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This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Mandriva 2010.0) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Mandriva 2010.0 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Keeping your system clean can be a time-consuming affair, unless you use specialized tools like BleachBit. With just a few mouse clicks, this nifty little utility can help you to purge all the junk produced by the system and installed applications.

Last week you learned the basics of using Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the command associated with them: getfacl, setfacl and chacl. This week you’ll learn that protecting the rights of your users is as important as protecting your users from themselves. You’ll also learn the effects of changes to user’s rights. Managing users and permissions is a full-time job. That’s why your job as System Administrator (SA) exists. Your job is to keep the system running smoothly for the system’s users. That includes patching, file maintenance, performance measurement, capacity planning and user maintenance.

A data center war between Red Hat and VMware seems to be accelerating. Partners like Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard may need to choose sides. Here's why.

So you just finished installing the latest version of Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) on your main machine, and you need to do some simple graphics work. Maybe you need to crop some photos or take out some sensitive information in a screen capture. Maybe you want to create a simple logo for your website or create a freehand drawing. If you open up the Applications menu and click on Graphics you won't find much. In fact, you won't find a tool that would let you do all of the tasks just mentioned.

I was quite surprised this morning whilst reading my RSS feeds to discover that Ubuntu has named their most recent ‘lite desktop‘ Unity. Surprised because we have our project, Unity Linux. Strange that both our ‘lightweight distribution and desktop’ and Ubuntu’s ‘lite desktop’ should share a name together.

What if the cloud was an environment that favors Open Source ? Read-more to know why the cloud is helping promote open source project and open source companies.

The new Unity interface for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Light will remind you of Gnome Shell, but Unity seems more usable, with the "dock" panel on the left. We took Ubuntu Unity interface for a test drive, so here are some screenshots and video I just took, as well as explainations on how the Unity dock works.

Here are three nice open source games for Linux. Go Ollie!, Bos Wars and Scorched 3D.

This week's column has been written a little more slowly than normal because on Wednesday, I tripped over the dog and broke my left thumb. Under strict instructions to keep it elevated, and concerned not to put too much strain on the remaining good hand, I went looking for resources for one-handed keyboard operation. Here are a few useful links in case you are ever in the same position!

Welcome to my new ComputerWorldUK blog, where I'll aim to bring you regular dispatches from the front lines of the free and open source software revolution. Starting out with news seems smart, so I'll use this post to announce my new job. Throughout the five years I spent as the chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems, I had the great pleasure of liberating the source code behind many great products. During my tenure Sun open sourced the Java platform, Solaris Unix, the UltraSPARC processor and much more.

Dan Kegel has been running some DirectX and OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu + Wine and Windows Vista, Here is the results of Dans recent benchmark test. Yagmarkdata now has data from five different benchmarks: 3dmark 2000, 2001, 2006 and heaven2_opengl, d3d9, and running on a semi-whimpy e8400 dual core box with an nvidia gt 220 card, on both Vista and Ubuntu+Wine.

The new Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) has just been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Kubuntu 9.10 desktop installation to Kubuntu 10.04.

There's always something noteworthy happening in Linux audio development. This week's news includes reports about a new Linux audio blog, music made by particle acceleration, how to use a laptop as a virtual music stand, synth emulation from the terminal command prompt, and watching the Linux Audio Conference on-line.

LXer Feature: 10-May-2010

In the Roundup this week we have a Faster and better Chrome 5 as well as 5 things you didn’t know VLC could do, Why rejecting Microsoft’s OSS contributions is counter-productive, Upgrading your distro should come with a warning and more. Enjoy!

Hi folks! We have some pretty big changes today, with an update to the latest KDE SC 4.4.3, and the addition of support for ConsoleKit and PolicyKit which have been enhanced to use shadow authentication. Thanks to Andrew Psaltis for doing some great work on polkit-1, and to Robby Workman for spending months following the sometimes random developments coming from the CK/PK camp. :-) Thanks to Eric Hameleers for leading the KDE 4.4.x Slackware development and handling the out-of-tree testing through http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/. And with that, we're calling this Slackware 13.1 BETA1. A stable release should be just around the corner...

Mark Shuttleworth just announced a version of Ubuntu for the dual-boot called Unity and a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios. These "Light" Ubuntu versions are optimized for the web.

Gnome 3.0 is coming to give the Linux desktop a boost. Gnome, the desktop environment favoured by the likes of Ubuntu Linux, is getting an overhaul. For users this means a number of things, including a new way of interacting with files and a new way of launching and managing applications.

I recently read through a post on "The Blog of Helios". The article was about the troubles of porting Osmos to Linux. There were apparently many struggles with audio and video support, due to the variety of platforms. This isn't surprising when we consider that variety is Linux's main selling point. Don't like [insert feature] in Ubuntu? Try Arch. Don't like [insert feature] in Arch? Try Slackware, ad infinitum. Yet, this hurts developers who are not part of the community and are writing software for a profit. Which distributions should they support? Which audio systems? Which DEs? Which WMs? Which graphics drivers? Which GUI toolkits? And these problems can be more serious than they at first appear. If you make the wrong choices with Linux, you may not just fail to sell the software, you could anger the Linux community and lose sales with other products as well (**cough** KDE4 **cough**).

Buggy kernel mode drivers in desktop security products from major vendors threaten to make mockery of the concept of Windows security.