Linux Road

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitorize as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

It has been designed to be used under production UNIX/Linux servers, but due its simplicity and small size you may also use it to monitor embedded devices.

All its development was initially created for monitoring Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS Linux systems, so this project was made keeping in mind these distributions. Today it runs on different Linux distributions and even in other UNIX systems like FreeBSD.

Monitorix Features

The monitorization includes:

• System core (CPU load and temperatures, active processes and memory allocation).
• Global or per-processor/core kernel usage (user, nice, system, idle and i/o wait).
• Temperatures (HP ProLiant IML Agent and LM-Sensors with HDDtemp support).
• Mounted filesystems and disk i/o.
• Activity of up to 5 network devices.
• Use of SMTP, SSH, FTP, Telnet, Samba, NetAtalk, VirusMail, FAX, POP3 and HTTP services.
• Complete MTA statistics including anti-spam, anti-virus and greylisting.
• Activity of up to 12 predefined network ports.
• Devices interrupt activity (APIC support with up to 256 different interrupts).
• Support for HP Insight Management Agents for ProLiant servers.
• Support for Samba v2 and v3, Sendmail, Postfix, NetAtalk, Qpopper and Hylafax status logs.
• Support for the Nginx web server statistics.
• Support for remote servers monitorization (Multihost feature).
• Silent mode to be able to retrieve the graphs from scripts or other programs.
• Traffic statistics are stored on disk into RRD format fixed-size databases.
• Possibility to view statistics per day, week, month or year.
• Possibility to view statistics with rendered graphs or in plain text.
• Each picture can be zoomed in to see the graph in more detail.
• Monthly traffic activity report via email can be sent to LAN users.
• It warns if some selected network port is not listening.
• Alert capability if CPU load average reaches or exceeds a threshold value for an specified amount of time.
• Web interface offers minimal learning, ubiquitous access.
• Configuration with only one text-plain file.
• Perl and Shell Script based (lightweight tool).
• Requires the RRDtool package and a CGI capable web server.

Install Monitorix in Ubuntu Server

Install ubuntu LAMP server follow these steps:

Preparing your system

Install the following packages

sudo apt-get install rrdtool librrds-perl libwww-perl

Now you need to download Monitorix source package from here or use the following command

$ wget http://www.monitorix.org/monitorix-1.5.0.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf monitorix-1.5.0.tar.gz

Go to the Monitorix directory and execute the install script.

$ cd monitorix-1.5.0
$ sudo ./install.sh

Welcome to Monitorix v1.5.0 installation process.

The following is a list of the default paths where the Monitorix components
will be installed:

sudo service monitorix start

Now wait for a while and then go to http://localhost/monitorix/

Orignal Source

If you are of the many people who think the response time of Firefox is less or consider it to be slow then you might want to try the following:

• Open Firefox and in the address bar type about:config.
• Click on "I’ll be careful, I promise".
• Use the search bar above to look for network.http.pipelining and double click on it to set it’s value to True.
• Create a new boolean value named network.http.pipelining.firstrequest and set that to True, as well.
• Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, double click on it, and change its value to 8.
• Look for network.http.proxy.pipelining and set it to True.
• Create two new integers named nglayout.initialpaint.delay and content.notify.interval, set them to 0.
• Restart your browser.

Once you are done. You will see the speed of Firefox would have increased to a greater extent

Suppose you have brought home an Amazone Kindle or a Barnes and Noble Nook, or may be someone gifted it to you (your lucky day, who knows?). Now the problem is you would need to convert you ebooks to .EPUB or .MOBI format, No panic readers because all you have to do is to install Calibre. With this little piece of software you can actually convert between EPUB, FB2, LIT, LRF, MOBI, OEB, PDB, PDF, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT, HTML and more. Even CBR and CBZ (comic book formats) are supported.

The syntax to the command is fairly simple.

For example, if you want to convert a comic book archive to something readable on an e-ink screen, use

or

Not only will ebook-convert convert the file, but it will also trim the white spaces around the page so they will better fit the small screen of an electronic eBook reader.

Ever since the release of Peppermint Ice, the main question has been that can it do the same magic for desktop PCs as Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks.

Pros

• Super fast operating system.
• Attractive shortcuts using the ice applet.

Cons

• Not enough features to be marked as cloud oriented operating system.

Cloud computing has emerged as a big bang, and cloud-oriented Linux distributions are much talked about these days. Peppermint Ice is a name that will be talked about for years to come

All the upcoming linux distributions are based on some previous one, they add functionality and pack it with a different brand name giving credit to the original developers. Peppermint didn't dare to different and is based upon the much popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Different from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Peppermint Ice uses the light weight LXDE desktop, which makes it super fast.

Minimum System Requirement

• i386 or derivative processor (AMD64 and x86_64 are fine as well)
• 192 MB of RAM
• 4 GB hard drive space (this is an overestimate just for good measure)

As the system requirement suggests the peppermint ice will run smoothly even on modest of the machines, which makes it a good candidate for older netbooks. Peppermint is not a complete Ubuntu variant rather adds some of the mint functionality as well.

Peppermint OS is available in two flavors: One and Ice. One relies on the Mozilla Prism technology to bring cloud applications to the desktop and uses Mozilla Firefox as its primary browser. While on the other hand Peppermint Ice, sports Chromium as its default browser and uses the custom Ice tool to link cloud applications to the desktop.

Peppermint Ice Desktop	Peppermint One Desktop

The lead developer of Peppermint OS calls Ice as a "Site Specific Browser." This tool copies the functionality of Mozilla Prism for the Chromium browser. Using Ice, you can create a shortcut to a cloud application which opens in a stripped-down version of Chromium. Despite its simplicity, this is a rather useful and easy to use tool. Peppermint OS comes with a few "Iced" shortcuts in the Applications menu, including Seesmic, Facebook, YouTube and Last.fm.

The office section of Peppermint comes with links to Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Reader. Linking to Google tools seems like an obvious choice. But, one would rather prefer to link to Zoho productivity applications as they provide more functionality and the readily available webservice-office-zoho package from Ubuntu’s main software repository provides a better integration of key Zoho apps with the desktop.

Peppermint come with some standard desktop applications to enhance the productivity of the user with applications like Leafpad text editor, the ePDFViewer document viewer, and the Xnoise music player. I also appreciate the inclusion of the Dropbox software which lets the user to synchronize his files and documents across multiple machines, making it a very useful application.

If you have use ubuntu then you will find the software manager fairly familiar, same grouped software are present in the software manager. Unlike Ubuntu Software Center, mintInstall also allows you to rate and review applications. Another utility transplanted from Linux Mint – mintUpdate – helps you to keep Peppermint OS up-to-date.

LinuxUser.co.uk has reated Pappermint 3/5 commenting,

Peppermint OS is just another Ubuntu-based distro with a few tweaks here and there and the Ice tool on top of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be more than that to make it an appealing proposition.

Overall, I am not even that impressed to give 3/5 there are just too many distros like the Papermint in order to impress the cloud community, you have to do better than this to be counted.