Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

What does "su" mean to you? super user switch user substitute user subshell Other (tell us in the comments) Do you still prefer using the command line to accomplish tasks on your Linux or UNIX based system? For some, navigating the filesystem and firing off commands in a terminal window can be extremely productive. SSHing from one machine to another or running scripts in the background are everyday occurences for system administrators.

Do you routinely make changes to more than a dozen machines at a time? Read this article to find out about a tool to make that task much easier. I'll be honest. Even though this library is fully five years old, I hadn't heard of Fabric until about six months ago. Now I can't imagine not having it in my digital tool belt. Fabric is a Python library/tool that is designed to use SSH to execute system administration and deployment tasks on one or more remote machines. No more running the same task, machine by machine, to make one change across the board. It is a simple fire-and-forget tool that will make your life so much simpler. Not only can you run simple tasks via SSH on multiple machines, but since you're using Python code to execute items, you can combine it with any arbitrary Python code to make robust, complex, elegant applications for deployment or administration tasks.

Samsung developers last week provided patches for a new cpufreq governor dubbed "LAB", or the "Legacy Application Boost", for the Linux kernel. The Legacy Application Boost cpufreq governor uses historical cpuidle usage information for determining the number of currently active processor cores and uses that with the number of idle CPU cores for determining the next frequency dynamically.

Are you thinking about rolling your own Linux-powered device as part of a start-up, or through a Kickstarter project? Before you go that route, it’s best to understand what’s ahead of you, suggests Opengear co-founder Tony Merenda in this LinuxGizmos guest column.

The Linux Foundation has announced that it has founded the OpenDaylight Project, which will create an open source framework for software-defined networking (SDN). Joining as founding Platinum members of the project are Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft and Red Hat. NEC and VMWare join as Gold members and Arista, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Nuage Networks and Plumgrid join as Silver members. Platinum and Gold founding members are expected to donate software and engineering resources to build OpenDaylight; in the case of Platinum members that includes a commitment to allocate the equivalent of ten engineers to the project.

The 15th anniversary of Mozilla also saw moves in the browser ecosystem that are laying out the technical future of the web. But where next for Mozilla asks Glyn Moody    

Someone claiming to be a "1337 hacker" has defaced programming projects hosted by SourceForge.net Web pages for the network utility Angry IP Scanner and other open-source software hosted by the online coding vault were altered by the infiltrator. The individual responsible claimed the websites were "hacked" using a "backdoor", and darkly warned he or she could have supposedly caused far worse damage.

Dell has doubled up on its range of PCs which run Ubuntu, following up its Ubuntu Ultrabook release with a Ubuntu-running desktop PC aimed at gaming – Dell subsidiary Alienware, which specialises in gaming hardware, is now selling its X51 series desktop PC in the US with Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed.

At age 18, Kenyan students take a nationally-standardized test, the results of which determine not only their eligibility for university education, but also the school they will attend as well as their area of concentration. This transition is associated with a lot of stress and depression, since students believe that their entire future relies on filtering sequentially through the formal education system. This doesn't have to be the case. Our non-profit organization, Tunapanda (Swahili for "we are planting"), believes that due to the high rates of growth projected in ICT, technologically savvy individuals will be in high demand regardless of whether or not they are in possession of an advanced degree. We want to provide a means of technology learning that is both useful and accessible. And, we believe that open source holds the key to making this a reality.

When it comes to public key cryptography, most systems today are still stuck in the 1970s. On December 14, 1977, two events occurred that would change the world: Paramount Pictures released Saturday Night Fever, and MIT filed the patent for RSA. Just as Saturday Night Fever helped popularize disco through its choreography and soundtrack, RSA helped popularize cryptography by allowing two parties to communicate securely without a shared secret.

Curious how NVIDIA Corp and Valve Software brought the Source Engine to Linux and their game porting lessons learned? Earlier this week I wrote about the NVIDIA and Valve sharing their lessons in porting Source to Linux. That article drew a fair amount of interest from the many Linux enthusiasts and Linux gamers reading Phoronix. Questions were raised whether there was a video recording of the presentation to shed additional light on the matter.

Denx Computer Systems has introduced a second member of its SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) product line. The M53 module is available with Freescale’s i.MX535 or i.MX537 SOCs (system-on-chip processors), which integrate an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, graphics engines, and numerous other functions.

Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.

The Debian Project has announced that Bytemark Hosting has donated a fully populated 16 server blade HP BladeSystem with HP Modular Storage Arrays containing 57TB of storage. The new server, which will make its home at Bytemark's new data centre in York, is said to be worth £150,000 per annum in commercial terms. Bytemark said that they have relied on Debian on their servers since they started the company in 2002 and said it "was always an embarrassingly good deal".

Acquia, the support and services company run by Drupal lead developer Dries Buytaert, has open sourced Drupal Create, an iOS application that allows Drupal users to post content to their site from their mobile devices. Buytaert says open sourcing the application is "kick-starting development of mobile content publishing apps for Drupal." The open source Drupal content management system (CMS) runs a number of high profile web sites from the official web site of the White House to the web sites of Stanford University and General Electric.

The Open Book is an essential reference point for those interested in the culmination of a global movement for change in a time of rapid social progress.

For tweaking Ubuntu in general, there is the Ubuntu Tweak that take care of most of the system tweak and configuration. However, if you are using the Unity desktop, there are some features that are not covered by Ubuntu Tweak. This is where Unity Tweak Tool comes in. Unity Tweak Tool is a configuration tool for the Unity Desktop, providing users access to features and configuration options. While most of the configuration options are available in the System Settings as well, Unity Tweak Tool brings them all together in a single place so you don’t have to search high and low for each setting.

Heroku's Matt Thompson has announced the Helios framework, an open source backend for iOS applications which provides a range of essential services. These include data synchronisation, user accounts, push notifications, in-app purchases and passbook integration. The design focuses on "mobile first" developers who build out their applications on the mobile device and then want to implement the server-side mechanisms as they become necessary.

The chief developer of the popular alternative Android firmware CyanogenMod thought that requiring devices to report unique smartphone and tablet data would be an unqualified blessing. They reckoned without their users.

Embest is accepting pre-orders for a $99 single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1GHz dual-core Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC). The compact “MarS Board” provides interfaces for Gig-Ethernet, SATA, HDMI, camera, and more, and it’s supported with ready-to-use embedded Linux and Android OS images.