Dec 032010
Dec 022010
I’ve received this article from Francesco and gladly i publish it:
Every day we read of new Linux distributions (GNU/Linux to be correct), and sometimes happen to want to try them “on the road”, even those who do not have a live version. The first program that comes to mind, I think, is precisely Qemu. But I also think that there is also an attempt to find a more friendly alternative. The second choice I think is VirtualBox, a Qemu-based solution that gives to you at once and without effort everything you need. But is it really necessary to use a program that adds to our Linux machine other useless processes ? For me no. Of course, to switch from Virtualbox to Qemu I think, all of these tasks should be accomplished by a graphical interface “mouse-proof” and the terminal should not be used.
You don’t believe that it’s possible ?
Programs you need:
- qemu, the main program on the command line;
- qemu-launcher, graphic interface of qemu;
- qemu-control, add-on of qemu-launcher.
Nov 302010
Article By: Roberto Sedycias
As we started the project of our web site, we knew that the proprietary software costs would be too high for our financial resources. Our only option then was to make use of Open Source Code softwares.
However, within the Open Source Code there are lots of softwares to choose from, and it´s up to the system analyst/programmer to pick the ones that best suit the project goals.
In our case, we picked Linux as our operating system. However we faced a big question: Which Linux distribution ? There are dozens of linux distributions, each one with specific advantages, sometimes with or without paid services.
Nov 272010
You may need to have information replicated between two computers that actually are part of a cluster, in addition to”software” replica mechanisms such as Rsync you can use a product that is stable and included in the standard kernel: DRBD.
DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is a distributed storage system for the GNU/Linux platform. It consists of a kernel module, several userspace management applications and some shell scripts and is normally used on high availability (HA) clusters. DRBD bears similarities to RAID 1, except that it runs over a network.
DRBD refers to both the software (kernel module and associated userspace tools), and also to specific logical block devices managed by the software. DRBD device and DRBD block device are also often used for the latter.
It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. Continue reading »
Nov 262010
inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals.
The original developers of inotify were John McCutchan, Robert Love and Amy Griffis. It has been included in the mainline Linux kernel from release 2.6.13 (June 18, 2005), and could be compiled into 2.6.12 and possibly earlier releases by use of a patch.
One major use is in desktop search utilities like Beagle, where its functionality permits reindexing of changed files without scanning the filesystem for changes every few minutes, which would be very inefficient. By being told that a file has changed directly by the kernel, rather than actively looking, Beagle and such utilities can achieve change-to-reindexing times of only about a second.