More free software and open source good news from Europe

On the line of my latest post about Linagora, a European data researcher recently published the results of a study concluding in that the European Community is saving 450 billion euros per year thanks to Open Source software. In the same orientation, the APRIL (French Association for digital freedom) published a study reporting the substantial savings of the French Government thanks to Open

Building a Debian Lenny package for Sphinxsearch

See the second part of http://sphinxsearch.com/wiki/doku.php?id=sphinx_on_debian_gnu_linux for the original post: 
$ cd
$ mkdir src
$ cd src
$ sudo grep deb-src /etc/apt/sources.list > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy.list
$ sudo vim wheezy.list
  (change squeeze to wheezy and remove security line)
$ sudo apt-get update
$ mkdir sphinxsearch
$ cd sphinxsearch
$ apt-get source sphinxsearch
$ apt-get build-dep sphinxsearch
$ cd sphinxsearch-2.0.3/
$ debuild
$ cd ..
$ dpkg -i sphinxsearch_2.0.3-1_amd64.deb
You can then start it with 
$ sudo vim /etc/default/sphinxsearch
$ STAR

Creating a software RAID array on an already installed Ubuntu 11.04

Let's say you got confused by a misleading fake-RAID feature on an HP Blade server and you decided to ignore that the Ubuntu installer was telling you it found 2 disks while it was supposed (if it was actual hardware RAID) to be detecting only one. And let's say you are lucky to have 3 disks, and you only one to use two as the RAID array (and they do not contain your operating system, i.e. the / partition). You might wonder: "And now what? S**** you, HP!" (that last bit is if you left panic get you, of course).

Memcache(d) to store PHP sessions

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).
Subscribe to open-source