Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the agent should run automatically in the background once an hour. It will only update the feeds based on the interval you've set in each channel document. So, for example, the agent runs at 9am, it looks at a channel doc and sees that the interval has been set for every 8 hours for that channel. It looks at the last time it updated that channel and sees that it was 7am. It will not read that channel for updates during this run of the agent.
The same will occur at 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, and 4pm. At 5pm, it will update that channel when it runs.
As for Linux, I don't know of definite reason why it wouldn't work. However, java can be quirky on Domino on linux depending on the linux configuration. Since it ships with a jvm, I've seen instances on Linux where the default jvm is being used rather than the one that ships with Domino. Just a thought. Before you run off and check that out though, we've got a linux server we can run some quick tests on. We'll do that and I'll report back here.
Thx again for trying it out!