Opensource Calendar and Address book server: DAViCal

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As many of you, I’ve been using Google Calendar features for a long time. But that was not completely satisfying, from a pure “opensource” and intellectual property perspective…
I was also looking for a way to synchronize my various Thunderbird installations (my wife and I are both using several calendars and several address books…) across all devices we have at home/work (Linux, Windows, smartphones,…).

Yesterday, thanks to a colleague (another geek ? Check his website: ezIX), I found the answer. I decided to setup my own server for Calendar and for Address books.
This is DAViCal.
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Remote monitoring with gkrellm

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Icon GkrelLMAs you know, I have several systems running at home (physical and virtual machines).
I was looking for a way to “see” quickly any bottleneck, or any unusual activity on those systems from my laptop.

My first reaction was to go for a gnome-like system monitor (gnome-system-monitor).
Despite all criticisms I could read, it was showing me all necessary information, especially real-time graphs for CPU, Memory, and Network.
But when I launched them remotely (through an SSH session, and with the appropriate DISPLAY forwarding option), it showed clearly that it was consuming around 4Mb/s of Network bandwidth just to display… itself !

So, I googled a little bit, and I rediscovered a tool I used to install a long time ago : gkrellm
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Little hack to display last Tweets

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This morning, I was reading an interesting article about plugins in WordPress, and how to get rid of them (available here, in French… Google Translate is your friend 😉 ).
I wanted to test adding my Tweet feed, not impacting performance (I tested several plugins already, but they decreased performance, as I could measure on GTmetrix).
And this hack works !
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Thin clients setup at home for kids

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It’s been a long time since I wanted to move to a thin client infrastructure at home.
Up to now, kids are using some very old laptops, with a minimal Linux distribution. I setup a central Edubuntu server (on a Virtual Machine), with their accounts, and the kids laptops are using remote X (through NX/FreeNX for better reactivity).

Problem: I don’t want to maintain those minimal Linux OS, and I would like to replace those old laptops (broken keyboards, damaged screens,…) with simpler, cheap and low consuming hardware (Wyse,…).

So my first step was to setup the infrastructure to support those thin clients.

And this is what I did, taking advantage of Edubuntu distribution… and LTSP !
The main steps:

  • install LTSP server
  • construct thin client images
  • setup DHCP server
  • tune specific configuration for each thin client if needed

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