Designing and building Web sites can be a maze of tasks these days. One tool that can simplify the task is the well-known Firebug extension, which lets you edit and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within Firefox. As useful as Firebug is on its own, it can actually be extended past its initial setup with additional extensions that can make your work as a developer or designer even easier.
Power monitoring and logging with Apcupsd and Cacti
Friday, September 05 2008 @ 10:37 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
For some time I have been using the American Power Conversion (APC) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) daemon Apcupsd to interface my desktop computer with my APC Back-UPS ES 550. Available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris 10, Apcupsd reliably warns me when the power goes out and gives me time to get my box properly shut down before data is lost, or does so automatically if I am not there to supervise.
Wednesday, September 03 2008 @ 09:53 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Ceeidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.
Scripting languages are incredibly useful for quick-fix scripts. The problem with this is when the quick-fix script is still in place months down the line, at which point the corners you cut because, hey, it's just a short-term fix, come back to bite you. Read on for some best practice tips to make the experience less painful.
Everything is OK with this Laptop, just one issue- It has Vista Basic. Now Vista Basic does not have the cool features of Home Premium, nor is it as snappy as Windows XP. Dell also installs a 30-days subscription of McAffee anti-virus, which although secures the system, but at the same time further makes Vista slower.
Along with VIA releasing a new open-source X.Org video driver, there is work underway on improving the status of another open-source graphics driver. Silicon Motion is perhaps more obscure than VIA Technologies when it comes to integrated graphics, but they primarily specialize in low-power graphics chips for tablet PCs.
In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Mandriva 2008.1 system. Fail2ban is a tool that obseves login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.
xargs is an incredibly useful command: it takes in input and executes your chosen command on it: xargs command. Deceptively simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. It's most commonly used to execute one command on the output from another command (command1 | xargs command2), and most often;the output-generating command is find (xargs is more flexible than the built-in -exec option). Here we'll look at xargs with find, and then at some other possibilities.
Friday, August 22 2008 @ 08:14 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 2 'okapi'. This beta includes a completely new installer for the Free (and, in the final release, Powerpack) edition, and is testing the Fedora system-config-printer printer configuration tool as an alternative to printerdrake. The new beta also brings Firefox 3, OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, and support for the ethernet adapter used in many new Eee (and other netbook) models.
