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LXer Feature: 29-Oct-2010

Mr. Des Ligneris wrote that the adoption of Unity is a bold move and a good one for Canonical and Ubuntu, as the focus of computing is shifting wholesale to the internet and "The Cloud". It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don't see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a "Mobile Internet Device". Their use cases don't overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.

Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, shares his thoughts on Ubuntu's decision to replace GNOME with Unity. He is not happy.

Perhaps as important as the ability to properly and effectively scale hybrid clustered CPU environment (in this case over 6144 Intel Xeon CPUs and 5120 AMD GPUs), is the fact that the underlying operating system is entirely Linux.

Elementary 2.5 was released days ago and the latest Elementary theme brings in the much awaited dark panel elementary theme variant. Elementary 2.5 feels a lot more snappier too.

The open source Asterisk project started off as an effort to be an on-premise IP-PBX. Over the years, demand for increasingly scalable and modular approaches for voice communications has grown, which is why a new Asterisk project is being announced this week. The Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) is a new project sponsored by Digium that aims to build an open source VoIP system for large-scale deployments.

ITTIA DB SQL version 3.3 introduces new tools for software developers, in the form of a custom memory allocator and graphical database editing utility. This makes ITTIA DB SQL even more suitable for embedded relational data storage in device applications.

This article describes installation and usage of Google Chrome web browser in conjunction with Ubuntu Linux. The article also touches on some privacy concerns in regard to Google Chrome and its restrictive license. Although, Google Chrome web browser is a multi-platform application this article will be focused solely on Google Chrome and i386 Ubuntu Linux.

Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software.

The new European e-reader was just released and while it features a webbrowser, audio player, web store next to the book reading and everything with a touch screen, everything is also slightly buggy:

Oracle has updated its patent infringement suit against Google. Now the enterprise software corporation has point-blank accused the ad broker of directly copying its Java code, according to reports. According to InfoWorld, the originally vague suit now includes specific examples of code that Oracle claims Google had filched to use in Android, with examples thoughtfully attached. These include class libraries and documentation.

You've been using GIMP for cleaning up your photos -- but now you have a picture of a kitten or a bird or your new smartphone that you want to paste into another picture. It's one of the most common questions the GIMP community fields -- how do you take one part of a photo and make it ready to paste somewhere else? The answer is, "It depends." There are lots of different methods. Here are four of the most useful I've found.

Nautilus Elementary simplified Nautilus extensively. If you are wondering how Nautilus can be improved any further, DanRabbit has an answer every single time. Following mockups deals with integrating paths with search/edit entries in the Nautilus location bar.

Installing Webmin on CentOS 5.5. Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: October 28, 2010) - The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) with the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA: http://www.fossfa.net/) on November 13, 2010 (Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya) and February 12, 2010 in South Africa (location to be announced). These exam labs are part of a larger "train-the-trainers" program jointly sponsored by FOSSFA and InWEnt Capacity Building International of Germany (InWEnt: http://www.inwent.org/).

On October 10, Canonical released its latest installment of Ubuntu, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”. Like previous iterations, Maverick also includes variations from the standard Ubuntu Gnome interface. Kubuntu is the KDE variation of Ubuntu, and last week, I decided to upgrade from 10.04 and give 10.10 a try.

A quick search of the CVE database turns up 80 CVE numbers related to kernel vulnerabilities so far this year. At one recent conference or another, while talking with a prominent kernel developer, your editor confessed that he found that number to be discouragingly high. In an era where there is clearly an increasing level of commercial, criminal, and governmental interest in exploiting security holes, it would be hard to be doing enough to avoid the creation of vulnerabilities. But, your editor wondered, could we be doing more than we are? The response your editor got was, in essence, that the bulk of the holes being disclosed were ancient vulnerabilities which were being discovered by new static analysis tools. In other words, we are fixing security problems faster than we are creating them.

Firefox 4 is all over over the news and the funny thing is, Firefox 4 final release has not even happened yet. Firefox 4 beta 6 was released recently and it boasts of key performance improvements and a number of new and useful features like Tab Candy. Let's do a quick look at the latest Firefox 4 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into ProFTPd for virus scanning on an Ubuntu 10.04 system. This is achieved through mod_clamav. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through ProFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

Performance of your database server is directly tied to how well the underlying operating system is working, and there the performance is driven by the hardware you're using. To fit all of these pieces together—hardware performance, operating system performance, and database performance—you need a good monitoring system.

The simple performance tools on a UNIX-derived system are straightforward to use, and it's easy to show examples of good and bad behavior, the best way to teach how those tools are useful for monitoring. In this article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, we will cover iostat; Unix's monitoring tool.

Our last review of the Jolicloud 1.0 operating system was very appreciated, and we thought that it will be a very good idea to give you guys a glimpse into the next release, Jolicloud 1.1, which will be available for download/upgrade in November 2010.