Tag Archives: ubuntu

HOWTO monitor Tomcat with monit and munin in Debian

I have an existing Tomcat installation in production that has been running hot and causing monit to send me notices that such and such service is down, only to come back clear on the next run. Of course since I use monit I can see that the service was never restarted, plus I’ve never had this happen on other servers with monit, so I’m convinced that Tomcat, with its hunger for Java, is the culrprit here. I’ve been running munin for years on this server too, however I never got the Tomcat plugins to work with it, so I can’t gauge how hot Tomcat is running, and how changing the heap size is effecting things. Because of this, yesterday I got serious about it and finally got it working, but I had to take an end run to get it rolling and it wasn’t fun; which is why I’m posting it here. If anyone knows a better way to do this, please share in the comments and I’ll update this, but here’s how I was successful.

HOWTO run Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9 with wifi

chrome-icon-200x200UPDATE: I’m now running the latest build of Hexxeh’s Chrome OS named Flow – and everything just works out of the box.  The release is much improved, and it’s getting very close to being the perfect day-to-day netbook OS as far as I’m concerned.  Great work!

Four free Linux eBooks

tux.jpgWhile looking for something else, (which is mainly when I find *other* interesting things) I found an article which included links for four free Linux eBooks. This is a great resource for anyone with some Linux experience, back to others who may be looking to get started with tux, and I would have loved to have this when I started, but that was before the Internet was available to most people. So, if you’re new to Linux, or want to get started (I used Red Hat Unleashed in 1996, here it is online!), here’s some great downloads to learn from:

HOWTO: install Ruby on Rails on Debian or Ubuntu Linux easily

In the early days of this blog I used to run it on Typo, which *was* a great Ruby on Rails blogging platform (at one time).  Unfortunately the project stalled (for years) and I ended up jumping ship after a few months of bugs and the ever crashing Rails server, WEBrick.  Yes, if you search Netcraft you could see that was my *exposed* server at the time…not good! ;)   Now if you look, Typo is still kicking, and it *may* be a solid platform now, I hope it is, as I even contributed a ton of the achieved themes that live on in the ‘Theme Garden’ there.  But on I moved into the world of MySQL/PHP front end sites via great apps like Drupal and WordPress, fast forward, Ruby on Rails is a mature platform now, and I am evaluating webapps at work, so I needed to install Rails on Debian GNU/Linux (but of course these directions would work just as well in Ubuntu Linux.  It’s amazing simple, I took some steps from the Ruby on Rails wiki, first install the dependencies for good measure:

HOWTO: fix fonts in Debian Lenny/Sid

Fonts FTWUPDATE: also, before you try this, make sure you have some good fonts installed, after a fresh install of Lenny at work, I needed to run this first: apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts

After a…slight slip up, I finally had the chance to install Linux from scratch on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1500) the way I’ve always wanted it with Debian GNU/Linux – Lenny and partitioned with LVM (Linux Volume Management).  After that I set out to get the desktop fonts to look as good in Debian as they did (by default) in Ubuntu.  After much scouring around online I found a pretty easy tweak that got me most of the way. As root:

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