Someone did a comprehensive comparison between Linux and Windows kernels. Yahooo! Enjoy the reading.
Source: http://widefox.pbwiki.com/Kernel%20Comparison%20Linux%20vs%20Windows
Logical Volume Management (LVM) makes it possible to dynamically group multiple drives/partitions into what appears to be one large chunk of storage. This may sound like a daunting task, however, as I will show its quite simple.
The following assumes that lvm2 is already installed.
Steps demonstrated:
I found this nice short guide for getting samba up and running. I always dread messing with samba because of problems I’ve had in the past. I had decided that I wanted normal user level security for when someone logs onto a share. This was a cleaner setup than my previous where I mapped every connection to a guest user account and automatically gave read/write access to specific IPs.
Next on the list: lvm setup to group several partitions and drives, nightly backups.
If you want to have a little fun while browsing web pages, paste the following code into the address bar, replacing the loaded page’s address, and hit enter. Since I cannot seem to get the code to wrap properly on the blog, just triple click it to select it all, then copy. :)
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);
Once it starts, even the links will still work. The effect is pretty awesome on pages with lots of images. Though you need a pretty good system to be able to do it if a page has high resolution images. :)
Great news for those Linux users out there who have been screwed by web content creators for the past year and a half or so. The beta version of Flash Version 9 is out. So run on over to Adobe Labs and grab it. :)
Getting it working is as simple as the following steps:
1. Download the installer for linux.
2. “tar xvf” the installer.
3. cp libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/ if you are root, or into ~/.mozilla/plugins/ if you are a user.
4. Restart firefox.
5. 
You now have Flash 9 working in Linux as well as a page that, “gasp”, makes flash seem decent.
In addition you did not even have to pay $600 and buy a PS3 to play Fl0w.
I’m a big fan of being able to walk up to a random computer pull up vim and know what I’m going to get. I am not a fan of loading up emacs on a box to finding that half of the keybindings that I am use to are not setup, indentation that I would have never conceived as useful being used, and a color scheme in place that could make me become sick. Now I’m minutes away from a useful environment with the config hacking and inet seraches for the name of that option that needs to be changed.
All of that… emacs can wash the dishes and… emacs will water the lawn and… emacs will scratch your back becomes worthless when your configuration is whiped or you on a different machine running a vanilla emacs setup and don’t have time to download and load the back scratcher module.
Want emacs to be usefull at all times on all computers? Consider an emacs that interacts with a web service to determin your config settings, language packs, what extensions you use and their settings, what elisp code needs to be imported, and if emacs its self needs to be updated. Imagine this web service has an account for you where you constructed or uploaded your emacs configuration and selected from a mix of options and extensions that you want in your emacs environment. Imagine that you sit at a random box and emacs M-x load-config user@mail.com and it connects to this web service and configures itself based on the configuration and packages you have set up on the web site. Maybe you have no web access but you’ve exported to a usb key and now emacs is building your custom environment based on the data its finding on that key.
I believe this may be worth creating, but there are many things to consider. I belive we are going to see more and more applications that set / retore their settings and behavior based on central configuration net services.
More on this stuff later…
Last night when I posted about getting my iPod to work with Linux, I spoke too soon.
I did get it to show up in Banshee and I dragged and droped a whole slew of songs on it (in Banshee), but in the end it was just dropping them in the iPods main directory. The iPod does not like this and will not show the music. It likes music index in its own special iPodish way. Its time for me to hold off for a while, keep booting Windows to load on songs, and wait for OSS development to catch up.
I also tried the iPodLinux and was left holding my… mouse when it complained about a sysinfo file missing. I think that the new iPods no longer depend on / use this file, but also read that you can create it your self, a search to undertake in the future.
Its been a couple of weeks but I finally sat down and got the iPod Nano working with my linux box. I guess it would have worked out of the box except the new iPods (I think generation 5?) do things a little differently with some index file and this was causing it to not show up in my music app, banshee. I was getting the message from the ipod app “Not a Valid iPod! Try Rebooting the iPod” so I thought this was the problem, but it wasn’t as it displayed this even after I got it working. Kinda misleading.
Anyways, getting the Nano working on my Gentoo box involved:
Banshee seems a little unstable, with some apparent deadlocks? where the cpu utilization goes to 100% with no response from the app (but I’ve seen this happen before the HEAD). Now, however, I don’t have to plug the usb into a different computer and boot windows to drop a couple of songs on the thing and it seems like it copies the music over faster than iTunes (or I have a good imagination). :)
While searching around for a Tux iPod picture to use I have just discovered ipodlinux and iDoom. Sweet!
Its been a cold long year for Linux, gaming, and me. Well, maybe not cold, but my mouse is pretty frosty in regard to fraggin’ action. Having been a big fan of Quake2 and 3 I was locked and loaded when I picked up a X2 w/ GeForce 7800 PCI Express system, about a year ago. I was ready to get some hot action brewing between myself and Quake 4 and Doom 3. I loaded up faithful Gentoo Linux and my games only to discover choppy video with crackling sound or no sound and amazingly smooth video.
Being a little stubborn I declared that Windows was never going on my glowing box just so I could gib up some time. So I hacked long and searched hard, but eventually lacking in determination and will, I surrendered and let my weeping Force de Ge lounge around like an old dog surviving another long dry day. That was until XGL and compiz dazzled my existence, but thats another post.
Today I got a good surprise. When getting OpenGL, GLX, and such re-setup something software snapped into place and not only did I get working what I was shooting for, Second Life (which is really interesting), but also all of my other games then worked with acceleration and perfect sound. Not much time to frag, but at least now Cory can no longer snicker at the thought of the poor tool who can not convince his Linux box to play with him.
This is interesting. Google is providing opensource project hosting with issue tracking, a project page, subversion, and mailling lists (google groups).
Using an all text based email reader, such as Mutt has its advantages and its disadvantages. Without going into what I consider advantages, my biggest annoyances are not being able to view picture attachments from within the browser and the frequent emails that contain HTML tags.
For the ladder there is a good solution, use a console based web browser as a viewer. Three quality products exist: w3m, links, and lynx. Of these w3m and links are the most powerful with w3m being the winner in my book.
Add one of the following to your $HOME/.mailcap and Mutt will use it to render html:
w3m
text/html; w3m -T text/html %s; needsterminal;
links
text/html; links -force-html %s; needsterminal;
lynx
text/html; lynx -force_html %s; needsterminal;
I switched from Emacs to XEmacs today as my primary editor for one main reason, XEmacs made it easy for me to change my font. This is not a trivial issue when you are running at a high resolution and do not feel like sitting with your nose in the screen, although apparently this feature is fluf acording to some Emacs buffs. It seems that there is some way of setting the font / font size in Emacs as well but I still have no idea how this is done.
Check out this live boot Linux distro that puts all of the tools to diagnose hardware problems and analyze networks at your fingertips.
Many common hardware problems are caused by bad RAM modules, overheated or broken CPUs, or bad sectors or clusters on hard disks. In this article we will introduce you to some open source tools you can use to trace these problems, and thus save time, money, and headaches.
I just got XGL and compiz on Gentto up and running and to put it mildly its amazing! It provides a win win with both advanced usability and the coolness factor at full throttle. Plus its very fast. Watching it on a co-workers computer didn’t compair to customizing it for myself and taking the steering wheel. It will be nice when xgl is there as a default install option, as opposed to the many many rough hours I have put into getting it working the last 2 days in Gentto on amd64 bit hardware.
Thats a pretty good review considering it has crashed twice since I have started writing this and to type capital letters I am having to hit the right shift and hold, hit the left shift, let go of the right shift, and then type the letter as a capital. My other options: use caplock everytime or disable all plugins except for gconf and decoration and then enable each of them. It seems that no one else has these wonderful shift key problems DOH! So, there are a lot of bugs and it will be cool to see this software in its more mature, futuristic state.
Gentto HOWTO_XGL/Troubleshooting
My 2 tips:
One thing I will definately be looking forward to is running transparent videos over desktop images to create a lively, flowing, dynamic desktop environment. I’ve been messing around with overlaying almost completely transparent fullscreen videos over the top of my desktop background and then using applications at no or little transparency on top of that. The effect is great! I think fluxbox has finally reached its date for this box.
I used to read a ton of the GNU / Linux news and articles. Now I skim gobs of headlines to find the the diamonds in the ruff. Mixed in with a lot of useful stuff like tutorials, new technologies, informative news, etc. always lies the slew of articles that focus on speculation about where things are headed and what “needs” to happen for “this and that” to be true. What I’m getting at is that I am annoyed by all of the fluff that is published everyday about GNU / Linux. Like these authors know the definitive Linux agenda that should be. It seems that most of these are written from the perspective of GNU / Linux / Open Source being like a business with business like goals. GNU / Linux may indeed appear like a business with businessy like goals, but don’t be mistaken it is its own beast.
Open source is created by hackers who are creating solutions. Whatever the reason, drive, or motivation may be. There is a large pool of people who develop for the shear pleasure of developing or for the necessity of a solution to meet their needs. It really doesn’t matter if the only graphical user interface in existance was really “shitty” if none of these people get annoyed, care about having, or believe they have a shitty graphical user interface and do nothing to improve it. It doesn’t matter because everyone can do what they want, what suits their needs. Most likely if enough people/users/developers think that it is indeed shitty someone is going to come along and do something about it and hopefully not write a article about how it is shitty and how someone should fix it.
What would make me happy is if these authors directed their opinions towards something specific, a company, or a product (not open source). For example titles like: “Linux needs to improve this…..” or “Linux has this wrong….” should be something like “Red Hat should do this” or “Suse got something wrong”. What would make me even more happy would be these people seeing something that they think needs improvement and doing anything at all to help improve it, according to their perception of improvement. Then feel free to write about it. This is how things get created in the open source world, not by stating that someone else should do something because it needs to be so.