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LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2010

A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of our Clients, he owns a company that does hooks up for prospective Employers with prospective Employees in the Fitness Industry, and in the process makes a few bob. He was complaining about his Asus netbook, which had Windows XP loaded on it, and how it has been getting progressively slower over time and knowing I use Linux, in fact I had recommended last year that he get someone, or do it himself and install Ubuntu UNR. He asked if I would install Linux on his machine.

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Lenny server.

It's a regular complaint: Linux is too hard. But is it hard, or are there other factors at play? We've all heard the complaint: "Linux is just too hard to use". Very often it's not defined in any more detail than that but it is enough for most users to write Linux off. So, is Linux too hard?

There are many ways to do the same tasks in Linux, which is a lovely thing because it means we can tailor our workflows to suit our own personal needs. Here are five of Carla Schroder's favorite speed and efficiency tips.

Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the "Evergreen" family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. The ATI kernel mode-setting support that we really care about these days is also about done, but it isn't yet published. The open-source ATI driver currently offers no 2D (EXA) acceleration and the 3D support either through a classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D also is not yet available.

Everyone is noting that Apple's iPad is a closed system; but there's a dangerous knock-on consequence of giving people the ultimate system for *consuming* content: they don't really understand computers. That's bad, because it means that politicians will find it even easier to bring in legislation like ACTA that will harm free software. Here's what can be done about it - and why the iPad might still be good news for open source.

Google released Chrome version 5 developer builds for Windows and Mac on Friday. "The devchannel has been updated to 5.0.307.1 for Windows and Mac," said the firm. On the Windows side of the fence, the default downloads directory on Vista and Windows 7 can now be used. Google has added a content settings window to the latest rough-round-the-edges iteration of its browser. The tool gives surfers more control over changing and policing their plug-ins, cookies, pop-ups, images and JavaScript. The search engine giant’s latest developer build, intended to be tested by hardcore coders, also comes with several bug fixes.

The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company. In the module called "The GNU/Linux operating system", the main contents are related with system administration. This book is the main documentation for the module. We will learn how to install and configure several computer services, and how to optimise and synchronise the resources. The activities that will take place in this module cover the studied topics in a practical approach, applying these concepts in real GNU/Linux systems.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2010

The sad thing is that Apple has basically delivered a Netbook but by chopping off the keyboard (and all of the I/O ports), giving it a touch screen, and crippling it significantly in several ways, they have everyone convinced that it is a new form factor. This is aided by the fact that it is reminiscent of devices from the Star Trek universe. In writing this article, I hope to expose the iPad for what it really is and stay out of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

While there can be some overlap between web designers and web developers, they tend to define their own specific worlds. However, what if a programmer would also like to be better at design? Where does he or she go? Turns out Brian Hogan and the folks at Pragmatic thought in that direction as well and came up with Web Design for Developers. I guess the title gives it away. But is this book just for programmers who want to learn design?

Starting with version 1.1, VideoLan Media Player (VLC) will get extensions support, and anyone will be able to write their own - like it is with Firefox extensions:

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with OpenSUSE 11.2 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running OpenSUSE 11.2). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

No, really. As trollish and dumb as they may seem, you still get such reactions. And the problem is that they may damage Free Software more now than ten years ago, when almost nobody knew what Free Software is anyway, so here are a few recent facts. http://stop.zona-m.net/node/87

Do you have problems with viruses and malware? Do you like to test different Linux distribution on your PC? Do you like to have tools and utilities available to check your PC, to partition your hard disk or to rescue data? This is perhaps the best tool you have ever seen and the best stuff for your USB Stick. Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility (Sardu) is software that can produce an ISO or an IMA anti-virus bootable CD, comprehensive collections of utilities, the most popular distributions of Linux Lite, and the best known Windows PE. In this article we’ll describe how to install more the 20 Live Systems on your USB Stick in 4 steps.

During much of the time I was running Ubuntu, I told myself that I'd be running Debian instead, if only I could get everything working. I have tried the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 build, and I still appreciate so many things working out of the box on my 2002-03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. Even the USB Headphone Set sound module I've been using was able to play system sounds and Flash audio in Ubuntu. However, I recently was able to get that sound module to work in Debian Lenny. All I had to do was plug it into a different USB port on the Toshiba, and now it's working fine.

Gábor Horváth has been developing the raw photo converter RawTherapee single-handedly, on Linux and Windows, since 2006. The application has been freeware the entire time, with Horváth accepting Paypal donations through the project's web site. Consequently, although there are significant changes in the 3.0 alpha release announced on January 4th, it was arguably bigger news that the project was switching to the GPLv3.

Well, it was bad enough when X@FOSDEM became a one day event (where for the past several years it has been a highly-populated two-day conference) at the upcoming Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) taking place in Brussels next weekend, but now it's not even a one day event. X@FOSDEM has just been sliced down to now just be a half-day conference... Well, five hours.

One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

Chris Green, a Microsoft employee who appears to use his MSDN blog here-and-there, posted a rather telling product support lifecycle update on December 2, 2009. In it, he details not only the public information found on Microsoft’s product support lifecycle site, but he boldly goes where no one has gone before by mentioning not only Windows 8, but Windows Server “2012? (Windows 8 Server) and Office “2012? (Office 15)… with dates.