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LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2009

A month or so ago I purchased a TomTom One map/navigation device, only to discover there is no Linux client for TomTom home, and as a consequence i am unable to update the maps on the device, or indeed, any other useful information that is made available for the device.

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware media center software with promising new social networking features. Boxee is based on XBMC media center, an award winning open source project. Since i had already tested the latest XBMC 9.04, i was not expecting anything dramatic from an alpha release of Boxee. I was way wrong.

Canadian director Ron Mann is testing a new method of movie distribution, releasing his documentary Know Your Mushrooms on a customized USB stick.

[This made my day -- a movie director that encourages sharing -- major coolness. Barbara]

Many Linux distributions ship with the heartbeat suite of software for setting up High Availability Linux. The Linux HA project has details and downloads for those who do not have it available for their system. This text addresses setting up a very simple HA Linux configuration using the configuration files versus a GUI or the XML definition files. The example setup will have two servers that serve up an apache webserver. One can have many other services assigned as well and shared data over NFS for example. Similarly a common mysql db backend could be available or even more exotic tiered mysql dbs - basically whatever the needs are. What Linux HA can do is using a shared IP it can host the same IP from any server in the cluster list. For demonstration purposes, however, the apache servers root will have an index file with the actual hostname of the system - what should be observed is the index file contents will change after a failover but still be accessible via the shared IP.

This may be a category in which the proprietary tools win out over open source. Unless you tell me otherwise...

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (known by the acronym ALSA) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing device drivers for sound cards. If you are experiencing sound issues on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 or just want the latest version, you may want to upgrade to ALSA 1.0.20 (Ubuntu Jaunty comes with Alsa version 1.0.18rc3 - you can check this by typing this in a terminal: cat /proc/asound/version). Read on!

The amount of time a given release of a Linux distribution is support is of paramount interest to its users. After all, large-scale deployments depend on stability, and stability means support. Some users of openSUSE are liable to be feeling a bit shaken this week, after the project announced that the support period for its releases has been cut by a fourth.

A Linux kernel bug in network socket initialization could allow an attacker to acquire root privileges to inflict damages. The security hole applies to all kernels of the 2.4 and 2.5 series and has been around possibly since 2001.

If you like the reliability of Debian Stable, buy yearn for some newer packages from Testing or Unstable, you can have it all. Juliet Kemp shows us how to run a mixed Debian installation and pull packages from whatever version we desire.

Arch Linux 2009.08 was released earlier this week with a new installer, more automatic configuration settings, many core package updates, and other changes to this growingly popular distribution. At the request of some readers, we have carried out some quick benchmarks to get a general understanding of where Arch Linux 2009.08 is performing in comparison to Ubuntu 9.04.

At home, I have,2 machines; one running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and the other running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). The Hardy machine is used by my family members and I use Jaunty for my experiments. Some times, I would like to test some thing on Hardy also. But most of the times that machine is not free. I use ssh to login to the hardy box and use an ssh tunnel to export the GUI session back to my Jaunty box.

It has been 15 years since Marc Andreessen developed the Netscape Internet browser that introduced millions of people to the Internet. After its early success, Netscape was roundly defeated by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars of the 1990s that dominated the Web’s first chapter. Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch. Now a prominent Silicon Valley financier, Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment.

I thought I was done with the command line for the week, but then I did something cool that I thought I'd share with you. I use twitter to promote my blog, and I follow almost 3,000 people. That means that every few seconds there is an update on my "people I follow" list, and it is almost always something I am not interested in. This makes Twitter kind of useless for me. My want: Manually maintain a file of the names of people whose tweets I want to actually see. An a-list, if you will. Write a script that would use the a-list to generate a list of tweets culled from the larger fire hose list. ... I call it a-tweet. Short for show me the a-list tweets!

PVOPS kernel been installed to run under Xen 3.4.1 was 2.6.31-rc5. To build Xen 3.4.1 Dom0 via Bug Attachments at Please merge xen-3.4 (3.4.0-2) from debian unstable installed "prevu" and performed build to obtain debian packages.

For most of the summer, Microsoft has done a good job of capturing the lion's share of media attention, but this week Google took steps to wrestle that attention away.

Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris. Even when installing Mono (pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib) and all the necessary components, I still had problems building the package. One day I may revisit that but in the meantime I decided to concentrate on building and installing the gnome-launch-box. For the most part, gnome-launch-box will do all that I really need it to do.

This is the second course in the Bash Shell course series which will help you understand the basics of working with the vi text editor in Linux. At some time everyone who uses Linux will need a text editor. One of the most important reasons for learning vi is that it is loaded on every Linux distro by default whereas others like nano or emacs are not. So whatever, text editor you choose be sure you load it and use it before you need it.

Break out the Speedos, grab the suntan lotion from the cupboard and crack open a chilled lager: the new summer collection from the top three desktop distro vendors is here. But if you’re thinking of giving a slice of your hard disk to one of these prominent free operating systems, don’t bother.

A steady stream of manufacturers are requesting Linux drivers for their hardware, suggesting growing adoption of Linux operating systems among enterprises. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, Novell programmer and Linux Driver Project lead, the group of some 400 programmers at the Project receive requests to port existing closed-source drivers to open source drivers for Linux "all the time", and has been "doing a lot of work on this over the past few years".

Black Duck has analysed its database of 200,000 open source programs to see which programming languages are most popular. The database is used by the company as part of their compliance and license management services.