Desktop search comparison: Beagle vs. Tracker, part 2

June is Bandwidth Conservation Month (well, not officially, but let’s say that it is), so if you have multiple machines running an APT -powered Linux distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should take a look at apt-proxy , a utility that caches package downloads in a shared pool for all interested parties on your LAN. This saves you both the time and the bandwidth it costs to download the same updates for more than one computer. ... more

Text editors are important for many tasks, from editing configuration files, nudging cron jobs, and manipulating XML files to quickly pushing out a README. Luckily, there are a number of interesting editors available. Here’s a brief introduction to nine intriguing choices. While some may be better suited to certain tasks, it’s no one tool is better than another for all tasks. Try them all and use the ones you like best. ... more

The XFS filesystem is known to give good performance when storing and accessing large files. The design of XFS is extent-based, meaning that the bytes that comprise a file’s contents are stored in one or more contiguous regions called extents . Depending on your usage patterns, some of the files contained in an XFS filesystem can become fragmented. You can use the xfs_fsr utility to defragment these files, thus improving system performance when it accesses them. ... more

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going. ... more