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Note: this post might be considered totally useless by some as there is no clear conclusion or solution. It is a work in progress.

Just as a reference for later (in alphabetical order) - this list was originally quickly composed as part of the planning of a comparative study which was not concluded: Open Source:

• A-Tutor
• Canvas LMS
• Chamilo
• Claroline
• Docebo
• Dokeos
• eLMS
• Ilias
• Moodle
• OLAT
• Sakai
• .LRN

Non Open Source:

• Angel (now Blackboard)
• Blackboard
• CourseMill
• e-Doceo
• e-Ducativa
• SharePoint LMS
• TotalLMS
• WebCT

To reset a mailman admin password on Debian, the easiest way is to locate the mailman's proper bin directory (use dpkg -L mailman), generally: /usr/lib/mailman/bin There, you'll find an executable script called change_pw. Use this one. If you want to change the password of all lists at once, use: sudo ./change_pw --all --password=newpassword Ref: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg34242.html

Today we had a server stalled on "Loading kernel modules" at reboot (after adding 12GB of RAM, to 24GB total). The datacenter didn't know what to do and they put us on a 32-bit rescue mode console from which we couldn't (obviously) launch a 64bit chroot to update the kernel. The situation seemed pretty desperate. Our sysadmin, Jérôme, once again came to the rescue. Waiting for the datacenter to respond would have potentially increased reboot time up to 45 minutes. The only possible thing to do: replace initrd with a similar version (just in case the first one would have been damaged).

Yesterday w had a funny (I say that now that I've been able to relax a little) situation on one of our hosted servers. The server's RAM usage went bang to the ceiling in a matter of minutes, and it was then practically impossible to get it back (had to hard-kill Apache and the monit process that was restarting it). What happened?

Just a self-reminder, in the vcl_recv section (before sending request to the backend), check the url you want to always serve from cache and tell it to return(lookup);

  if (req.url ~ "request_server.php$") { return(lookup); }

Reload Varnish and get ready for a massive fall of your load if this bloody request_server.php was overloading your site uselessly...

For all those of you who've been expecting this release for a long time, we are finally closing in and this week seems to be the ideal time to have ourselves an first release candidate, which will last only one week of all goes well. Unlike previous versions, Chamilo 1.8.8.4 doesn't bring any major new feature. Instead, it is the fruit of a very deep process of trials and fixes, which has been lasting more than 60 days now and sums up to a staggering 1000 of working hours.

I'm a happy user of a Lenovo W500 but I had a very hard time getting anything more than 1h30 battery time, even with a brand new 9-cell battery (this one got me just 1h45 when using low screen brightness and minimum CPU). Then through a conversation with a friend and colleague, he suggested I disable the ATI graphics card and use the motherboard's... This means disabling it in the system's BIOS (not inside whatever operating system you use). Since I tried that, I get up to 4h45 on my 9-cell (with the minimum energy usage configuration in Ubuntu 10.10 64bit).

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Many new videoconference systems nowadays are Flash-based. Of course, the main input for them is some sort of video device (e.g. a webcam). Under Linux, the framework responsible for this is Video4Linux (V4L), of which version 2 (aka V4L2) is current. That means that most recent webcams drivers are supported only by V4L2. Alas, some proprietary editors (of which Skype and Adobe with Flash) still only support V4L1.