July 2009

A free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX was published in 2004 by Fabian Franz. FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of BASH, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain.

Last week, Google Code released the source code of their own proof-of-concept implementation of an NX server, Neatx. Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries. It is written in Python, with the exception of very few wrapper scripts in BASH and one program written in C for performance reasons. Neatx was also able to reuse some code from another Google Open Source project, Ganeti. The code still has some issues, but we're confident interested developers will be able to fix them.

Also, Neatx implements features not found in FreeNX, such as the drop-down menu for session control in rootless sessions. At the same time, not all of FreeNX's features are implemented in Neatx.

Find the Development page here: http://code.google.com/p/neatx/
Link to the original article: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/07/releasing-neatx-open-sourc...

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. 'cron' is short for 'chronograph'.

If you would like to set up your Drupal and linux server to use the cron, these steps will help to achieve your goal.

Open up a console and change to the user which will run the cron.
Every user has it's own cron tab (which is the list of jobs cron has to run.)
If you prefer, create a new user for this job.

To access your crontab use the following command:

crontab

This will give you a summary of crontab's commands and switches.

To list your cronlist type:

crontab -l

and to edit the list:

crontab -e

If this is the first time you edit the crontab, it will ask you which editor you would like to use.
If you are unsure, use google to find out which editor is the best for you.

Inside the editor, add the following line to the end of the list:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://[your server url]/cron.php

This will execure the cron.php in every 5 minutes.

Here is a diagram of the general crontab syntax, for illustration:

*    *    *    *    *  [command to be executed]
|    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|    |    |    +------- month (1 - 12)
|    |    +--------- day of month (1 - 31)
|    +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

* in the value field above means all legal values as in braces for that column.
The value column can have a * or a list of elements separated by commas. An element is either a number in the ranges shown above or two numbers in the range separated by a hyphen (meaning an inclusive range).