The guys over at the Linux Link Tech Show held a pretty good interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro from Novell about their Linux products. Although the interview was a little slow at times and did not start until 18 minutes into the show it still managed to cover a lot of ground.Topics ranged from OpenSUSE's growth (approximately one install every 11 seconds) through to Novell's Linux strategy and their transition from Netware. Also discussed was the KDE/Gnome debate and the rumoured (but untrue) death of the Hula project. It was also good to hear someone at Novell say they felt the SUSE CD-Rom layout was stupid, why you should need to download 5 CD's to get a working desktop is just crazy - put important things on the first two and leave the others as optional.
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Some of my favourite places to get desktop backgrounds and icons for Mac/Windows/Linux:

http://www.joejoe.biz/joejoe/walls/
http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/
http://desktop.dvdesign.com/

The name is hard to say ten times fast but the demos, scripts and discussion is undenyably fantastic. Extremely useful for leading edge web-based interface scripts and ideas.

http://script.aculo.us/

 

A blog post from AgilePartners describes how upcoming web applications like Fluxiom achieve the dynamic image resizing effects illustrated in their promotional material. It turns out to be very simple (Javascript modifies the CSS image size property) yet the effect is really cool. True 'image resizing' is not employed, large images are downloaded to the browser and then it is left up to the browser's own display engine to perform the dynamic resizing. In a high bandwidth environment this does not matter but for people stuck in 56k modem land it is just one more nail in the coffin for their enjoyable Internet experience. There is almost a need now for web developers to be able to distinguish between low and high bandwidth users in the same way browser or Javascript detection is employed.
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After some Googl'ing, reading and playing about I have got Ruby on Rails running on my SuSE 9.2 server. The process was made difficult by the need to compile quite a few different pieces of software from source and configure mod_fastcgi (which has not been worked on for a while). If you are stuck on this subject take a look at the tutorial here:

http://www.stress-free.co.nz/node/163/59/

After some experimenting today I have put together a howto for getting Linux to authenticate to a Border Manager proxy server. If you do not know what that means do not worry but if you do and have tried in the past you maybe very interested to have a read of this tutorial.

 

This Red Hat document although old concisely explains how to generate and install DSA and RSA keys via SSH. Very handy when you are logging in to a number of different servers for administration purposes.

After some long hours picking graphics and colours I have my Webmin theme at a point where it can be used. It features a completely new graphical look, high colour icons, dropdown menus and an AJAX search tool for locating Webmin modules quickly. It has been tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

Download now

Alternatively you can download the latest development build from the Google Code Subversion repository.

News and updates

For the latest development news on this theme please see this listing of articles.

Say thank you with a donation

Bandwidth unfortunately costs money. To help me out with this if you download the theme and like it feel free to make a donation in my tip jar (PayPal) by clicking the button below.
Thanks to those of you have already made donations, it is greatly appreciated.

Installation

To install open Webmin and browse to Webmin -> Webmin Configuration -> Webmin Themes
Select the downloaded archive from your local disk and press the Install Theme button.
Once installed change the Current Theme dropdown to StressFree Theme and press the Change button.

Note: This will change the default theme for Webmin but will not effect users who have selected a personal theme. If you have enabled the StressFree theme as the default yet find it is not applied check your personal theme settings:

• Category -> Webmin -> Webmin Users.
• Select your username (e.g. root).
• Open "User interface options" and ensure the "Personal Theme" field is set to either "From Webmin Configuration" or to the specific theme name (StressFree).

Screencast

Screenshots only go so far when it comes to illustrating what this theme does. The screencast below demonstrates the theme's drop-down menu and search functionality.

 

Screenshots

The ability to control a server remotely using a friendly web-based GUI is very handy. Novell makes some fairly nice web-based management tools but the same cannot be said for Linux. Webmin exists but I have always been put off by the fact it all looks like it was put together in the early 90's by someone who was in the process of going blind. Recently there have been some more cleaner themes out for it but still nothing to write home about. So to fill in the time and try out some cool new things and brush up on my poor Perl skills I have put together my own, far more tasteful theme for Webmin.