Banish your daemons for a faster Linux PC.

How to manage your machine's background processes. In common with other parts of the early Unix operating system, the term 'daemon' gives little away about what its function might be.

A daemon is a task that runs in the background, and there's a small army of them that are started when you fire up your machine. There are daemons for controlling automated tasks, daemons for managing power and CPU use, daemons for printing and daemons for writing the system logs. Some denote their status by ending with the letter 'd', while others prefer the anonymity of names like 'binfmpt-support' or 'brltty'.

Daemons are obviously an important part of the running environment. But there's also a slight problem. Without any divine inspiration, the average Linux distribution can't accurately guess which daemons are going to be of use to you, and which aren't. The result is that they'll normally play it safe and err on the side of caution.

This means that your desktop may include a laptop power management daemon, or Bluetooth tools, neither of which may be of great use. These will still get loaded up and use valuable memory, so you can save boot time and memory by spending a little time pruning your daemons, and fitting them to your own requirements. The trick is knowing which ones to cut.

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Apple's Take On Mobile Unix

The Mac community was buzzing in late November when the director of Apple’s Unix group showed a slide at the LISA (Large System Adminstration) conference that predicted that the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X would ship in the first quarter of 2009. In presentation they offered some interesting bits of their own.

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Help at last for IT and consultants

Those of us that work in computer support have all seen our share of bad IT support policies and awful help desk software. In my years of doing technical support I have seen some of the very best help desk software to some of the worst. Bad or difficult to use help desk software is a major reason of unhappiness for not only your support staff but also for your customers.

One fantastic customer support program you may not of heard of is called Web Help Desk. The Web Help Desk is a high performance web application designed as a 100% browser-based solution. The Web Help Desk's browser-only focus guarantees a rich, powerful cross-platform application regardless of your operating system. Web Help also offers integration with LANrev Client Manager and Apple Remote Desktop.

This week MacsDesign Studio LLC makers of Web Help Desk split there product line to into three offerings:

• Web help desk Pro
  
• Web help desk Light
  
• Web help desk Free
  

A full feature Help Desk Software Comparison Checklist can be reviewed here or the full technical specifications of the software here.

In a gesture of pure generosity MacsDesign Studio offer consultants and small one support man shops a fantastic gift Web Help Desk for free and this version has very few limitations and no adversing! I hope you will enjoy using their software as much as I do!