Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Bonnie++ allows you to benchmark how your filesystems perform various tasks, which makes it a valuable tool when you are making changes to how your RAID is set up, how your filesystems are created, or how your network filesystems perform. Bonnie++ is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click, for Ubuntu Hardy, and in the standard Fedora 9 repositories. I installed Bonnie++ from the 64-bit Fedora 9 repositories. The packages for Ubuntu and Fedora both install Bonnie++ into /usr/sbin, while openSUSE installs into /usr/bin. Bonnie++ will complain and fail to work if invoked as the root user, but if Bonnie++ is installed into /usr/sbin instead of /usr/bin, to invoke Bonnie++ as a regular user you will probably have to include its full path.

Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all. You can also force the browser to use Gmail for mailto: links, discover a hidden "Easter egg" and more. So fire up your browser and get ready to teach it some new tricks.

In math, two negatives make a positive. In the fledgling world of desktop Linux, unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the case. According to reports from OStatic and others, Xandros is buying Linspire. Who cares, you ask?

One of India's 28 states plans to distribute 100,000 Linux laptops to students there. It sounds like Tamil Nadu's volume purchasing agent decided to use Linux exclusively after being put off by Microsoft's bundling tactics for academic users. The laptops will be purchased in volume by Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT), which works as a volume purchaser for students in the state. Tamil Nadu is the Southern-most of India's 28 states, and home to the technology center of Chennai (formerly known as "Madras"). ELCOT says it will purchase more than 100,000 laptops this year, selling them to Indian students for about $800, a considerable mark-down compared to retail value, it says.

Big Buck Bunny is the colorful product of the Peach open movie project: an animated short released online and on DVD. But in addition to the 'toon itself, Peach has produced an altogether different yield: improvements to the Blender 3-D modeling application. Like its predecessor Project Orange, Peach pushed the open source tool forward with the demands of a real-world media production, in a way that hobbyist usage cannot. Could other free software projects use the same model?

NetGear has announced an 802.11g WiFi router and access point made to be hacked. Seemingly created in homage to LinkSys's hacker-friendly "WRT54GL," the WGR614L offers fairly generous complements of CPU power, RAM, and Flash, and supports several commercial and community-supported alternative Linux-based router distributions.

There is no dearth of software that can help you run that indispensable Windows app over Linux. Win4Lin has managed to survive through the years as an inexpensive tool for people who like to pay for support. The recently released Win4Lin 5, available for $30 a pop, has shrugged off the shortcomings of its predecessor and delivers on its "near native-performance" promise. When I reviewed Win4Lin 4 last year, the software wasn't easy to work with, thanks to its half-baked graphical user interface and over-reliance on the command line. It was on the edge of usability, with poor hardware support. Win4Lin 5 promises improvements on all these fronts, along with special pricing for desktop users, especially those running Ubuntu.

The new, record breaking, Firefox 3 web browser is the fastest version of Firefox yet. But are you really getting the biggest bang for your buck (metaphorically speaking, because, of course, Firefox is free?) You can eke out a better disk and memory footprint and higher speeds by building it yourself from the original source code. I'll show you how, with genuine metrics to prove it.

Images are an important part of an attractive, eye-catching blog. Well-chosen images can highlight and capture the essence of your communication, helping your audience to better appreciate your message. Here are three WordPress extensions that help you gain more control over the photos and graphics you want to display on your blog. Image Manager lets you set default image sizes and borders and control other aspects of your photo and graphics collection. ImageManager works especially well if you like to include images with each blog post and need to keep them to less than a specific width in order to avoid breaking a template design.

A business version of Micro-Star International's (MSI) Wind mini-desktop PC should be available in Asia and Europe in July, as products are already in mass production, a company representative said Monday.

One of the perennial jibes about open source is that it never innovates. This conveniently forgets that the World Wide Web was released as free software (Tim Berners-Lee contemplated using the GNU GPL before he decided to release it into the public domain). Despite the ludicrousness of the accusation, it is nonetheless always good to have further counterexamples.

You've seen it too - a recent Linux convert, used to clicking on executable files to install software, is often shocked to discover that Linux distributions use dedicated package managers to install and remove applications. But with a large number of distributions and philosophies, which is the best tool on the market? And how do they differ in terms of usability and convenience? If you are a new Linux user then our article explaining the various package management options is a must-read. In the news section, openSUSE developers defend their inclusion of KDE 4 into the recently released openSUSE 11.0, Mandriva cancels the first alpha release of version 2009 due to problems with X.Org, Debian completes the security infrastructure for the upcoming release of Debian "Lenny", and Ubuntu unveils the first developers' build of the new MID edition for mobile Internet devices. Also in this issue: a link to an interview with Zenwalk's Jean-Philippe Guillemin, a review of the upcoming Acer Aspire One and a round-up of rescue live CDs based on Linux. All this and more in this week's DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!

OK, I’ve now tried KDE 4.1. I’d been assured that it would be better than KDE 4.0x. It is. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I still find KDE 4.1 to be inferior to KDE 3.5x. KDE’s developers believe that KDE 4.1 “can fully replace KDE 3 for end users.” I don’t see it.

LXer Feature: 29-Jun-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a OLPC XO-1 spotted in a red enclosure and a possibly faked demo of XP an a OLPC as well, The MPAA says "We Don't Need No Stinking Evidence!", Linux developers petition for open Linux kernel drivers, No Vista Inside for Intel, Dear Microsoft, thanks for the help, Linux, Battle of the Titans - Mandriva vs openSUSE: The Rematch and Ten sticking points for new Ubuntu users.

The business of standardizing compression formats for audio and video files on the Internet is largely dominated by the big companies -- Adobe, Microsoft, etc. Some in the open source community are fighting vendor lock-in by creating superior formats. Now, if only users would adopt them.

Social networks are peppering the Internet with Facebook-like interactive features. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is fast becoming the defacto programming tool for Web developers. But by itself, Ajax is a daunting challenge that requires demanding coding skills. Ajax toolkits offer Web developers a shortcut method to build in the convenient and useful features that visitors of Web 2.0 sites have come to expect. However, the toolkit concept is nothing new to programming. What's newer is the proliferation of Java-based toolkits to feed the social network phenomenon.

This will be a concise report regarding, the spamming of web forms by commercially driven criminal enterprises. I am forced to make this short, because my knowledge is second hand and incomplete. I have been consulting with an associate, who has been trying to counter a deluge of spam that is being thrown both into his and into his client's email. We are not in agreement as the probable path; I think it is through the form each time whereas he suspects a single pass followed by cloning the resultant emails. However, I have no access to the email or the internals of the site. He just wants the problem solved with minimum effort. Therefore, it is possible his answers are not accurate; I simply cannot be certain.

Resuming regular bi-monthly releases, the Wine development team released 1.1.0 and is now available.

On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry.

Motorola has quietly started shipping three new Linux-based "PDA" phones. Available now in China, and also approved by the FCC for use in the U.S., the MotoMing a1600 and a1800 are higher-end versions of the popular a1200, while the a810 adds a lower-end Ming model.