Small and at the same time great article from Steve on http://www.debian-administration.org/.
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If you run a multi-user system it can increase security if you hide the display of running processes, and their arguments, which belong to other users. This helps avoid problems if users enter passwords on the command-line, and similar.
I’ve recently received a fitbit flex as gift, and I love it, this personal device tracks steps, distance, and calories burned. At night, it tracks your sleep quality and wakes you silently in the morning. Just check out the lights to see how you stack up against your personal goal. Flex allows you to set a goal and uses LED lights to show how you’re stacking up. Each light represents 20% of your goal. You choose which one — steps, calories, or distance. It lights up like a scoreboard, challenging you to be more active day after day.
Flex automatically syncs your data to PCs and Macs with Fitbit’s wireless sync dongle (included), many iOS devices and select Android phones without plugging in or pushing buttons. Now all this sound fantastic and really funny if you like to take your stats and see nice graphs, but there is a small (big) problem about fitbit, it doesn’t support officially Linux.
Sure, you can use a compatible smartphone, but in general I like to use the idea of using my Linux computers for anything and with some research and some tests I’ve been able to sync successfully my flex with my Linux Mint 16.
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Guest post by Kerry Blake
We love Linux and we love it for its open source nature, security, and powerful tools. There are a lot of free as well as commercial VPN solutions available for Ubuntu. We are not going to list or rank all the top VPN providers. We don’t necessarily want to rank them simply because users choose their VPN provider based on their personal requirements. If you want an US VPN service, you should look for the best US VPN service that supports OpenVPN. The intent of the article is to help newbies configure and use their favorite VPN service without going back and forth in Ubuntu community forum and embarrass oneself before the rather patronizing users.
Article by me, first published on Openlogic.com
Whether you are a system administrator or a developer, sometimes you need to consider the use of memory in GNU/Linux processes and programs. Memory is a critical resource, and limited memory plus processes that use a lot of RAM can cause a situation where the kernel goes out of memory (OOM). In this state Linux activates an OOM killer kernel process that attempts to recover the system by terminating one or more low-priority processes. Which processes the system kills is unpredictable, so though the OOM killer may keep the server from going down, it can cause problems in the delivery of services that should stay running.
In this article we’ll look at three utilities that report information about the memory used on a GNU/Linux system. Each has strengths and weaknesses, with accuracy being their Achilles’ heel. I’ll use CentOS 6.4 as my demo system, but these programs are available on any Linux distribution.
MPD, short for Music Player Daemon, is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.
It is also used for one of the two purposes, as local daemon or as network daemon. MPD don’t use many resources. It is designed to make its job in background playing music from its database.
For connecting with MPD and managing music there are many options and clients. CLI clients, GTK clients, Qt clients and even from VI.
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