Archive for the 'Linux' category

If you are interested in GNU/Linux and want some useful e-reading, you should jump to this list of free ebooks related to Linux from LinuxHaxor.net.

When you have a computer with multiple partitions on the same disk or several disks with different partitions, things start getting bad if one of them is a Linux Ext or Ext2 partition: Usually, you can’t access the Linux partition from your Windows computer, Microsoft totally ignore your disk/partition.

In order to correct this, you can/must use a special Windows driver able to recognize correctly those Linux Ext/Ext2 partitions. Ext2 IFS provides full read/write access. It’s is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows. When installed in your Windows computer, it simply becomes able to natively access the Linux disk. After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

Download from fs-driver.org.

A good 2-part tutorial from C|net.

• Dual-Boot Windows and Linux, Step 1: Get Ubuntu
• Dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux

You install your PC some time ago, it may be necessary to clean it up a little in order to keep or improve its raw speed. As a matter of fact, even if we are no longer in the old times of Windows 98 that were nearly forcing you to a re-install once or twice a year, it is not unusual to see that installing many new software packages (voluntarily or indirectly) leads to tons of data and roadblacks for your PC.

Here are a few solutions to improve the situation:

• Optimize Windows start with the help of Microsoft BootVis (source: LH).
• Optimize Linux start (a previous article on Roumazeilles.net: Linux boot sequence in images).
• Clean up a Linux installation with FSLint which will find -for example- duplicate files (source: DS).
• CCleaner for Windows.
• Slim Down and Speed Up Linux (LH)

I hope it will help you in securing a faster PC whatever your prefered Operating System.

If you are a gamer (as in video games), if you like the challenge of confronting other players in FPS shootouts, if you are using GNU/Linux, you will be interested to find the comparison brought by LinuX-gamers.net: Comparison of Free Software Shooters with:

• Sauerbraten
• OpenArena
• Alien Arena
• Nexuiz
• World of Padman
• Tremulous
• War§ow

Do you remember my newsbit about LightZone for Linux? Unfortunately, you may also have noticed that some time later, LightCrafts had stopped distributing it.

However, after a petition on the forums, things changed again and version 3.3 beta of LightZone for Linux is again available for download.

It is still difficult to be sure if the final version 3.3 will be freely available, but I feel that it would still be a good way for LightCrafts to widen the paying distribution of this very good tool for digital photographers: LightZone.

Thanks to LifeHacker, and if you have the following, you will be able to use your iPhone to access Internet from your laptop.

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Source: LifeHacker “Use Your iPhone’s Internet Connection On Your Laptop [Feature]“.

A backup, this is nearly nothing. But it can help you, it can save you, when disaster will strike. Since when didn’t you backup?

Some ideas:

• Remember to copy the contents of your Flash memory card (even more if you store a lot of JPEG images on your big Flash card)
• Copy the data files from your PC onto an external drive
• Send yourself your important data on a separate email account (and let them there)
• Use WP-Database-Backup to backup your WordPress web site database
• Use free DriveImage XML to backup a full-drive image of a disk drive

It’s time to prepare yourself for a better-backed-up year.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but with the newest PC equipped with more than 1 gigabyte of DRAM, the 32-bit version of the Linux kernel is usually showing issues around the use of 2-4GB of central RAM.

It appears that it’s only a matter of checking the kernel configuration to go further. All the details in “Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Here’s how to use it“.

When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:

• How To: Control Ubuntu from Windows
• How To: Build a BitTorrent box
• Run Linux apps on Windows.. kinda (X-Windows system on MS-Windows)

The Linux kernel is trying to be the best contender in the race against electrical power use. In this context, a web site has been created to support this tendency and to help GNU/Linux users improve their power efficiency: LessWatts.org.

It even has some downloadable free applications to help you find the worst power hungry applications of your Linux box.

RAID storage is a good way to ensure a good security for your data: Two or more discs are used to give some redundancy and be sure that in case of a single drive failure you can still access your files (it will not protect you against deleting the files, though). However, the problem is often that RAID storage is very expensive or very complex (buying an expensive appliance, setting up a complex PC configuration). So much so that a normal user (a photographer willing to protect her zillions of digital images, a student willing to give reliability to his MP3 and DivX files, etc.) will not do it.

Now, Iomega is proposing a solution for an external RAID at a bargain price (It’s available in a 500 GB model with street pricing as low as $240). Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder is giving it a run and tells us all about it: Tiny Terabyte RAID: Iomega 1 TB StorCenter Network Hard Drive Review.

Mad is the only adjective you want to use with the guy. and probably about Linux, since Saikee installed no less than 145 Operating Systems on his PC, including 137 different GNU/Linux distributions.

Linux.com published a good post giving three ideas about how to optimize your GNU/Linux distribution performance.

Rather than downloading a pirated copy of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), I keep repeating that you should try a free download of OpenOffice. But some people complain that it is too slow. I am not of this opinion, but I found a post about how to accelerate OpenOffice on an Ubuntu GNU/Linux. But this advice is applicable to other configurations (OpenOffice is available for Windows, GNU/Linux, Apple Mac).

The bootchart utility is able to produce a simple PNG image of the boot sequence of your GNU/Linux configuration. Installation is a snap:

sudo apt-get install bootchart

The result is a nice little thing like: