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Tuning IO is a tedious task which requires many iterations until you eventually reach your goals or see any results. While tuning IO, I think that tuning for read performance is a different task from tuning for write performance. Combing them both can sometimes be one of the hardest tasks a SysAdmin can face. I decided to focus on write performance in the first article.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on a Fedora 15 GNOME desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8100 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop. I will use the free nouveau driver in this tutorial instead of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. nouveau is an accelerated Open Source driver for NVIDIA cards that comes with experimental 3D support on Fedora 15 - on my test system 3D support was working without any problems.

LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2011

In the Roundup this week we have RMS telling to resist the temptations of the cloud, good bye Kubuntu, numeric relativity with the Einstein Toolkit and Microsoft is in the top 5 contributors to the Linux kernel? Methinks not.. Enjoy!

Slackware Linux is one of the most powerful distributions available. But its power comes at a price. It's far less user-friendly than many other distributions. In fact, only Gentoo tops Slackware for difficulty. But if you avoid Slackware for those reasons, you'll miss out in a number of ways. Here are 10 of them.

One of the challenges I ran into while installing Arch was configuring the Wi-Fi network. In Arch is not that much of a problem, because their documentation is very well laid out, but what if you are using something else?

We will talk about how to connect to Non-Secured Networks, as well as WEP and WPA protected networks.

It has emerged that in 2007, Jonathan Schwartz (the then CEO of Sun Microsystems) gave heartfelt congratulations to Google for incorporating Java into Android. Google now has another defence against Oracle's Java patent lawsuit using the doctrine of estoppel.

Mozilla Foundation is re-forming the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group (MEWG). This is a complete reversal in attitude on Mozilla's part, and the right move to make. Firefox and Google Chrome can't continue to take market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer without convincing enterprise administrators that these browsers are safe, secure, and thoroughly tested. It just won't happen. Furthermore, nothing could produce more distrust from enterpise IT administrators than statements that make it seem like they don't figure into the grand scheme of things.

Nvidia 275.21 has been released. Version 275.21 adds support for GeForce 540M, restored the release splash screen in the NVIDIA X driver and also fixes a handful of problems.

Document-oriented databases are particular strong in situations where horizontal scalability is required. As your database grows, additional servers or resources from the cloud can be added thereby avoiding the need to use expensive supercomputers.

Ahead of the Berlin Desktop Summit, several GNOME and KDE developers have begun a mailing list battle...over a name. In particular, that with GNOME 3.0 their control panel areas is called "System Settings", which is precisely what the KDE developers call their system control area too...

After not being updated for a few mainline kernel release cycles, the real-time (RT) Linux kernel has been updated against the Linux 3.0 kernel release...

ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

This article, presents the three graphical interfaces for managing ufw that I am aware of. If you know of another that is not listed here, tell us about it.

For those with a Wiimote controller for Nintendo's Wii console, it's long been possible to use this Bluetooth-based motion controller with Linux when installing external packages. Just pulled into the Linux 3.1 kernel, however, is a Wiimote HID driver...

By popular demand, one of our members has moved from a backup some of his old articles: "I don't know about you, but Windows users frequently show me photos/DVDs/slideshows edited with the usual programs for video editing. Yes, I could use Windows, too (note: not one of my computers has Windows installed.), but I love using a Linux distro, particularly Ubuntu. So I chose to learn Cinelerra and discovered that, after the first impression, it's very easy software to use. The envy of the “Windows users” would be priceless."

I'm happy to announce the succesful GNU Health Academia at the United Nations University, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during the last week of June.

Microsoft has sent a Happy Birthday message to the Linux Foundation, congratulating them on turning 20 years old. The video, created by the Microsoft Germany team and shared on the Linux video site, documents the past twenty years of sniping and rivalry between the two platforms, though suggests that the end for such arguments might be in sight.

Linux 3.0 has been released, featuring a storage backend for Xen virtualization and an antifrag and data-scrubbing features for the Btrfs filesystem. Meanwhile, Thomas Gleixner released a major new, real-time Linux patch that will ready Linux 3.0 for highly-deterministic applications....

Red Hat released version 5.7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, adding new drivers and KVM hypervisor improvements. In other enterprise Linux news, Oracle acquired Ksplice and its Linux-based hot-patching update technology, and an eWEEK review found the new Ubuntu-based Stackops Linux distro speeds the process of configuring and deploying OpenStack clouds....

Pardus is a Linux distribution developed in Turkey. To be specific, it is developed and maintained by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜB?TAK). It is a desktop-oriented distribution based on KDE, the K Desktop Environment.

This article presents a detailed review of the latest stable release, Pardus 2011.1,

These two questions came out on a mailing list recently. Since the answers are relevant for everybody interested in Free Software development, especially, but not only, in educational/non-profit contexts, I put them online in one page. Feedback is very welcome!