Madhav Kobal (You cannot afford to ignore Linux)

A "reconfigurable" computer, it can rearrange its internal circuitry to suit the task at hand. A supercomputer named Novo-G, described by its lead designer as likely the most powerful computer of its kind in the world, became operational this week at the University of Florida (UF). Novo-G gets the first part of its name from the Latin term for "make anew, change, alter", and the second from "G" for "genesis". A "reconfigurable" computer, it can rearrange its internal circuitry to suit the task at hand. "Applications range from space satellites to research supercomputers — anywhere size, energy and high speed are important," said Alan George, professor, electrical and computer engineering and director, UF's National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing. According to the university's website, traditional computers use so-called "fixed logic devices" to perform a large va...

Linux is considered to be one of the most secure operating systems, but what if you are setting your system for public use? Then it becomes necessary that you should set some rules on the usage of computer so that the users are restricted to some particular areas of the system and they should not play with sensitive options. In Ubuntu, you can use Lockdown Editor (Pessulus) to lock down your settings specially Gnome Desktop and Panels. Lets explore how we can install it in Ubuntu, go to Applications > Add/Remove , and choose Lockdown Editor and click Apply Changes . It will take couple of minutes to install it, once installation is complete you can launch it from System > Administration > Lockdown Editor . Now there are some categories which lets you lock down the system options, under General category you can apply general rules like you can disable command line interface, printing and save to disk. Please note that you should apply these rules by logging in as main ad...

Here is a very simple tip that will allow you to save some power and hence extend your battery life (on laptops and netbooks) on your Linux system. Typically in a Linux graphical environment like GNOME or KDE, whenever we insert a CD or DVD into your CD/DVD-ROM drives, a window pops open automatically showing the contents of CD or DVD. Disabling auto polling Although it is a cool feature but it comes with some cost – your computer program like HAL in this case has to typically poll the CD-ROM drive every few seconds to see if there is CD inserted or not and this process causes some extra power consumption. With all the “Going Green” hoopla present around us, let’s us see how we can tell hal to stop polling for the CD-ROM device like this: #hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom Output: Following symlink from /dev/cdrom to /dev/scd0. Polling for drive /dev/cdrom have been disabled. The fdi file written was /etc/hal/fdi/information/media-check-disable-storage_model_iHAS120___6....

Yahoo scoops up Xoopit, a Web services specialist that combs through the glut of files, photos and videos floating in users' Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail clouds and lets users post the content on other social networks and blogs to share with their friends. Yahoo hopes to place ads around the tool, which has powered the My Photos section in Yahoo Mail since December. Google, AOL and others lose out on this one.

SMILE is a simple and easy to use application for creating video slideshows in minutes. The slideshow can be created using images and video files and supports the latest video output rendering XVID, MPEG2, Flash Video and DV formats. You can add effects like transition, background images, image rotation, opacity, etc.. Download : -DEBS (Ubuntu Jaunty) http://download.tuxfamily.org/ufs/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/graphics/ http://download.tuxfamily.org/ufs/dists/jaunty/main/binary-amd64/graphics/ -RPMS (OpenSUSE 11.1) ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/11.1/x86_64 ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/11.1/i586

The Palm Pre is considered by many as the most potent iPhone-killer. It has a sleek design, a powerful OS, and a great numer of supported 3rd party applications. Even though the iPhone is the most popular smartphone around and I'm quite impressed by some of its features, I still believe that Palm Pre beats the iPhone in certain important areas: 1. Linux-based webOS With webOS, the Palm Pre offers true multitasking capabilities that will enable users to run multiple applications at the same time. You can easily and fluidly switch between running applications (just like swapping cards) on Palm Pre's touchscreen display. Meanwhile, the latest iPhone OS 3.0 still has a very limited multitasking feature. 2. Easily-replaceable battery I strongly believe that every mobile phone should have a battery that can be easily replaced or swapped because we use our cellphone all the time and we all know that batteries don’t last that long. Unlike the iPhone, Palm Pre's battery door c...

Open-source software has been making inroads into U.S. federal agencies for years, most notably in January when the U.S. Department of Defense set up an internal forge to host open-source software for use by the government. Now NASA, not to be outdone, has created its own open-source software repository , with a diverse array of software available "as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions." NASA indicates several purposes for making its software open source: To increase NASA software quality via community peer review. To accelerate software development via community contributions. To maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research. To increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA's education mission. Some of the 23 projects currently listed, like BigView , reflect a developer focus. BigView "allows for interactive panning and zooming of images," but only if you're running Linux on your desktop. Others, like Livingstone2 , ...

Open Source for America is an alliance of more than 50 companies (including Red Hat, Oracle ( News - Alert ) and Sun), technology industry leaders, associations, various non-governmental organizations, communities and academic/research institutions. It’s purpose? To promote the use of free and open source software by the U.S. federal government. This general statement can be deconstructed into three mission goals: (1) to effectuate changes in U.S. Federal government policies and practices so that all the government may more fully benefit from and utilize free and open source software; (2) to help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the Federal government on technology requirements; and (3) to raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software. OSA may also participate in standards development and other activities that may support its open source m...

MICROSOFT SEEMS TO BE getting all open saucy all of a sudden, as it has released more code under the General Public License (GPL) that's often applied to (gasp!) free software. The Vole sent out some code to help Linux virtualisation guests run under Windows Hyper-V hosts earlier this week and now it has released code for the open source online learning system Moodle. The code Microsoft released is a Live Services Plug-in for Moodle licenced under the GPLv2. Writing in his bog , Peter Galli, a community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, said that the plug-in adds Microsoft's Live@edu services such as e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle user experience and makes them available via single sign-on. Moodle is an open sauce course management system that teachers use to build online learning websites for their classes. It is said to have about 30 million users in 207 countries. The Volish plug-in is the first of what will b...

A recent set of Linux distro benchmarks appears to show some surprising results. Yet it also shows the dangers of relying too heavily upon such benchmarks to make real-world technology decisions. Phoronix is one of the few Web sites with a heavy focus on Linux hardware testing. Its editors have also developed a comprehensive, and highly regarded, testing and benchmarking suite for Linux distros. As a result, Phoronix is a notable source for comparative data on Linux distro performance, involving both multiple distros and different releases of the same distro. Recently, Phoronix offered up comparative benchmarks of four leading Linux distros: "With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. To see where these Linux distributions are at, we used their latest development rele...

Have you ever come across a server that is doing a lot of traffic? Maybe you have logged in to see a process running at 100% CPU, so you know the culprit, but instead of kill -9ing it, wouldn’t it be great to see what exactly it is up to? Or even if you see a process and don’t know exactly what it is doing, and you are just curious what it is up to? As with most issues there are several ways to skin this cat. You can use tcpdump or wireshark to sniff the all of the network traffic on the device. If you know the port the program is running on (you can use lsof for that), you can restrict traffic to that port. But what if the program is jumping ports, or even uses a side-port for some sort of data transmission (UDP?). The main problem going down this route is that on a server that is doing any significant bit of traffic, it is like sorting through a needle in a haystack. If you have a single process that is taking up all of your bandwidth, you can probably find it pretty fast. But if t...

MultiTail is an improvement on the well-known program tail, which allows you to view multiple files at the same time in the same window. It colorizes them, making viewing much easier. MultiTail is available as a package for most distros, and you can also install it from source . By default MultiTail does the same thing as tail -f , i.e. watches files in real time. To watch two files at once, the basic usage is: multitail /var/log/messages /var/log/auth.log To scroll through the files, press 'b' and pick the file you want from the list. You'll then get the last 100 lines of that file to scroll through using the cursor keys. You can also use 'gg'/'G' to go to the top/bottom of the scroll window. If you want more lines, exit the scroll window with 'q', hit 'm', and enter a new value for the number of lines to store. Even better, instead of viewing the files in separate windows, you can merge them: multitail -I /var/log/apache2/ac...

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave. While about 6,000 developers got their hands on Wave Monday, a post on the Google Wave developer blog says the company isn't planning to open it up to everyday users until September 30th. At that time, some 100,000 users will be let into the program. To be a part of that first run, users will have had to have signed up to use the service on Google's invite page. Along with a hard date on the semi-public beta test, Google also highlighted a few developer creations using Wave's API. One of them, called Waves in WordPress , lets bloggers quickly embed an entire Wave conversation into a blog post, which lets readers view and interact with it. Similar tools that let you do that with other social and blogging can be expected as Wave's API matures. First in...

You read that right — Microsoft has become a contributor to the Linux kernel. Microsoft and Greg Kroah-Hartman have posted about this in more detail, so I’d encourage you to go read those posts for the full details. The long and short of it, though, is that Microsoft has contributed roughly 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel related to their Hyper-V drivers. As Greg says, this is no different from any other company contributing to the Linux kernel — lots of companies are becoming contributors to the kernel, so why not Microsoft? On the other hand, it’s Microsoft , so it is a kind of big deal that they have come 180 degrees to become a kernel contributor. This really underscores the importance of the Linux Driver Project that Greg has been working on. It also underscores the importance of having an open dialog with companies. This week, I’m in San Jose for OSCON. A little more than 10 years ago, I was in San Jose for LinuxWorld Expo, and the idea of Microsoft contributing a k...

What's New? SLED 11 leverages all the updates found in openSUSE 11.1 to bring a fully up-to-date distribution to the enterprise. In addition, SLED 11 includes a number of Novell developed features, such as the AppArmor application security tool, specifically targeted at enterprise users. It also includes proprietary applications like Adobe Acrobat Reader, not typically included with an open source distribution. Single-click install is another new-to-SLED 11 feature that makes installing application programs a breeze. We tested this out with the just-released MonoDevelop 2.0 . There are actually three options on the download page, and you'll need to pick the openSUSE 11.1 button for SLED 11. Version 2.4 of the core Mono components were also released this week. The download page has instructions for using the zypper command line tool to add the mono repository and perform the upgrade with three instructions. The default file system has changed from ReiserFS to ext3 with SLED...

A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month. Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences. These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up. "We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experien...

A Celestial event, the sight of the century is happening tomorrow morning here in India. Monsoon clouds may spoil the fun though. Fear not, you can still see how exactly the event will unfold. Grab Li-f-e DVD if you don’t have it already or if you have openSUSE 11.1 installed, use this 1-click to install Stellarium . Boot from Li-f-e DVD and launch Stellarium application. Select location as shown in the screenshot - Gujarat, India. The location selection dialog comes from the menu on the left hand side of the screen, hit the mouse in that corner to bring the menu up. Set Date and Time, 22 July 2009, 5:30 am Search for the Sun, hit “Space” to center it Turn off atmosphere for better clarity Zoom in with mouse scroll so the sun fills the screen, fast forward a bit to speed up the eclipse

Google Earth can now take you to the moon. Timed with the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, the Internet giant on Monday released an addition to its Google Earth mapping software to provide images of moon landscapes and traces of human exploration there. Called the Moon in Google Earth and available for Windows , Mac , and Linux , the software allows you to see topographical features on our closest celestial neighbor with the lunar equivalent of Google Street View. People can also see a gallery of the Apollo space missions and get information on every robotic spacecraft that has visited the moon. "This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together," Anousheh Ansari, a trustee of X Prize Foundation and the first female private space explorer, said Monday on a Google blog . Google is hosting an event Monday to launch the Moon in Google E...

Google's Engineering Director has promised that its forthcoming Chrome OS will see 'the end of malware'. Google is promising what the latest issue of New Scientist magazine refers to as "a carefree antivirus nirvana" with its forthcoming Google Chrome OS. Linus Upson, Google's Engineering Director, has promised the company is: "Completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work." Chrome browser patched Ironically, Google is also in the news this week due to security flaws in its Chrome browser. Two of the most recent Google Chrome web browser security flaws (one relating to malicious code exploitation in the Chrome tab sandbox and one relating to memory corruption in the browser tab processes) have now been fixed. You can see the full run-down of all the latest changes over on Google's Chrome site . So is the cloud computing future ...

When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, many saw it as the real coming of age of Linux. While there is little doubt that IPO was a big event for Red Hat and Linux, perhaps an even more important one from a milestone point of view will officially occur this Friday. As of Friday July 24, Red Hat will join the S&P 500 index. In my opinion this is a major milestone for Red Hat and for Linux. Red Hat started off on the NASDAQ in 1999 then moved to the NYSE in 2006. Two years later, the NYSE itself moved to Linux as the underlying operating system for trading operations. While financial services are a key vertical for Red Hat, it's not the only one. In the last several Red Hat earnings calls, analysts keep asking how Red Hat's exposure to financial services is affecting its bottom line. The answer is self-evident. In its first quarter fiscal 2010 earnings , Red Hat showed continued growth despite the global economic downturn. How did that happen? The way I see it, Red Hat is not o...

Google has launched a free voice-based mobile internet search facility in India that has been built entirely by the internet search giant’s India engineering team. Currently available only to the estimated 400,000 Blackberry cellphone users, the company hopes to extend this facility to other handsets by the end of the year. The voice-based mobile search throws up results similar to a PC-based search query. A user can log on to the internet on his/her mobile, open the Google search page, and ask for a particular location, pizza joint, taxi stand or florist while driving a vehicle. Simply speaking the word “weather” into the phone, for instance, would throw up the top results. A couple of months earlier, Google India had also launched an SMS-based search in Hindi and Telegu in cities like Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The mobile internet-based voice search, however, is currently available only in English. Right now, Google is struggling to reconcile India’s variegated accent...

recordMyDesktop is a command-line tool which allows to record your entire Linux desktop and save it as a Theora Ogg video. It has GTK and Qt frontends too, and in Ubuntu gtk-recordmydesktop is available in the repositories. To install recordmydesktop in Ubuntu, just type in the GNOME Terminal: sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop And if you want the GTK frontend, use: sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop The simplest way to record your desktop is to run the command recordmydeskto p without any parameters inside a terminal, then do whatever you wanted to do, and when you feel the screencast is over, type Ctrl+C in the terminal where you started recordmydesktop to stop it. It will start the procedure of encoding the video to Ogg Theora, which can take a while. The default output file will be out.ogv , located in the same directory from where you started recordmydesktop: You can also choose the name of the output file: recordmydesktop -o my_screencast.ogv Or make it encode the video...

1. K3b Not many can argue against this one. K3b is the most popular burning application for Linux, and although it uses KDE3 libraries, many GNOME users prefer it too over native GTK burners. K3b 1.0.5 running in Debian Lenny The version I'm going to talk about is 1.0.5 for KDE3, but K3b 2.0 for KDE4 is in the works, and the second alpha was made available for testing purposes earlier this year. You can read my review of K3b 2.0 Alpha 1 here . K3b can burn anything, from audio CDs to DVDs or ISO images. It allows you to save the projects, it includes a powerful file explorer and an easy to use interface. You can also use K3b to create CD/DVD ISO images, it supports projects, multisession mode and ripping video DVDs. 2. Brasero Brasero is the default GNOME burning application. As usual, it features a simple interface which integrates very well in GNOME, with five large buttons for fast access to the most common actions: - Audio project, to create an audio CD - Data project, to cre...

In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday , Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation's train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution. In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too? "The typical video that we see on the web is basically a black box format in a Flash container. I can't easily manipulate it; I need to buy proprietary tools to really do things with it or even to rebroadcast it." All these factors go harshly against the free-as-in-beer, Creative Commons grain of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, so it should come as no surprise that the Foundation's video player and tools are to represent a dramatic shift from current web video standards. Althou...