Oct 212010
 

pdf linuxMany people associate pdf to adobe reader, but is this the best reader of this type of documents that we have on Linux?.

But in the while le’ts say that Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange. The file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

Originally a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008

Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Oct 162010
 

background changerIn Linux, setting an image as the desktop wallpaper is not a difficult task, but getting it to change automatically at a certain interval is.

If you have a good collection of wallpapers and want to see them in action on your desktop, there are some nice wallpaper changer software, i’ll try to give you an overview of some of them:

Desktop Drapes, Webilder, wallpaper-tray, desktopnova, wally

Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Sep 232010
 

ntopIn the previous article we saw wireshark, which allows, once activated, to capture packets in a given interface, in this article we’ll see ntop software that allows you to have similar information but also something more.

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.

ntop users can use a web browser (e.g. Firefox) to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface. Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Sep 122010
 

virtualboxIn this article I want to talk about three great virtualization software for your desktop computer.

Why virtualize?

The current computers have faster CPUs and  more RAM compared to those of 3 or 4 years ago. There is more ability to run a second operating system in parallel to your main operating system. But why do it?

  • To have another operating system (Windows, Linux or other)
  • For testing a new distribution
  • To prepare an environment dedicated to a product. For example, I installed a virtual machine with apache + mysql + everything I need for running a local a copy of my WordPress site

The three products that I will install and analyze on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine are:

  • VMware Player
  • VirtualBox (OSE)
  • KVM

For each of them i will consider a score of 1 to 3 for:

  • Ease of Installation
  • Administrative Tools
  • Features (license included).
  • Virtual appliances available

Continue reading »

Flattr this!