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Are you aware that Sun is allowing the Apache Software Foundation to create a 100% open source build of java that complies with the official Sun spec?.

This is the best of both worlds and gives those who want a "Free Software" VM their own VM, while allowing Sun to continue shaping the future of the platform according to outside comments (JCP - Java Community Process, a process where IBM, Nokia, Intel, etc. have a say), but preserving the right to prevent "pollution" of the platform like Microsoft attempted years ago with their windows-only win32 hooks in their Java implementation.

I think some slashdotters need to read The Inquirer more often... ;-)

Sun-approved Open Source Java making progress
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30688
MAR 31, 2006

Argentina students help Apache's Open Source Java effort
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30689
MAR 31, 2006

Apache Foundation to create clearn-room Java
with Sun's blessing
Compatible open source J2SE in the works
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23127
MAY 10, 2005

About Java based apps, the "Java is a failure on the desktop" is an old MYTH. Java has been getting really nice on the desktop lately, starting with J2SE 5.0 just at the time most systems above 1Ghz are now (finally!) the norm and at a time when 512MB ram is the average.

There's a lot of java based apps that I run on my linux AND windows desktop and whic I've learned to love:

  http://phex.kouk.de/ http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ http://www.artofillusion.org/index
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/productOve rview.jsp - http://www.jedit.org/ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/frinika
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaamp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/humaitrader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/
http://megamek.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main ...Editors, Music, Office Suites, P2P clients, 3D design, financial apps, games.... you name it, there is one best-of-breed app written in Java. And without having to chase a Microsoft API from behind like it happens with Mono...

https://mustang.dev.java.net/
"Sun is releasing weekly early access snapshots of the complete
source, binaries and documentation for Java SE 6 ("Mustang"). These raw snapshot releases let you review and contribute to Mustang as it is being developed."

What part of "Source" don't you understand??

I rest my case.

Finally about Desktop apps and Swing. Swing is MUCH faster in Java 6.0 (aka 1.6.0), because a lot of stuff is maped to native windows and gnome widgets.

Are you aware that Sun is allowing the Apache Software Foundation to create a 100% open source build of java that complies with the official Sun spec?.

This is the best of both worlds and gives those who want a "Free Software" VM their own VM, while allowing Sun to continue shaping the future of the platform according to outside comments (JCP - Java Community Process, a process where IBM, Nokia, Intel, etc. have a say), but preserving the right to prevent "pollution" of the platform like Microsoft attempted years ago with their windows-only win32 hooks in their Java implementation.

I think some slashdotters need to read The Inquirer more often... ;-)

Sun-approved Open Source Java making progress
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30688
MAR 31, 2006

Argentina students help Apache's Open Source Java effort
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30689
MAR 31, 2006

Apache Foundation to create clearn-room Java
with Sun's blessing
Compatible open source J2SE in the works
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23127
MAY 10, 2005

About Java based apps, the "Java is a failure on the desktop" is an old MYTH. Java has been getting really nice on the desktop lately, starting with J2SE 5.0 just at the time most systems above 1Ghz are now (finally!) the norm and at a time when 512MB ram is the average.

There's a lot of java based apps that I run on my linux AND windows desktop and whic I've learned to love:

  http://phex.kouk.de/ http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ http://www.artofillusion.org/index
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/productOve rview.jsp - http://www.jedit.org/ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/frinika
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaamp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/humaitrader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/
http://megamek.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main ...Editors, Music, Office Suites, P2P clients, 3D design, financial apps, games.... you name it, there is one best-of-breed app written in Java. And without having to chase a Microsoft API from behind like it happens with Mono...

https://mustang.dev.java.net/
"Sun is releasing weekly early access snapshots of the complete
source, binaries and documentation for Java SE 6 ("Mustang"). These raw snapshot releases let you review and contribute to Mustang as it is being developed."

What part of "Source" don't you understand??

I rest my case.

Finally about Desktop apps and Swing. Swing is MUCH faster in Java 6.0 (aka 1.6.0), because a lot of stuff is maped to native windows and gnome widgets.

Are you aware that Sun is allowing the Apache Software Foundation to create a 100% open source build of java that complies with the official Sun spec?.

This is the best of both worlds and gives those who want a "Free Software" VM their own VM, while allowing Sun to continue shaping the future of the platform according to outside comments (JCP - Java Community Process, a process where IBM, Nokia, Intel, etc. have a say), but preserving the right to prevent "pollution" of the platform like Microsoft attempted years ago with their windows-only win32 hooks in their Java implementation.

I think some slashdotters need to read The Inquirer more often... ;-)

Sun-approved Open Source Java making progress
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30688
MAR 31, 2006

Argentina students help Apache's Open Source Java effort
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30689
MAR 31, 2006

Apache Foundation to create clearn-room Java
with Sun's blessing
Compatible open source J2SE in the works
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23127
MAY 10, 2005

About Java based apps, the "Java is a failure on the desktop" is an old MYTH. Java has been getting really nice on the desktop lately, starting with J2SE 5.0 just at the time most systems above 1Ghz are now (finally!) the norm and at a time when 512MB ram is the average.

There's a lot of java based apps that I run on my linux AND windows desktop and whic I've learned to love:

  http://phex.kouk.de/ http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ http://www.artofillusion.org/index
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/productOve rview.jsp - http://www.jedit.org/ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/frinika
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaamp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/humaitrader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/
http://megamek.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main ...Editors, Music, Office Suites, P2P clients, 3D design, financial apps, games.... you name it, there is one best-of-breed app written in Java. And without having to chase a Microsoft API from behind like it happens with Mono...

https://mustang.dev.java.net/
"Sun is releasing weekly early access snapshots of the complete
source, binaries and documentation for Java SE 6 ("Mustang"). These raw snapshot releases let you review and contribute to Mustang as it is being developed."

What part of "Source" don't you understand??

I rest my case.

Finally about Desktop apps and Swing. Swing is MUCH faster in Java 6.0 (aka 1.6.0), because a lot of stuff is maped to native windows and gnome widgets.

Are you aware that Sun is allowing the Apache Software Foundation to create a 100% open source build of java that complies with the official Sun spec?.

This is the best of both worlds and gives those who want a "Free Software" VM their own VM, while allowing Sun to continue shaping the future of the platform according to outside comments (JCP - Java Community Process, a process where IBM, Nokia, Intel, etc. have a say), but preserving the right to prevent "pollution" of the platform like Microsoft attempted years ago with their windows-only win32 hooks in their Java implementation.

I think some slashdotters need to read The Inquirer more often... ;-)

Sun-approved Open Source Java making progress
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30688
MAR 31, 2006

Argentina students help Apache's Open Source Java effort
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30689
MAR 31, 2006

Apache Foundation to create clearn-room Java
with Sun's blessing
Compatible open source J2SE in the works
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23127
MAY 10, 2005

About Java based apps, the "Java is a failure on the desktop" is an old MYTH. Java has been getting really nice on the desktop lately, starting with J2SE 5.0 just at the time most systems above 1Ghz are now (finally!) the norm and at a time when 512MB ram is the average.

There's a lot of java based apps that I run on my linux AND windows desktop and whic I've learned to love:

  http://phex.kouk.de/ http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ http://www.artofillusion.org/index
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/productOve rview.jsp - http://www.jedit.org/ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/frinika
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaamp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/humaitrader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/
http://megamek.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main ...Editors, Music, Office Suites, P2P clients, 3D design, financial apps, games.... you name it, there is one best-of-breed app written in Java. And without having to chase a Microsoft API from behind like it happens with Mono...

https://mustang.dev.java.net/
"Sun is releasing weekly early access snapshots of the complete
source, binaries and documentation for Java SE 6 ("Mustang"). These raw snapshot releases let you review and contribute to Mustang as it is being developed."

What part of "Source" don't you understand??

I rest my case.

Finally about Desktop apps and Swing. Swing is MUCH faster in Java 6.0 (aka 1.6.0), because a lot of stuff is maped to native windows and gnome widgets.

I've found that without some systematic method it's impossible to make this work, as a result of using a system I know that my passwords are relatively weak but what would you do?

Install KeePass.

no DVD release, yet)
http://en.opensuse.org/Making_a_DVD_from_CDs
or directly download from https://sourceforge.net/projects/makesusedvd/

Mainly you put the 5 or 6 CD's in an empty directory , go to that directory and run makeSUSEdvd.

> "For me, nfs is faster than any tcp socket, including samba."
>> "Including NFS, too? (Were using NFS-over-UDP or NFS-over-TCP?)"

nfs defaults to udp and if you have decent switches, it doesn't need any of the things that tcp offers (see below). Why add the overhead and problems (see below) of tcp to an nfs mount?

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/performance.h tml

5.4. NFS over TCP

A new feature, available for both 2.4 and 2.5 kernels but not yet integrated into the mainstream kernel at the time of this writing, is NFS over TCP. Using TCP has a distinct advantage and a distinct disadvantage over UDP. The advantage is that it works far better than UDP on lossy networks. When using TCP, a single dropped packet can be retransmitted, without the retransmission of the entire RPC request, resulting in better performance on lossy networks. In addition, TCP will handle network speed differences better than UDP, due to the underlying flow control at the network level.

The disadvantage of using TCP is that it is not a stateless protocol like UDP. If your server crashes in the middle of a packet transmission, the client will hang and any shares will need to be unmounted and remounted.

The overhead incurred by the TCP protocol will result in somewhat slower performance than UDP under ideal network conditions, but the cost is not severe, and is often not noticable without careful measurement. If you are using gigabit ethernet from end to end, you might also investigate the usage of jumbo frames, since the high speed network may allow the larger frame sizes without encountering increased collision rates, particularly if you have set the network to full duplex.

They point to pool.ntp.org, which is designed expressly for this purpose.

As another example, many Linux distributions point to a download site for Microsoft msttcorefonts. Do you think they have permission?

They universally point to SourceForge, which was specifically designed for this exact purpose.

Any other examples?

I have quite a bit of experience with Sarbanes-Oxley and UNIX compliance. One weak area is auditing root and shared account access. Generally the developers know the application account's password (like oracle or db2) and it's really hard to audit who did what. I created the tool Enterprise Audit Shell (EAS) which centrally logs shell access and sessions in an enterprise environment. Sessions can be snooped in real-time or played back at a later time. Each session is digitally signed and transmitted via OpenSSL. Project Site http://sourceforge.net/projects/eash Support Forum http://eas.strchr.net/

Heh. Of course, the Java bridge is now deprecated (with good reason; Java's lack of dynamism causes large impedence mismatches with ObjC). I'm hoping Apple officially adopts PyObjC as a replacement.

Who needs CSS when you have Lynx?

(Oh, and don't mention that other text-mode browser. I like my browsers coarse and ugly, thank you.)

Java is not the Java Development Kit, or any other specific peice of software. To Sun, "Java" is a trademark, so they can't even use it as a noun. But the rest of us can get by with thinking of Java as a collection of specifications: the Java language, the Java class libraries, and the Java VM spec. None of these is software — software can only be a implementation of Java.

That might seem like a silly distinction, until you remember that Sun is not the only vendor for Java implementations. Not only are there commercial implementations, but there are open source implementations of all three, specs. Of course, these all lag way behind commercial implementations, as open source clones are wont to do.

Anyway, when people say "Sun should open-source Java" what they really mean is "Sun should open-source their implementation of Java."

Which brings us to:

"Open source" is not software where the source code is freely available. It software where you can obtain the source code provided you agree to a license. That license specifies that you must make any changes to that source code available to anybody else who agrees to the same license.

And here's a non-legal issue: if you're serious about making your product open-source, you don't just throw the source code over the wall and say "go crazy!" You make a serious attempt to fold contributed code back into your main source tree. That's a serious administrative cost, and a big reason so many companies are unwilling to OS their products.

"need to try it with Motif"

Don't, you will like it even less. It's said to be somewhat faster, but that comes at a horrible cost. Maybe you should try the fox-port of SWT instead.

http://swtfox.sourceforge.net/

there's a makedvd program to build a DVD iso from the CD images. I guess this is easier to manage than having two lots of images to download. It's pretty trivial to do, simply put the iso into a directory and run the script - just be sure to have sufficient disk space for the CD ISOs, the intermediate temp files and the final ISO!
download here.

Why not use on your own machine?

Because I want to be able to use it from anywhere.

Its [sic] faster, and your thoughts are (mostly) private

When I am collaborating with others, I don't want my thoughrs to be private - I want to share them. Or maybe I just want to share them anyway in case someone finds them interesting or useful. And maybe someone else will have something to add.

I really hope that Google Notebook has bibliographic features built in to it. I'm using a pilot implementation of WIKINDX because it allows me to:

1. Take notes
2. Associate bibliographic information with those notes
3. Share them

I'd really like Google to leverage their brainpower to automate most or all of the bibliographic information gathering and input. I'd love to throw a URL at Google Notebook and have it figure out (or make really good guesses about) the author, publication date, title, etc. And it would have to be able to format that information in different ways (APA, MLA, etc.) and export it in different formats (BibTex, EndNote, etc.) but that should be relatively easy as those are all well-defined formats.

My PII 300Mhz still has a use as a Bering uClibc firewall... it's even underclocked to save on power/noise.

Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S.

Install ROX: intuitive, lightweight, and lightening fast. It works under any window manager.

Phillip.

Ok. If you want something specifically for managing photos then wouldn't it make sense to use something designed for that task. Of course a simple CLI isn't going to help when you need to view images as you manage them, so use something like GQview[1] or (my personal favourite) feh[2].

The right tool for the job.

[1] http://gqview.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://linuxbrit.co.uk/feh/wiki

The most useful feature of Nautilus is the scripts functionality, so simple & elegant.

I have a lot of iso cdrom images, that I use occasionally - I popped the iso mount script in my ~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts & off I went, merilly mounting & using iso files.

I looked for equivilant functionality under windows recently & just couldn't find it - this microsoft app wouldn't mount (map, whatever you whacky windows guys call it) lots of my isos, rar was nagware (and required you to extract, rather then giving you a virtual drive), nero's expensive, etc etc.

Anyway, back on topic - go download Nautilus scripts from g-script they've got loads of scripts, which solve a lot of problems in a very unixy way. All in all, handy.

nVidia's linux drivers are very solid. They aren't open - get over it - but a given nVidia card in a Linux box has the capability to do everything that a nVidia card in a windows box can do.

So goddamn what? Here's a cluestick for you - Linux can do a helluva lot more then windows. When nvidia's driver supports accelerated 3d, framebuffer, 2d & video out, across all platforms I might be impressed.

At the moment however, I'd rather suck down crappy unichrome chipsets over the offerings from ATI or Nvidia. At least they have Open Source Drivers

That is despite the fact that they get 20-30% less work done as result because of dealing with all the binary blobs taking over the machine.

That is not completely true, I use Windows XP same as Linux (Fedora Core 4) and I find I am equally productive in both environments.

In fact, there are things I can do very easily in Windows which on Linux take quite a bit. You see, the truth is that all of the "niceties" that linux has (a bash shell, the GNU utilities, scripting languages like Python, etc) are freely available for Windows, AND in Windows I also have some nice IDE programming interface (Visual Studio) (no, nor KDE or Anjuta or whatever you name is 60% of what Visual Studio is), I have Whole Tomato Visual AssistX, I have an excellent diagraming tool (Microsoft Visio), I have a bunch of great utilities from Sysinternals and a really good Office Suite (Microsoft Office 2003).

To make people adopt Linux systems you should start by creating the applications users want to have, and to do them right, just take a look at sourceforge, from the 135595 projects available today, there are only 1392 which are "mature", which is the status I would choose for a software that comes without any kind of support, oh, and there are only 16239 "production/stable" projects.

That is the problem of Open source software, and that will be the problem forever. It would be nice to see some graphics of the an anylisis in the development of projects from sourceforge comparing the number of new projects per month with the projects that change category and other "maturity" rates. People just start new projects but then they get bored and abandon them.

As a simple example, look at a program called FreeMind for Mind Mapping, nowhere close to MindGenius or other mind mapping applications. Sorry but, although I advocate the use of free[como en Libre] sotware, it (all free software, not only Linux) can not provide a desktop environment for 90% of computer users.

It's not a Windows solution, but PXES is an incredible linux-based thin client solution. It's used in my workplace and we never had an issue with it. You can pretty much recycle any old computer you have laying arround, create a bootdisk and off you go.

    Just make sure the server machine has enough memory, and it just works. No hassles.

... or you could live vicariously with cinc, the cardiac cardboard computer emulator.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinc/

There are various programs/scripts that deal with ssh scanning, but that's a really nice angle to it. I've been using DenyHosts on my production servers (it's in ports, I'm running 6.0-RELEASE on sparc and x86) and it's been working a treat. To name a few other ways to handle it, there's fwscan.sh, DenyHosts, fail2ban, blockhosts, bruteforceblocker (uses pf) and i'm sure i'm missing a bunch of others.

There are various programs/scripts that deal with ssh scanning, but that's a really nice angle to it. I've been using DenyHosts on my production servers (it's in ports, I'm running 6.0-RELEASE on sparc and x86) and it's been working a treat. To name a few other ways to handle it, there's fwscan.sh, DenyHosts, fail2ban, blockhosts, bruteforceblocker (uses pf) and i'm sure i'm missing a bunch of others.

The real advantage of a *good* microkernel is that normal people can write drivers and modules to extend it. If you compare the filesystems available for FUSE compared to what's available by compiling into the kernel you get a good idea:

Kernel: ext2/3, reiser3/4, jfs, xfs, minix, romfs, cdrom, fat, ntfs, proc, sysfs, adfs, ffs, hfs, BeFS, jffs (flash), cramfs, qnx4 fs, smb, cifs, andrew fs, plan 9

FUSE:

FunFS: network filesystem,
KIO Fuse Gateway: mount anything kde can talk to as a filesystem
Bluetooth FS: bluetooth functions as files
mcachefs: caches files locally from another filesystem ie nfs/smb
Fusedav: mounts WebDAV shares as fs
GmailFS: uses gmail for storage
CvsFS: view a version as fs
SshFS: mount sftp as fs
WikipediaFS: edit wikipedia articles as files
FuseCompres: transparent compression
FuseFTP: ftp filesystem (written in perl)
GnomeVFS2: mount anything nautilus can view
archivemount: mount tar, cpio, tar.gz archives read/write ...

Notice any difference? In the kernel, everything is pretty much either some long-standing standard or developed by some large corporation. The user-mode ie microkernel-style ones are developed by single people because they saw a need -- and so they actually do something useful like mounting ftp or zip files, or using gmail. These things are useful and different whereas once I've picked the fs for my drives I couldn't give a crap about any other fs in the kernel. None of them do anything even remotely interesting.

So that's the real advantage of a microkernel. Somebody wrote a useable filesystem in perl for heaven's sake. Yes, you can get some of the same benefits by turning a monolithic kernel like linux into basically a big/slow/ugly microkernel in certain areas like fs for instance. But with a good microkernel or safe kernel you get these same benefits everywhere with the advantage that your "archive filesystem" is much, much faster.

FreeBSD may be an excellent operating system, but it's lack of a good journaling file system is a major barrier to adoption. I don't think they can claim to be an excellent choice for SATA RAID arrays until this is addressed.

Although UFS2's background FSCK is a welcome improvement, it's not a solution.

It's good to see that there are projects to bring XFS and JFS support into FreeBSD, I suspect it will be a long time before they're production ready and you'll be able to boot FreeBSD on them.

Try http://eclim.sourceforge.net/

From their homepage:

The primary goal of eclim is to bring eclipse functionality to the vim editor.

Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, eclipse, provides many great tools for development, especially java development.

Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both are lacking overall. Vim lacks native Java support, and eclipse still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text.

That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write a java ide in vim or a vim editor in eclipse, eclim provides an eclipse plug-in that exposes eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of vim plug-ins that communicate with eclipse over that interface.

If you prefer Modeless Editors, have a look at Cream for Vim.

Personally I dislike it intensely, but it does have a place when people have issues with "Modes" in Editors.

There are currently 4 bsd projects that i'm aware of. They include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD. In addition to these projects which each develop their own kernel and userland, there are linux style distros PC-BSD and DesktopBSD which do not develop their own kernel or low level userland. (they add gui shit) These two track freebsd progress as well as other projects like frenzy that do live cds.

Just to add to what you've listed, there are some lesser-known but quite interesting *BSD projects out there.

AnonymOS, an OpenBSD 3.8-based LiveCD with strong encryption and a preconfigured TOR proxy service for net anonymoity.

http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/

NeWBIE, a NetBSD-based LiveCD aimed at being a desktop LiveCD that includes the Fluxbox desktop environment.

http://arudius.sourceforge.net/

FreeeSBIE, a FreeBSD-based LiveCD (includes install script) which includes Fluxbox and XFCE4 desktop environments. The FreeSBIE toolkit to produce custom LiveCDs is even included in FreeBSDs' ports tree. (There is a Romanian-created flavor called RoFreeSBIE, links at Softpedia http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/RoFreeSBIE -Live-CD-Download-9067.html).

http://www.freesbie.org/

There may be other projects, but those are the ones I'm familiar with. They are all very nice, and worth a try.

As to PC-BSD, I'm more knowledgeable than the average PC user, but I found PC-BSD to be quite impressive and usable, without being too terribly dumbed-down.My G/F (Yes, I have one, but I'm 48 and also play lead guitar in a gigging and recording blues band. :-P) actually prefers it over XP or Mandriva.

The .PBI software packages aren't too numerous as yet, but there has been steady development with new .PBIs appearing at a fast enough pace that I'm sure the number will be respectable before too long.

Bravo, laffer! I wish you luck with MidnightBSD, and I'll keep checking that URL. I look forward to any new ideas being applied to FreeBSD, as it seems a very solid base, and IMHO has not been taken anywhere near its' capabilities yet as a desktop.

Cheers!

Strat

Seems nxdos is heading in that direction with asmuch of the extra .asm modules as tsrs and system files. --chris http://nxdos.sourceforge.net/

I'm a fan of both emacs and vi, but I do agree with you. When the bloat of emacs gets in the way instead of helping I need vi, not vim which both RedHat and Apple try to force down our throats on their systems. I always install the real thing from sourceforge on any machine I'm going to spend a significant amount of time on. Lightning fast, no surprises in the keystrokes, no highlighting to make it unreadable on certain terminals... Sometimes it just feels like coming home.

If you like Vi try Cream:

Cream

Hmm.... I don't think vi is to fault for his site's design strength/weakness.

Here's a site I've been working on (still testing) coded entirely w/VIM.
http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/_testing/

EP

I think that this might be the Cream you are searching for...

It's called Cream.

http://cream.sourceforge.net/

It's the gateway drug into a wonderful universe.

Ever since I found notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/, I have never looked at another editor.

I spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change the default font, and make it stick next time I open it up.

Add :set guifont=font\ name to your _vimrc (search for it in the Vim install folder).

:set compatible

vim -C

:syntax off

Vim is one of the most powerful, lightweight and full-featured text editors ever created. It is the popular and famous descendant of the 1976 Vi text editor. Vim is also free and works on most operating systems. But Vim has a steep learning curve. It was not primarily designed to be easy to use, favoring performance and technical flexibility instead. Because it is so different, learning to use Vim takes time. Cream shapes Vim to use the standard Common User Access model of user interface.

Try Cream http://cream.sourceforge.net/

Wait...isn't that what the original game had anyway? Well, it's yellow milk I guess, but it's close.

You mean something like this?

Looks like someone repackaged up HotSaNIC and rebranded it as their own. Graphs are IDENTICAL. I knew something looked mighty familiar when I saw them, because I've been running HotSaNIC on our servers for awhile now. Great stuff.

How is this effort different than peekabooty?

Apparently some people took the effort to make a remake http://montymole.sourceforge.net/

Both are correct: you should not bill off plain RRD-based formats, as old data is removed over time, meaning your "95th percentile" isn't valid anymore. The main reasons this is acceptable in most cases are: 1) most people just want pretty graphs and don't need to do usage based billing; 2) the RRD file will remain a constant size forever and won't fill up the disk.

For real billing, I use RTG (http://rtg.sourceforge.net/) which stores all samples in MySQL. It should be safe to run it side by side with MRTG or Cacti or whatever. It still has the same averaging functionality for graphing, but it never removes old samples from the database so you can run complete usage reports. The downside is that the data will grow without bound, so you'll need to keep an eye on the DB (although mine's only growing about 4 MB/month).

Sounds similar to a project I'm working on called MonAMI, which aims to be more flexible, but is currently less mature.

Ganglia is quite useful for performance monitoring of large server farms / grids. It works in either multicast or unicast, allows nesting grids and the config files are easy to generate by script.
Be sure to check out the developers mailing list archives - recent posts featured patches for sampling external devices and graph templating.

This sounds a lot like Nagios. From TFA I couldn't see anything Munin and Monit would do that you can't do on Nagios with a few plugins. Just a plug - Nagios is beautiful, it makes nice graphical representations of load, hits, throughput, and about anything else you can think of.