Dec 122012
 

spirits

Perhaps someone is old enough to remember the original Lemmings game, a puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Originally developed for the Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular video games of its era, the basic objective of the game is to guide a group of humanoid lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In order to save the required number of lemmings to win, one must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles in order to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.

This gameplay has been reused by many games in these years and today I want to present you the last heir of this big family : Spirits

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Dec 092012
 

In the past I’ve wrote an article about the commands du and df that can respectively give you information about the Disk Usage and the Disk Free of your Linux computer.
I personally use both of these commands a lot of times at work to check file system and/or directory, but I also understand that on a desktop with Linux you could use something more graphical to see the status of your partitions or directories, so today I’ll show you some programs that can achieve this goal: baobab, cdu, ncdu, JDiskReport and Filelight.

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Dec 022012
 

Logging is a critical thing for all system administrators, if you log too much and you don’t manage the files you could fill up a partition or even worst stop some service, if you don’t log enough you’ll lose information when something goes wrong, in general a good solution for this is to send all the logs to a central server that will store for the time you need them, and keep just 1,2 days of log into the local machine.

You could do this configuration easily with rsyslog or syslog-ng to send/receive the logs and logrotate to rotate the files locally on your machines, today I want to show you some open source programs that can receive the logs, store them on filesystem or database and analyse them presenting the results via Web dashboards.

These are large applications most suited for big company, or in general to everyone that want to keep and manage a lot of data they are: Apache Flume, Logstash, Greylog2 and Scribe

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Nov 162012
 

Around 1 month ago Jason posted an article related to Educational software that run on Linux (or even Linux distributions done with that goal), today he return on that topic with another roundup of software useful for schools.

Many educators might have been hesitant in the past regarding embracing open source software. But not any more as the number that has taken to open source software (OSS) has increased significantly over the years. As more teachers as well as institutions are now engaging with organizations such as Open Source Schools, SchoolForge among others. Consequently, these educators have begun to realize the potential inherent in OSS that can help transform education in many ways.

Now here is a list of open-source applications that is available to assist educators in teaching as well as in inspiring their students:
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Nov 082012
 

Steam is a great source for any gamer. It is a place that will allow you to try out and enjoy many of the more popular video games that are available on the market today. Steam Greenlight will allow you to vote on games that you would like to see come available. It is a great system for gamers, so they do not have to drop $50 to purchase every game off the shelf. They can simply join Steam and enjoy the most popular ones at a reduced price.

Steam is not only a place to acquire games to play it is also a place where you can talk with other gamers and possibly get information on cheat codes or creative ways to pass a particularly difficult level. It is convenient and rather popular.

Linux Gaming

Linux has always had its own style of gaming. The Linux users had to get creative in order to find a way to download games that were specifically created for the Windows OS to their Linux OS, but the Wine made most of this possible. There are also games that were specifically created for users on the Linux system. It originally seemed like gaming was more of an afterthought with the Linux OS, but lately Linux developers have been pushing their gaming development.

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