The 2012 London Olympics promises to be a spectacular event. Recently I have been wondering what role open source software will play in the event. Here are a few things that have come to mind: 1) There will be lots of websites carrying news, results, information and statics about the event. Linux is the most popular web [...]
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CentOS-5.7 Released for 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs
CentOS-5.7 has been released, It is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All the upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. The Release Notes for CentOS-5.7 can be found on-line at: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.7 Downloading CentOS-5.7 by Torrent When possible, consider using torrents [...]
READ MORE »Raspberry Pi – An ARM Linux box for $25
Size of a credit card, designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. All for $25 for a fully-configured system. 700MHz Broadcom media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM 128MiB (Model A) or 256MiB [...]
READ MORE »CentOS 5.7 is now staging for release
It has just been announced via twitter that CentOS-5.7 is now staging for release. It should hit the public mirrors sometime on Saturday 10th September. CentOS 5.7 should include: Various KVM and Xen improvements, including: Xen 32bit performance improvement Xen boot time reduced KVM CD-ROM emulation improvements KVM live migration speed improvements Usage of XFS in conjunction [...]
READ MORE »Oracle Enhances MySQL Installer and High Availability for Windows
Oracle has released a new MySQL Installer for Windows to simplify and streamline the installation process. According to the press release: Oracle delivers up to 90 percent cost savings over Microsoft SQL Server with MySQL Enterprise Edition,(2) which includes a complete suite of visual tools for modeling, development, monitoring, administration and backup of Windows-based MySQL [...]
READ MORE »NSA proposes Accumulo NoSQL database to Apache
Built on top of Apache’s Hadoop, Zookeeper and Thrift projects, Accumulo is a distributed key/value store based on the design of Google’s BigTable. Developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the Accumulo project has now been proposed to the Apache Software Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project. Accumulo’s big difference [...]
READ MORE »Ubuntu Without a Monitor (Headless)
I recently installed Ubuntu server (including the GNOME desktop) on a new machine which I want to run headless (that is without a monitor). It seems that Ubuntu feels the need to be physically connected to a monitor to properly boot. Without the monitor the system wouldn’t boot or if it did it would be impossible to [...]
READ MORE »What’s New in CentOS 6
Last month saw the release of CentOS 6. The move from 5 to 6 establishes the foundation for this community-run enterprise Linux distribution for the next five years. CentOS brings a new kernel, new versions of key server components, and improved virtualization support. The new release was unexpectedly slow in arriving. In 2007, the CentOS [...]
READ MORE »25,000+ Hospital Staff in Demark to Use LibreOffice
Almost 25,000 staff from a group of thirteen Copenhagen hospitals will mirgate to using LibreOffice,the community maintained and developed fork of the OpenOffice.org office suite, over the next year. The plan, reported by OSOR.EU, is being embarked upon for “long term strategic reasons” and aims to save around 5.3 million euros in proprietary licence costs. The hospital [...]
READ MORE »Ubuntu Server 11.10 to Support ARM
According to a blog post by Chris Kenyon on the Canonical Blog, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release will be simultaneously available for x86, x86-64 and ARM-based architectures. The base image of the releases will be the same across architectures with a common kernel baseline. The ARM architecture will also be part of the long-term support (LTS) [...]
READ MORE »CentOS-5.6 Continuous Release Repository is Now Available
The CentOS-5.6 Continuous Release ( CR ) repository is now available on mirror.centos.org. This repository contains rpms to be included in the next CentOS-5.x release. Because these include security and bugfix updates, we strongly recommend everyone using CentOS-5 install and update their system using this repository. Download and Install Installing the CR repository needs a manual step. You must [...]
READ MORE »Reading a Gutenberg Project eBook with Kindle on Android
I wanted to read a book which was freely available from Project Gutenberg on my Android using Amazon’s Kindle app. Generally Project Gutenberg provides its eBooks in several different format including a Kindle format. I tried opening the eBook’s page using my Android phone but when I tried to download it the browser told me [...]
READ MORE »Packt Publishing, the publishers of Learning FreeNAS, have donated over $300,000 to open source projects
Packt Publishing, the publishers of paper and electronic books, including Learning FreeNAS, has announced that it has made donations now totalling over $300,000 to open source projects. Since starting to make such donations in 2004, the company has helped support over 70 different open source projects. via Packt Publishing’s open source donations top $300,000
READ MORE »Getting to grips with the ‘top’ command [TUTORIAL]
When ever I am called to perform system administration on a Linux server there are several command line tools I use to familiarise myself with the machine (like df -h to see the disks). And invariably one of the commands I will use early on is the top command. top displays real-time live view of the running [...]
READ MORE »Executive director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin talks Linux
Jim Zemlin, former executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation, and earlier this month he sat down with the Google’s / Samba’s Jeremy Allison for a chat about the future of Linux.
READ MORE »PC-BSD 8.2 (Hubble Edition) Out – Uses FreeBSD 8.2 & KDE 4.5.5
Version 8.2 of PC-BSD, the desktop orientated FreeBAS varient, has been released with a number of enhancements and improvements including: Based on FreeBSD 8.2-Release KDE 4.5.5 Added ability to select file-system type and encryption during auto-partitioning Able to toggle between MBR/GPT partitioning Various bug fixes to the wireless / network managers Minimum system requirements: Pentium [...]
READ MORE »FreeBSD 8.2 Released
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE with improved functionality and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 and Xen PV support in FreeBSD/i386 improved ZFS on-disk format updated to version 15 aesni(4) driver for Intel AESNI crypto instruction set BIND and OpenSSL updates Gnome updated to 2.32.1 [...]
READ MORE »FreeBSD 7.4 Available – Last Release for 7.x
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the availability of FreeBSD 7.4-RELEASE for the amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. This will be the last release from the 7-STABLE branch. Some of the highlights: Gnome updated to 2.32.1 KDE updated to 4.5.5 Many misc. improvements and bugfixes For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see [...]
READ MORE »What is Open Source?
Open Source is a concept and license for publishing software along with it’s sourcecode. Under Open Source, software is licensed in a certain way which allows anyone to redistributable it at will and without cost. The source code is freely available, and it is modifiable by anyone sufficiently experienced in programming. An example of a [...]
READ MORE »What is Linux?
All computers (including desktops, servers, smart-phones and super computers) needs a core piece of software which is called an “Operating System”. Many computers today use Microsoft Windows as their operating system or if you are using an Apple machine, Mac OS X. Linux is an operating system for Personal Computers (including Apple Macs), servers, super computers, [...]
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