A New Spin on the Xfce Window Manager

Getting Started

Kenneth Hess
Sunday, April 13, 2008 07:58:16 PM

Xfce isn't for everyone, but for servers or minimal desktop systems, it's just what the doctor ordered. Rather lightweight in Window Manager terms--weighing in at around 63MB--Xfce arrives with a full complement of applications from Abiword, gnumeric, and pidgin to CD/DVD burning software (Brasero), Thunar File Manager, and a host of administrative applications. For this article, I am reviewing the Xfce Fedora Spin based on Fedora 8 and Xfce4.

A Spin is a hip, new term for a Live CD image. All Fedora 8 Spins are available on the Fedora Spins Project Tracker page as torrent downloads. If you don't have a bit torrent client, you can pick up the software for any OS at The BitTorrent Website.

Formerly known as XForms Common Environment, Xfce as an acronym doesn't stand for anything these days, since XForms are no longer part of its programming, but the name has stuck. Its look and feel is slightly reminiscent of the CDE (Common Desktop Environment) interface that once was the ubiquitous X Window interface for all commercial Unices. Currently at version 4.4.x, Xfce aims to be a small, fast, and efficient Window Manager. It delivers on all those fronts and it is pleasant to look at--as you can see in Figure 1.

Installing Xfce is a simple process if you have yum or apt-get in your distribution. The following command will download and install Xfce 4 and all dependencies for you.

# apt-get install xfce4

or

# yum install xfce4

You can also download the source code and compile it yourself or grab a graphical installer to assist you. To do so, go to the Xfce.org Download page. A few distribution-specific binaries are available on this page as well.

Touring Xfce

Kenneth Hess
Sunday, April 13, 2008 07:58:16 PM

There are a few common Xfce applications with which you should be familiar. Each one was carefully chosen based on size, functionality, and speed to maintain Xfce's focus on agility. Mousepad, Thunar, Orage, Terminal, and Xarchiver are some of the most useful and intensely developed applications in the Xfce repository.

Mousepad is a simple text editor based on Leafpad. Mousepad is simple yet full-featured with goodies like search and replace, font options, word wrap, auto indent, and line numbering. See Figure 2 for a look at Mousepad. If you need higher-end functionality, like spell check and special formatting, you should use Abiword or download and install OpenOffice.org. Mousepad is not a competitor with those word processors--it fills its niche as a quick and dirty text editor without a lot of fluff.

The Thunar File Manager is the file management application designed specifically for Xfce. It was designed for speed, simplicity, and with advanced features not present in other file management applications. The most interesting of the advanced features is the bulk file renaming capability called, appropriately enough, Bulk Renamer.
To rename a group of files, select the files you want to rename, right click the list, select Rename. See Figures 3 and 4 for an example of bulk file renaming.

More Xfce Goodies

Kenneth Hess
Sunday, April 13, 2008 07:58:16 PM

Everyone needs a good calendar application but they are often large, cumbersome, and not user-friendly. Orage is different. I have never used it before but within about one minute of opening the application, I had already setup an appointment for Monday. Open Orage by navigating to the Office application group then Calendar. The small calendar application opens on your desktop with today's date in highlight. To setup a new event, double-click the date for which you want to set the event. A small date window opens (See Figure 5). Select File, New or click the New icon and the New Event Details form appears. Enter your event details, set recurrence, alarms, and notes, and then Save. Once saved, the Title of the event is saved to the New Event window and the date is now in bold. To receive your event notices, you don't have to have Orage open--a very powerful feature indeed since I never remember to open my calendar application to receive my notices.

The Terminal application is a command line interface for your system. Terminal is a lightweight terminal emulator that is packed with customizable features and options. You can choose to view multiple Toolbars and set a myriad of preferences such as window title, color, background, and keyboard behaviors. Terminal is an essential part of any system administrator's arsenal of preferred applications. It is so essential that the developers have placed it in the main Panel. See Figure 7 for a look at my customized Terminal.

You may wonder why I added the Xarchiver tool to the essential apps list above but you'll soon find that it is a regular player on your team. The Xarchiver can be called directly from the Accessories group, from the command line, or within Thunar. My preference is to use it within Thunar. To create an archive, select a group of files in Thunar, right click that group, and then choose Create Archive from the menu. You are presented with the Xarchiver interface where you name your archive, select its location, and the type of archive from the list (arj, tar, tar.bz2, tar.gz, jar, zip). Choosing arj, tar.gz, tar.bz2, or zip provides some compression with your archive so that the archive is smaller than the original group of files (see Figure 8).

A New Spin

Kenneth Hess
Sunday, April 13, 2008 07:58:16 PM

Fedora's custom Spins (Live CDs based on Fedora's latest stable release) are an excellent way of testing a new desktop environment, some cool developer tools, and even some content that can't be found anywhere else (e.g. videos from FUDCON). The XFCE Spins are available in x86 and x86_64 formats.

Xfce is a minimalist desktop Window Manager that is fast, fun, and efficient to use. Xfce is a viable alternative to other minimal desktop environments such as twm and Fluxbox. It is customizable but also has a kiosk mode for those of you who want to deploy a desktop environment that isn't customizable by end users. Originally for kiosk operations, some system administrators are using the Xfce kiosk mode to provide an unbreakable Linux desktop to employees.

Kenneth Hess is a freelance technical writer who writes on a variety of subjects including Linux, MySQL, SQLite, PHP, and Apache. You may reach Ken via his website.

Original link: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linux...

IBM open collaboration client solution: An overview

Level: Introductory

Faheem Altaf (faheem@us.ibm.com), Senior Software Engineer, IBM
Antony Satyadas (antony_satyadas@us.ibm.com), Chief Competitive Marketing Officer, IBM

08 Apr 2008

Learn what's involved when introducing a Linux client pilot in your organization, including planning for business and IT requirements, architecture decisions, risks, and understanding how IBM's open collaboration client is used to implement this desktop of the future, today.

Editor's Note: This article is Part 1 of a four-part series. Look for articles in the coming weeks on organizational planning and user segmentation for desktop migration (Part 2, on user segmentation and associated best practices (Part 3), and on highlights of various tools that let you migrate or access business-critical applications from Linux Desktops (Part 4).

This article guides you through the most important technical decisions involved when you introduce a Linux client in your organization. Business and IT requirements range from the need to reduce cost to a variety of desktop migration pressures. We begin by introducing the IBM open collaboration client solution (OCCS). We present the need for our solution based on business and IT requirements, and then we provide a detailed view of the OCCS architecture.

Included are a brief introduction to the solution components and a high-level view of the OCCS jumpstart method with the associated processes and work products. We also examine key architectural decisions, associated risks, and risk mitigation strategies based on lessons learned from customer implementations.

2008 Server OS Reliability Survey*

The latest survey, which was completed in January 2008, served up some very interesting results and a few surprises. UNIX, the leading Linux distributions from Novell and Red Hat as well as open source Ubuntu were the clear winners in Yankee Group's 2007-2008 Global Server Operating Reliability Survey.

Yankee Group's second annual Server Operating System Reliability survey polled 700 users from 27 countries worldwide. The latest independent, non-sponsored Web-based survey revealed that all versions of UNIX -- which typically carry very high workloads -- are near bulletproof, achieving 99.999% reliability. IBM's AIX UNIX led all server operating systems for reliability with just over 30 minutes of per server annual downtime but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems also got high scores.

The top Linux distributions Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SuSE Linux notched the biggest reliability improvements in the latest 2007-2008 survey. Each decreased per server per annum downtime by an average of 75%. The biggest and most unwelcome surprise in the survey was that Windows Server 2003 downtime increased by 25% to nearly 9 hours of per server, per year downtime compared to the results it achieved in Yankee Group's 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey. Windows Server 2003's decreased reliability is attributable to a series of security alerts Microsoft issued in the summer and fall time frame which caused network administrators to take their Windows Server 2003 machines offline for significantly longer periods of time to apply remedial patches.

In the past two years, the Yankee Group polls indicated that all of the major server operating system platforms have achieved a much higher degree of reliability than they experienced in the prior decade. In general, none of the major server operating systems -- Linux, Macintosh, Windows or UNIX are today beset by the long list of bugs that plagued their predecessors back in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, there is far less disparity now, in the number and severity of unplanned server outages and the time that businesses experience on their standard Linux, Windows and UNIX platforms, than at any time in recent memory.

Yankee Group's individual corporate Linux, Windows and UNIX servers experience an average of 1 to 4 failures, per server per year resulting in downtime that ranges from 1 hour to up to 10 hours of annual downtime for each server, depending on the server operating system and its specific configuration (See the graph of Hourly Per Year Downtime per Server).

Among the other survey highlights:

* UNIX-based servers, which represent about 10% of the installed base of server operating systems, achieved the highest reliability ratings among mainstream distributions.
* IBM's AIX achieved the highest level of reliability with corporate enterprises reporting only 36 minutes of average per server downtime in a 12 month period. Hewlett-Packard's HP UX version 11.1 recorded 1.1 hours of downtime for each of its servers on a yearly basis, while Sun Microsystems' Solaris customers reported 1.4 hours of per server, per year downtime.
* Both versions of Novell SuSE Linux -- the standard off the shelf distribution as well as the custom implementation -- saw downtime decline by 73% from just over 4 hours in Yankee's 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey to a little over 1 hour of per server annual downtime in the latest poll. The off-the-shelf version of Novell SuSE Linux, bested Red Hat reliability by recording 37 minutes less downtime for each server compared to the comparable off-the-shelf RHEL implementation. The customized version of SuSE Linux experienced 65 minutes of downtime per server, per year, roughly 13 minutes more for each server than its chief competitor RHEL in a custom configuration. Additionally, Novell's market share climbed from approximately 13% in last year's survey to roughly 17% in the current poll.
* Linux market leader Red Hat scored similarly rosy results: per server downtime decreased by 75% for the standard off-the-shelf distribution to 1 3/4 hours for each server annually, down from just over 7.1 hours in Yankee Group's 2006 survey. And Red Hat's Enterprise Linux also increased in its enterprise presence. Custom implementations of RHEL delivered even greater reliability -- a scant 52 minutes of per server, per year of unplanned downtime. This year, 31% of the survey respondents reported they have standard RHEL present in their shops, up 5% from the 26% who had it installed in the 2006 survey.
* Debian, a popular open source distribution, which last year posted the highest number of outage minutes, saw significant improvement in the latest 2007-2008 Global Server Reliability Survey. Debian servers this year experienced just over 5 hours of annual downtime a 41% decrease from the downtime figure it posted in Yankee Group's 2006 Global Server Reliability survey. And the open source operating system also increased its presence year-over-year with 24% of the respondents reporting they had at least one Debian server in their network compared to 15% who had it installed in the 2006 timeframe.
* Ubuntu, which appears in Yankee Group's Global Reliability Survey for the first time this year, has also come on strong and is an open source operating system to be reckoned with. Some 22% of the survey respondents are running at least one Ubuntu server at their sites. And it has proven highly reliable, with 1.1 hour of per server, per annum downtime.

Disclaimer: Yankee Group polled over 700 users worldwide in this independent, non-vendor sponsored survey. Yankee Group also took precautions to ensure the integrity of the survey by implementing intrusion detection and authentication mechanisms to ensure that no parties could tamper with the results or vote more than once.

By Laura DiDio
Research Fellow, Enabling Technologies Enterprise, Software Economics and Infrastructure,
Yankee Group
Boston, MA

Original link: http://www.iaps.com/2008-server-...

Educational programs in GNU/Linux

What does education have to do with Linux, or free software in general, you ask? In this article, I am going to answer this question and describe available open source educational programs for your kids.

DIGG THIS ARTICLE!

Author: Karol Kozioł

Part I - General reflections

By referring to an ‘educational program’, we define this as an application that aids the ‘normal’ learning process, either by helping to absorb new information, or as a support for recalling information already learned. Educational programs, especially those for the youngest students, are often designed with the idea of ‘learn through play’. Such applications are most commonly being divided because of the age of the target user (and of course by the subject concerned). So programs for the youngest have to teach new abilities under the pretext of playing, whereas programs for older users (that are conscious enough to realize how knowledge is important, but remaining under h4 influence by their parents, and carrying out the constitutional duty of learning until 18 years old) don’t pass time with visual tasks, but are concerned with having to prepare a student for a mature exam, test, or other type of knowledge test, in relatively fast, and pleasant way. A separate class represents educational applications in the field of foreign language teaching (invariably the most popular is English, then German). From the simplest, that can be treated as elaborate thematic dictionaries, to the more complex, with human speaker and speech recognition systems, they all skillfully support children and youth with the difficult task of learning a foreign language.

But children become easily bored. For an educational program expected to fulfill its task, it’s important to maintain an appropriate balance between learning and playing. If the child views an application as boring, it will just put it away, paying no attention to it. Today, programs have come into existence that found the “golden mean” between learning and playing and are eagerly used by children. But some applications require an overabundance of tasks to be completed and while playing is an aspect of the learning, it becomes secondary and soon becomes yet another neglected learning tool. I believe that it would be a good idea to create an adventure game that offers various stages that would require completion before graduating to the next stage (such applications for Windows already exist). Another idea is an arcade racing game, one which would exchange knowledge from a given subject for (additional) power-up’s for our vehicle. While for older kids, perhaps some FPS in which access to a location will require the student to provide correct responses to questions in math, physics, geography, or biology. Perhaps even some easy RPG in which the development of a character will be dependent on assimilated knowledge.

Monitoring UPS Power Status Using Network UPS Tools (NUT) 2.2.0 on Multiple OpenSuSE 10.3 Servers

Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS hardware.

The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide reliable monitoring of UPS hardware and ensure safe shutdowns of the systems which are connected.

This is a developing project to monitor a large assortment of UPS hardware. Many models have ports on the back to allow other devices to check the status. If it gives basic information about the power and battery status, it can probably be supported without too much difficulty. More advanced features on the higher-end models are also supported to allow tracking of values over time such as temperature and voltage.

Network communications are used so that multiple systems can monitor a single physical UPS and shut down together if necessary without any special "sharing hardware" on the UPS itself.

How To Control Access To Unwanted Websites Using URL Blacklist With SafeSquid Proxy Server

SafeSquid - Content Filtering Internet Proxy, has many content filtering features that can be used to decide who is allowed what, when and how much on the net. In this tutorial I will describe how to control access to unwanted categories of websites, by using URL Blacklist database with SafeSquid Proxy Server.

Note: Also see the following articles :
'Deploying A Content Filtering Proxy Server To Distribute Controlled Internet Access With SafeSquid'
Set Up Gateway Level Virus Security With ClamAV And SafeSquid Proxy
How To Set Up Internet Access Control And Internet Filtering With SafeSquid Proxy Server

SafeSquid allows the administrators to use plain text urlblacklist very easily and with a desired level of sophistication. The site http://www.urlblacklist.com maintains a well categorized list of various web-sites and pages like porn, adult, webmail, jobsearch, entertainment, etc. This is an excellent resource for an administrator seeking to granularly enforce a corporate policy that allows or disallows only certain kinds of web-sites to be accessible by specific users, groups or networks.

You can use this feature by downloading the trial urlblacklist database from HERE.
Please note that you will be able to download this trial database only once. You need to subscribe to urlblacklist.com to be able to receive regular updates