Netlive is a slightly unusual distribution developed in Italy: a live version of Linux that makes available on demand any other live version of Linux chosen by its administrators to all the computers of its local network. Its developers, Ezio Da Rin and Marco Clocchiatti, call Netlive “a very efficient way to build portable ICT labs for schools, alternative to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)“. The practical advantages of Netlive for end users, that is schools and students, have been already explained elsewhere.

note: I am trying to publish, a piece at a time a lots of tricks that I use in my email management system, in such a format that each of them is usable separately. This is why it may be a bit difficult to understand certain parts of this and other pages, until I have published all of them. In the meantime, please let me know about anything you find not clear in these pages, so I can improve them, and read this article of mine on how to Build your own email server with Postfix, because it is a good synthesis of the whole picture

Even in this age of social networking and instant messaging, mailing lists are very useful tools to get technical support or carry on public discussions online. The problem with mailing list is that, especially when they are very popular, you will soon find out that most of the traffic is irrelevant, because it’s either some flame war or some topic that has no interest for you. This kind of email traffic is a big problem for two reasons:

Backup procedures based on the tar program have many advantages: they are very simple to implement on every operating system and the single files they produce can be moved from one computer to another in lots of different ways, including IRC and email. Tar archives are perfect when you don’t care about which directories some files were in, or how much time passed between one revision and the other.