Articles | Linuxaria

Open Source conference – Scale 11X

Jan 092013

I’ve received an email about this conference, and so gladly i propose it to Linuxaria readers. SCaLE stand for South California Linux Expo and it’s held at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport on February 22-24, 2013

I think that I can say that SCaLE has become the largest, small event in favor of the open source and looking at the list of speakers and presentations I can think only one thing … unfortunately, I can not go there.

Good topics and prominent names of the community, well done SCaLE!

And for Linuxaria readers there is a special promo code to get a discount on the registration.
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5 “lightweight” backup solution for the Linux desktop

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 1 Response »

Jan 062013

Today I’ll present you some good solutions to save your home directory, this is the reason I’ve called this type of backup “lightweight”, the goal is not to restore the full operating system, just all the information you have in your /home directory, that for desktop usually means save all important information of your computer.

Naturally on a server this approach is not so useful because you want to save your websites, databases and all programs configurations, so don’t use this approach on a server.

1 week with Mint Nadia XFCE

Articles, Opinion, Reviews 10 Responses »

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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Configuring 2 mirrored disks on Ubuntu Linux

Articles, Guides 10 Responses »

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.

An introduction to security models in Linux

Articles, Guides 2 Responses »

Dec 262012

Today I’m glad to republish an interesting article of Adrian Stolarski first published on Infosec, a great source of information about security.
It’s a good summary of the different type of security models that you can have in a Linux system, focused on SELinux, and if you are interested in this topic, be sure to take a look also at my Introduction to AppArmor

A task of any operating system is to provide software that strongly increases its security. A lot of programs of this type have been created; some are better than others. What does it look like in terms of Linux? Of course, here we have many more choices when it comes to this type of software, but some software is worth recommending. Some people already know what I mean: SELinux. Why choose this solution? Why do I think it is so different from other software of this type? And the last key question: who really should use it?

This system, as the name suggests is Security Enhanced Linux! So I invite you to read this article and learn about this tool.
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