Mar 302014
 

humble open source bundle
This week the Humble weekly Bundle has the subtitle “Celebrating Open source”, so I must buy and publish it 🙂
Apart the interesting title this bundle contains 8 nice games.

Each game in this bundle was made featuring some open source tool or library. Pay what you want for the high school-themed fantasy game, Magical Diary, the post-apocalyptic turn-based adventure game, NEO Scavenger (Early Access Game), the baby-throwing puzzle platformer, Offspring Fling!, and the visually stunning sci-fi combat game, Planet Stronghold. If you pay $6 or more, you’ll also get the whimsical 2-D puzzler, Anodyne, the tower defense and RPG hybrid, Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, the 3-D action-adventure, Evoland, and the unique, limb-pulling adventure-puzzler, Incredipede.

The Humble Weekly Sale: Celebrating Open Source will only be here for one week. Grab this deal before it ends on Thursday, April 3, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

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Mar 162014
 

fitbit linux
I’ve recently received a fitbit flex as gift, and I love it, this personal device tracks steps, distance, and calories burned. At night, it tracks your sleep quality and wakes you silently in the morning. Just check out the lights to see how you stack up against your personal goal. Flex allows you to set a goal and uses LED lights to show how you’re stacking up. Each light represents 20% of your goal. You choose which one — steps, calories, or distance. It lights up like a scoreboard, challenging you to be more active day after day.

Flex automatically syncs your data to PCs and Macs with Fitbit’s wireless sync dongle (included), many iOS devices and select Android phones without plugging in or pushing buttons. Now all this sound fantastic and really funny if you like to take your stats and see nice graphs, but there is a small (big) problem about fitbit, it doesn’t support officially Linux.

Sure, you can use a compatible smartphone, but in general I like to use the idea of using my Linux computers for anything and with some research and some tests I’ve been able to sync successfully my flex with my Linux Mint 16.
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Mar 132014
 

Guest post by Kerry Blake

We love Linux and we love it for its open source nature, security, and powerful tools. There are a lot of free as well as commercial VPN solutions available for Ubuntu. We are not going to list or rank all the top VPN providers. We don’t necessarily want to rank them simply because users choose their VPN provider based on their personal requirements. If you want an US VPN service, you should look for the best US VPN service that supports OpenVPN. The intent of the article is to help newbies configure and use their favorite VPN service without going back and forth in Ubuntu community forum and embarrass oneself before the rather patronizing users.

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Mar 032014
 

Article by me, first published on Openlogic.com

Whether you are a system administrator or a developer, sometimes you need to consider the use of memory in GNU/Linux processes and programs. Memory is a critical resource, and limited memory plus processes that use a lot of RAM can cause a situation where the kernel goes out of memory (OOM). In this state Linux activates an OOM killer kernel process that attempts to recover the system by terminating one or more low-priority processes. Which processes the system kills is unpredictable, so though the OOM killer may keep the server from going down, it can cause problems in the delivery of services that should stay running.

In this article we’ll look at three utilities that report information about the memory used on a GNU/Linux system. Each has strengths and weaknesses, with accuracy being their Achilles’ heel. I’ll use CentOS 6.4 as my demo system, but these programs are available on any Linux distribution.

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Feb 192014
 

Original article by http://blog.shineservers.com/

Sometime a process “hang” both if you are using Gnu/Linux on your desktop (maybe a game ?) or as server, in these cases the best thing to do it’s to terminate that process, that probably is using precious resources, the basic commands to do this from a terminal are kill and killall.

killall is a tool for ending running processes on your system based on name. In contrast, kill terminates processes based on process ID number or “PID.” kill and killallcan also send specific system signals to processes. Use killall and kill in conjunction with tools including ps to manage processes and end processes that have become stuck or unresponsive when necessary.

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