As always, backing up is always one of those things that is to be frank, quite boring - right up until you have a hardware failure or something else bad happens and you suddenly need those backups you didn’t do last time around!

One of the best ways to back up all your data, or a great big load of your data, is to backup the whole partition. A tool to help you do this efficiently and easily and restore as well is partimage.

Once you’ve installed the application, you launch it from the command line as root, as follows:

# partimage

You enter a text-based, but interactive interface. You choose which partition you want to back up or restore to from the list at the top, and then you can press Tab and enter the filename of the image to back up or restore from.

In the case of backing up, you can now choose from different compression options, what to do after the backup completes and other advanced features as well.

Once you’ve set that running, the back up or restore will get going and you can let partimage get on with the work!

Using dd to manually copy whole partitions, then adding compression and restoring back again can be a troublesome and fiddly experience. partimage makes it extremely easy to do the same job, so for that reason, I highly recommend it as part of your backup solution!

Everybody likes to know when they have mail. It’s become a routine to get up in the morning and check before you go to work or school. Later throughout the day, most people don’t check it as often. This is where mail notifiers come in. Linux has many notification applications, and many of them work very well.

Yet another mail notifier has popped into existence known as cGmail. What makes this different from most? Well, it stores your passwords using the GNOME keyring manager instead of in plain text files like most do. It uses the standard notification daemon, which makes it integrate into your desktop visually. It stores its settings in GConf, so you can configure them with Sabayon or manage them in a central area. And finally, it uses DBus to let other applications know when mail has arrived.
Overall, cGmail wins the award for best desktop integration for non-standard apps. If only we had such an award…

cGmail can be configured to use your Gmail account in addition to IMAP and POP3. Another thing I noticed is that you get a nice “ping” sound when you get new mail, which can be turned off it you don’t like it. Because it integrates with so many other services on the system already, the interface is really simple and easy to use. The only strange thing I noticed was some weird spacing on some dialogs, but in reality this is not something to stop anyone from using it.

To download, you can get it from their website, as it isn’t in most repositories yet:

cGmail

Arguably the most popular free software forum solution available, phpBB, has just been bumped to version 3.0. It is a major new release of the forum software and includes many new features whilst also modernising the core architecture.

From the press release:

phpBB, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License.

Some of the new features in 3.0 versus the 2.x series include support for subforums, a feature which many have been crying out to get implemented for some time, attachments, birthdays and other collaboration features. phpBB also ships with a fresh new default theme.

phpBB is licensed under the GPL, runs anywhere where PHP and a compatible database system runs, and can be downloaded from the phpBB Downloads page.

You can find out more information about phpBB 3 from the release announcement and press release on the site.