Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all.

What sort of impact can you expect from switching a machine from the Gigabit Ethernet NIC that come on its motherboard to a higher-end Intel desktop NIC? I benchmarked two common gigabit NICs found on motherboards against two Intel PCIe desktop gigabit NICs, targeting the specific purpose of accessing an NFS share over the network. The short version: throughput for sequential read/write operations didn't improve much, but latency was much better, allowing anything that needs a network round trip, like create, delete, and seek, to work much faster.

Software teams must act to protect systems and development projects from revenge attacks by disgruntled current and former employees. So says Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's CERT, which is advising organizations take basic steps including code encryption, enforcement of code-change and access controls, reading their log monitors and denying access to non-project staff, such as systems administrators.

If you're looking for a GNOME desktop for the popular PCLinuxOS (PCLOS), then newly released PCLinuxOS Gnome might be for you. PCLinuxOS Gnome is a community-developed Linux distribution built on the official PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 distribution, which is a minimized system containing the bare-bones necessities for a running system, a skeletal window manager, and a remastering tool. PCLinuxOS itself, known for its ease of use, beauty, and functionality, is loosely based on Mandriva Linux. It retains the RPM package format, ports the Mandriva Control Center and live installer, and focuses primarily upon KDE. It also contains components from Gentoo, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. The distro's developers tend to adapt the best elements of some of the best distros available for their own distribution. They tweak, customize, and rebuild each package for PCLOS, creating a fast and stable environment.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time. Wubi is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS), which will be released this April. Both Wubi and Ubuntu 8.04 are available now in stable beta versions.

In this age of multi-core processors and 3-D desktops, some people still get work done on old resource-strapped single-core machines, thanks to programs like the AbiWord word processor. The latest stable AbiWord 2.6.0 release was unveiled last month, two years after the software's last stable release. Feature-wise, the little cross-platform word processor has closed the gap with heavyweight OpenOffice.org Writer, but it suffers from the oldest Linux ill of all -- it's a pain to install.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas, is a small event, with only about 300 invited attendees. Because it is small, you can find yourself face-to-face or in conversation with some of the biggest names in and around the Linux kernel, business, and open source scenes, including Ted Ts'o, Jon "maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Dan Frye, and Larry Augustin. The venue for the event -- the J.J. Pickle Research Center Campus at the University of Texas -- is the same place where IBM held its first "secret" Linux summit in 1999 to announce and refine its Linux strategy internally.

South Africa’s minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, took centre stage at a protest march in Norway today. The march was held to protest alleged irregularities in the ratification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard last week. Sections of a speech, given by the minister ahead of the ISO vote last week, were read out to the gathered crowd by Steve Pepper, former chairman of the Norwegian committe responsible for that country’s OOXML vote.

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.

The Asus Eee PC ultraportable comes bundled with a version of Xandros as its operating system. If you would like to try a different Linux distro on your Eee, there are plenty of options to choose from, including eeeXubuntu, EeeDora, ZenEee, EeePCLinuxOS, and Puppeee. The latter is based on Puppy Linux, a tiny Linux distribution that sports a few unique features that make it a perfect candidate for use on machines like the Eee PC.

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology. The potential for your hard drive to be your system's performance bottleneck makes knowing how fast your disks and filesystems are and getting quantitative measurements on any improvements you can make to the disk subsystem important. One way to make disk access faster is to use more disks in combination, as in a RAID-5 configuration.

Guest commentator Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Ziff Davis Enterprise tells what, in his opinion, is important about the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit going on right now in Austin, Texas.

Open Health Tools (OHT), based in the United States, announced its Health Interoperability Framework on Tuesday, which will see the organization work with international standards bodies, governments and companies from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States to develop common healthcare IT products and services.

Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor. In short, Ringside’s Social Application Server is designed to add social networking capabilities to existing applications and content. It does this providing hooks into enterprise data sources while delivering compatibility and interoperability with Facebook applications via the Facebook API, while support for Google and MySpace’s OpenSocial is also on its way.

After last week's unveiling of Mobile Internet Device (MID) prototypes based on Intel's Atom Centrino chipset, the pundits are weighing in. At ZDNet, Dana Blankenhorn blasts the whole lot as "ugly" while at TechNewsWorld, Rob Enderle calls the new Linux-based Lenovo MID an "iPhone killer."

Live CDs are still something that are relatively new to the Fedora Project, but because of their integration to the build system and the user facing tools such as livecd-tools allowing for easy re-spinning, they’re a fairly central part of what Fedora can offer people. Could you give us a bit of background on this and explain the current state of live spins in Fedora 8?

Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.

How do I like WordPress 2.5? In a word, "wow." Its developers promised that WordPress 2.5, released last month, was more than just "a fresh coat of paint." Instead, they said, 2.5 was a "from the ground up" redesign. The goal was to create a new WordPress that would be powerful but easy to administer. After upgrading my WordPress installation and using the new format, I found that the WordPress development team has done a fabulous job of making WordPress even better than it was. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.

An API should refrain from making promises that it cannot keep. A recent episode involving the kernel's in_atomic() macro demonstrates how things can go wrong when a function does not really do what it appears to do. It is also a good excuse to look at an under-documented (but fundamental) aspect of kernel code design. Kernel code generally runs in one of two fundamental contexts. Process context reigns when the kernel is running directly on behalf of a (usually) user-space process; the code which implements system calls is one example. When the kernel is running in process context, it is allowed to go to sleep if necessary. But when the kernel is running in atomic context, things like sleeping are not allowed. Code which handles hardware and software interrupts is one obvious example of atomic context.

MARENA, the government agency responsible for the environment in Nicaragua, has asked us to use a biofilter waste water treatment system instead of a traditional septic tank and drain field for the Geek Ranch. The reasoning is that as we are building in a nature reserve, we are being held to higher standards than is typical outside the reserve. While we don't claim to be waste water system experts, we are geeks so this sounded like a technology challenge. Beyond that, the good news, is that a local friend retired from being a wastewater engineer (even though there are many other titles associated with the job) so we have the resources to combine his knowledge of the, shall we say, material handling part of the system with our knowledge of control systems.