This has been in my opinion the first real year, and hopefully this will continue, for gamers on Linux, this is due to a massive investment by Valve in bringing the Steam platform on Linux systems and their planned Steam OS, that will be based on Linux.

So in short, I’ve never seen so many different games (also if closed source) available for my Linux desktop, and this is my personal top 10 of the games that I’ve played this year.

10 Knight of pen and paper +1
9 Shank 2
8 FTL – Faster than Light
7 Defender’s Quest – Valley of the Forgotten
6 Trine 2
5 Legend of Grimrock
4 Dungeons of Dredmor
3 Don’t Starve
2 Let 4 dead 2
1 Crusader Kings II

As you can see from this list I like strategic and RPG games, but in this list there are also other genres, let’s take a closer look to each of them.
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Use vim at its best to edit your Puppet manifests

Guides 2 Responses »

Dec 092013

This is my vim configuration to work with Git + Puppet manifests, mostly it’s based on some good articles about this that I found online:

Using this repository you’ll enable the following plugins:

pathogen Makes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files in their own private directories.
snipmate.vim snipMate.vim aims to be an unobtrusive, concise vim script that implements some of TextMate’s snippets features in Vim.
syntastic Syntastic is a syntax checking plugin that runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn’t have to compile their code or execute their script to find them.
tabular Sometimes, it’s useful to line up text. Naturally, it’s nicer to have the computer do this for you, since aligning things by hand quickly becomes unpleasant.
vim-puppet Make vim more Puppet friendly!
vim-fugitive Provides an amazingly deep Git integration for vim.

Also you’ll find a snippets directory with a custom list of snippet for Puppet.

Linux Terminal: Poor Man’s Spotify

Guides, Pills 7 Responses »

Dec 032013

While I was looking some video related to Linux I’ve found this video of gotbletu an user that I follow on Youtube, related to a small player to listen music directly from the terminal: pms AKA Poor Man’s Spotify.

I like lightweight clients, and so I’ve gave it a try, these are the results.
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How to put in pause any process in Linux

Guides 1 Response »

Nov 102013

Linux is much better at multitasking processor-intensive tasks than Windows. I remember how virus scanning used to make by old Windows PC almost unusable. Linux is much better, but sometimes bad things happens ! Perhaps a plugin of your browser is using all the CPU, or some bad software is freezing your system, or Apache it’s eating up all your resources on your server.

If you have seen some situation like these, don’t worry anymore, you don’t need to kill all the offending processes, restart your graphical session, or even worse restart the computer, you can simply put the specific process in “PAUSE” and analyse the situation, in some cases you could find the cause of a poor performing process, or just restart it in a second moment, maybe after you have saved all your works, when you can give to that process all the CPU.
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Linux Terminal: Check who uses all your memory with smem

Guides, Pills 6 Responses »

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.