Mar 062011
 

flattrSorry, no posts today on the penguin, I’ve been a bit busy with two things that took away a bit of time, that I want to tell: flattr and wordpress 3.1.

Flattr , today I joined the site flattr.com, i like the idea behind this project very much, make micro-payments to those sites or projects that i choose to help, also with small amount, to support them economically.

wordpress 3.1, On February 23, 2011, WordPress Version 3.1 “Reinhardt” was released, i waited until today to see if there were some know bug to avoid before upgrading, and today i did it… well almost painless.

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Mar 052011
 

ffmpegFFmpeg can be considered the Swissknife of audio and video applications, with many options and possibilities. You probably already have it installed on your computer as a dependency of a program you use to watch videos or listen to music. In this article we will see some use from the command line without using graphics applications.

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Mar 032011
 

collectd In these days I have seen in a somewhat more detailed way collectd, an excellent tool for collecting statistics on various aspects of our Linux servers.

From Wikipedia: “collectd is a UNIX-daemon which collects, transfers and stores performance data of computers and network equipment. The acquired data is meant to help system administrators maintain an overview over available resources in order to detect existing or looming bottlenecks.

The first version of the daemon was written in 2005 by Florian Forster and has been further developed as free open-source project. Other developers have written improvements and extensions to the software that have been incorporated into the project. Most files of the source code are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2), the remaining files are licensed under other open source licenses”

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Mar 022011
 

tuxI want to start publishing a list of the most read articles of Linuxaria in the previous months, we start today with the most read stories of January 2011:

7) Compression programs on Linux

Or zip VS gzip VS bzip2 VS xz

In a previous article about the tar program I mentioned gzip and bzip2 compression methods as options to create a tarball (and I forgot xz).

To make amends today I will introduce the main methods to compress the file and I’ll do some tests to see how they behave.
I will consider zip, gzip, bzip2 and xv, i will not test compress another compression program present on Linux systems but now dated and surpassed by the other programs. Continue reading »

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Feb 282011
 

iptstate-2.0-lookup-ssToday I’ll show you two tools to be used int the terminal to monitor your network and the active connections: iptstate and pkstat

IPTState

IPTState is a top-like interface to your netfilter connection-tracking table.

Using iptstate you interactively watch where traffic crossing your netfilter/iptables firewall is going, sort by various criteria, limit the view by various criteria. But it doesn’t stop there: as of version 2.2.0 you can even delete states from the table!

The only requirements are a curses library (usually ncurses), and libnetfilter_conntrack version 0.0.50 or later.

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