Category Archives: Linux
Free X server for Windows
I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.
Preserving UTF-8 filenames from Windows to Linux
On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required.
Setting up SCP/SFTP chroot access to Ubuntu/x64 server
scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP. scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in … Continue reading
Dell shipping PCs with Linux
I spotted on Ubuntu‘s news-section that Dell finally have commenced shipping products (1 desktop, 1 notebook) with Ubuntu. Available in UK, Germany and France. Excellent!
Feisty (2.6.20-16-generic kernel) boot failure
In applying the latest Feisty Fawn updates to one of my laptops I ran into a problem with the bootup hanging shortly after starting. The usual snakeoil of ‘acpi=off pci=noacpi’ appended to the boot command line failed to make any … Continue reading
Cluster monitoring and control
I recently setup a cluster of Linux compute servers, and found myself looking for instrumentation to monitor & control the servers. The following open-source packages give excellent insight and access to the state of the cluster: Ganglia – server stats, … Continue reading
Code and release management
I was an early adopter of Subversion and Edgewall’s Trac. Installation of Trac on my defacto Linux distro, CentOS, has not been very straightforward due to it being a RHEL clone. This guide has documented the process in a clear … Continue reading
Great photo management tools
To manage your sets of photos, try these (free) tools: Picasa (part of the Google tool-chest) for Windows users F-Spot for Linux For online photo gallery, I like the tagging aspect of this PHP script.
Useful Linux sysadm articles
Linux-mag has a very useful set of ‘guru’ articles for newly-hatched sysadm’s.
Encrypting files (and GMail storage)
I have been looking for a replacement to the encrypting filesystem which was part of PGP v6 (international edition) for a while. I believe I have now found it – EncFS, which is described further in this presentation.