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The short answer is a resounding yes. Whether you work as a Linux server administrator, or do custom Linux installations, you can make a decent income from it.

Many people assume that just because Linux is a free open source software, there’s no money in it. How wrong these people are. Heck, almost every Linux kernel hacker is paid or sponsored in some way by reknowned IT companies for their work. Almost every IT company in the world has an interest in the Linux kernel. Of course there are others such as Microsoft and its cronies who fear the tremendous growth and stability of Linux and would do anything including spreading FUD about it.

I too have made a few thousand bucks from various Linux related projects including:

• Setting up web hosting servers
• Implimenting Samba servers
• Email solutions (a fetchmail, dovecot and sendmail threesome)
• Backup solutions

And probably a few others I can’t recall right now.

Back to the topic of this post, Can you make money from Linux? Of course! In fact, it’s easier than you think. Before going onto the things you need to do, let me cover some of the things you don’t need in order to make money from Linux:

• Paper qualifications of any sort
• A tremendously high IQ (heck, mine is only 147)
• Any initial monetary investment (although investing in a few good books is recommended)

What you do need are:

• The willingness to learn
• Perseverence
• A keen, observant and analytical approach to facing problems and solving them
• Decent googling skills
• Absence of shyness (you need to be willing to pimp your services)

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to it. Other than being profitable, Linux is fun and challenging. Heck, it beats problogging any time!

The first maintenance release of the 4.4 series for Xfce has been released. The changelog is available here.

What is Xfce? It’s the coolest desktop environment for the X Windows System. Download it and give it a whirl (if you haven’t already).

A huge majority of web hosting companies use Linux servers to host their clients’ web sites. There are plenty of good reasons why Linux is the preferred operating system for a web hosting server, among which are:

• Linux is a stable and secure operating system
• There’s a wide variety of Linux distributions to choose from; including free community supported ones, as well as those which offer support contracts
• Linux supports a huge variety of hardware platforms and devices
• The Linux kernel undergoes a constant improvement and enhancement process
• Linux is open source, thus making the code underlying it probed by thousands of eyeballs dedicated to making it better

One feature that makes Linux servers particularly useful is that you can perform remote administration on it via SSH. SSH is a command line interface that provides a secure and encrypted way of connecting to a remote server.

Read the rest of Why You Should Opt For SSH-Enabled Web Hosting »

I just bought an Acer AL1916W LCD Monitor to replace my discoloured Samsung CRT. Being a wide screen monitor which supports a native resolution of 1440×900, it took me some time to adjust to the abundance of horizontal screen real estate which I’ve just acquired.

What was very obvious from the start was that the desktop seem stout rather than expanded. I was expecting this effect because I’m still using the x.org configuration file which was customised for my previous resolution of 1280×1024.

It took me a while to find out how to make x.org support the 1440×900 resolution my new monitor was capable of. Apparently, the 1440×900 resolution is not part of the VESA standard modes.

The Caos Linux Wiki entry on X Server Configuration shows you how to get x.org to support native 1440×900 resolution.

For Slackware users, please not that the full path to gtf is /usr/X11R6/bin/gtf. Somehow /usr/X11R6/bin is not in my bash profile path, chances are, the same applies to other Slackers out there.

The Green Grid is a global consortium of companies dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems. At present, members include AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

Yep, big IT industry names and for a good purpose too. The IT industry is probably one of the highest consumer of electricity, especially data centers. As processing speed increase multiple folds over the past decade or so, processors and other peripherals consume a lot more power than they use to. Heck, in that period I’ve moved from 200 watt PSUs to the present 400 watt one that currectly powers my home box.

On the Open Source front, the next Linux kernel release (2.6.21) will integrate a tickless kernel feature that’s designed to reduce CPU power consumption and power consumption.

Although initial tests seem to indicate minimal improvements, I believe that it’s a step in the right direction by the kernel hackers.