Mandriva is another one of the Linux distributions that has been around for quite some time. Beginning as Mandrake Linux, the company MandrakeSoft was forced to change its name when sued by the Hearst Corporation because of the claims that Mandrake Linux was inspired by their comic character “Mandrake the Magician”. So the change in [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Nov 5th, 2009
- Comments: None
Let Munin monitor your servers and network
If you are looking for an easy to install, configure, and use systems monitor, look no further. The Munin is a network/systems monitor that presents all its data is easy to read graphs. Munin is setup as a server/client (or node) which makes this system very flexible. Munin also offers an extensive plugins library that [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Nov 4th, 2009
- Comments: 4
Starting services at boot in Linux
There are plenty of times when you may want to add a new service to start when your Linux machine boots. Or you may want to stop a service from starting upon boot. And, like nearly every aspect of Linux, there are many ways to deal with this scenario. And different distributions handle this in [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Nov 2nd, 2009
- Comments: 4
Installing CentOS 5.4
CentOS has not received much attention here on Ghacks, so I thought I would remedy that by introducing this outstanding flavor of Linux not by way of a Live CD (CentOS does have a Live CD, but you can not install from that CD), but by way of traditional means. Because of this you will [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Nov 1st, 2009
- Comments: 13
Scanning in Linux with iscan and XSane
If you are one of those that depends upon a scanner for your daily work, and you want to handle this task using the Linux operating system, you are in luck. In the past, Linux has had some serious issues with scanning tools. When USB scanners replaced the old parallel port scanners it seemed nothing [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Oct 30th, 2009
- Comments: 10
The new Ubuntu Software Center
You may remember my mention of the Ubuntu Software Center in my article “Ubuntu Karmic Koala preview“. Well, Karmic Koala is now officially Ubuntu 9.10 and is on the streets. I have installed the release and am as pleased as I expected I would be. One aspect of 9.10 that I was most interested in [...]
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Published: Oct 29th, 2009
- Comments: 7
Set up a Linux media server
Do you have multiple machines around your house that would like to share a centralized server for multi-media? Having such a server for music allows for consolidation, ease of use, and space saving on client PCs. Of course to many users, the idea of setting up a multi-media server sounds like it would be a [...]

