March 2009

Elive is a Debian based linux distro, so all of you Ubuntu fan boys its the same basic distro with noticable enhancements and tweaks to the UI.  Some major points to point out here is that the desktop manager is leveraging Enlightment which is Gtk based and very quick, light on resources, and customizable till no end.  The menu system is left and right mouse click driven similar to that of fluxbox.   The Application Dock is an actual portion of the Enlightment Desktop Manager.

I have been running Elive in a VMWare environment for 2 weeks now and am very pleased with how it is working and how quick and easy things were to pick up with the distribution.  The great thing is everything that you WANT installed is installed from the get go (mp3, flash, dvd, etc)  This is definitely more of a desktop driven distribution, but to throw it through the rings I went through some quick tests to make sure nothing was outa the ordinary with the build.  To do this I planned on setting up a mail server with virtual hosts, a LAMP environment and install Roundcube, vtiger CRM, and of course Drupal 6.10.   After that I made sure that I could properly backup the machine leveraging BackupPC.

 As some of you have heard I have been working on finding a pretty seamless automatic self managing backup solution for my home machines, as well as to finish a project up at work.   There were a couple requirements of the solution.  It had to be able to only backup bit level changes of the data.  Managed from a single central location.  E-mail Alerts.  Basic Reporting.  Web Based Administration.

Well I'm going to try a little something different, and make a rant post giving a couple nice links to some interesting reads and getting a little bit of information dumped into you mind all at once.  This is not going to be the most directed or organized post of mine, but who cares... it makes things a little more interesting.

Top 10 Open Source CRM Solutions - InsideCRM.com

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-121307/

Centralizing your data

One of the biggest tasks for most people is to get all their data in a central managable location that they know where it is and its easy to backup and managed and reliable.  For home networks a great solution for this is to leverage a NAS type solution.   My suggestion would be to build a storage server and install the latest build of OpenSolaris and make use of their ZFS filesystem to ensure your data is consistent and managable.