Why You'll Buy a Netbook On Black Friday Datamation: "Last year I told you the "10 Black Friday Secrets Retailers Don't Want You To Know." All these secrets still apply (and the retailers still don't want you to know them). What's different this year is that Black Friday will be dominated by netbook deals." (Nov 15, 2008)
Linux Today Features
KDE 4.2 is Flat Out Going to Rock moving parts of the kasper clan: "I've been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I'm thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I'm seeing!" (Nov 12, 2008)
Setting Up Master-Master Replication On Four Nodes With MySQL 5 On Debian Etch (Nov 22, 2008, 03:03 UTC) (425 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Howtoforge: "This tutorial explains how you can set up MySQL master-master replication on four MySQL nodes (running on Debian Etch). The difference to a two node master-master replication (which is explained here) is that if you have more than two nodes, the replication goes in a circle, i.e., with four nodes, the replication goes from node1 to node2, from node2 to node3, from node3 to node4, and from node4 to node1."
Nvidia Announces "Personal Supercomputer" (Nov 21, 2008, 18:33 UTC) (1154 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) PC World: "Nvidia, working with several partners, has developed the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, powered by a graphics processing unit based on Nvidia's Cuda parallel computing architecture."
The AIX Administrator's Guide to Learning Linux (Nov 21, 2008, 15:33 UTC) (803 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "Most system administrators planning to install Linux on IBM System p eventually run into an important question: Which Linux distribution should I install? This article compares two distributions from Red Hat and Novell, and weighs the pros and cons of each."
Mounting Xen Virtual Machine Storage on Physical Hosts (Nov 20, 2008, 08:33 UTC) (962 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) SearchEnterpriseLinux: "In the event that something happens to a Xen virtual machine (VM) that prevents you from starting it, it's a good practice to have the virtual machine storage back end mounted in the Linux file system of the Xen-based server. By doing so, you'll be able to repair the VM quickly and painlessly. In this tip, I'll cover how to do this for physical devices that are used as storage back ends."
First Interplanetary Internet Test Completed (Nov 19, 2008, 23:03 UTC) (754 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) NASA: "NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.
Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth."
The Super Windows That...Couldn't (Nov 18, 2008, 18:35 UTC) (2366 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Open Enterprise: "One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of "toy" operating system - fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on."
USB 3.0 to Deliver a Tenfold Speed Increase (Nov 18, 2008, 16:35 UTC) (1866 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Wired: "Fasten your seat belts -- data transfer is going into overdrive.
The ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus, better known as USB, is on track to make its first major upgrade in eight years -- a tenfold speed increase over the current USB 2.0 standard."
WFTL Bytes! for Nov 14, 2008 (Nov 17, 2008, 08:01 UTC) (912 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) WFTL Bytes!: "This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, November 14, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagne. In today's news, the economy just keeps on getting worse, proprietary software is really bad, making copyright into copywrong, Ubuntu gets ARMed, and the Sun goes down on a lot of jobs."
Basic Veritas Cluster Server Troubleshooting (Nov 16, 2008, 08:01 UTC) (1086 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "And, here we go again; quick, pointed bullets of info. Bite-sized bits of troubleshooting advice that focus on solving the problem, rather than understanding it. That sounds awful, I know, but, sometimes, you have to get things done and, let's face it, if it's the job or your arse, who cares about the why? Leave that for philosophers and academics."
ImageStream: Who Needs to Read Encrypted Traffic? (Nov 14, 2008, 20:03 UTC) (1340 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) ISP Planet: "Instead, Utter advocates a system his company has come up with that uses some simple open source concepts to preserve user privacy. He calls this system Per User Fair Queuing (PUFQ)."
Webmail Directory: LinuxMagic's Tuxedo (Nov 14, 2008, 17:33 UTC) (932 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) ISP Planet: "The Canadian Linux development house LinuxMagic, founded in 1997, is a subsidiary of the hosting and support company Wizard IT Services. From the beginning, according to company president and CEO Michael Peddemors, LinuxMagic has been focused on serving ISPs and telcos."
Linux: Setup iSCSI Target ( SAN ) (Nov 13, 2008, 20:34 UTC) (1180 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) nixCraft: "Linux target framework (tgt) aims to simplify various SCSI target driver (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SRP, etc) creation and maintenance. The key goals are the clean integration into the scsi-mid layer and implementing a great portion of tgt in user space."
Scale Your File System With Parallel NFS (Nov 13, 2008, 06:04 UTC) (1811 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "The Network File System (NFS) is a stalwart component of most modern local area networks (LANs). But NFS is inadequate for the demanding input- and output-intensive applications commonly found in high-performance computing—or, at least it was. The newest revision of the NFS standard includes Parallel NFS (pNFS), a parallelized implementation of file sharing that multiplies transfer rates by orders of magnitude. Here's a primer."
The Rise of Virtual Appliances (Nov 12, 2008, 17:34 UTC) (1162 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux Magazine: "Virtual appliances deliver focused services in a lightweight package. With all of the talk around virtualization being large system optimization, why single-purpose machines getting so much attention?"
Installing Xen On CentOS 5.2 (i386) (Nov 11, 2008, 08:34 UTC) (1201 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) HowtoForge: "This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.3) on a CentOS 5.2 system (i386)."
Sun Expands 'Open' Storage Line (Nov 10, 2008, 22:03 UTC) (904 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Wall Street Journal: "Sun Microsystems Inc. is making another move to expand its small position in data storage, as the computer maker continues to take advantage of the "open-source" movement that has shaken up parts of the industry."
How Two of the World's Largest Websites Use Linux for High Availability (Nov 10, 2008, 18:33 UTC) (2207 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Linux Distillery: "Pop quiz: you have a web site and you want it to be popular. It must scale to tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions of visitors. It has to be snappy and responsive. What server platform will you host it on? Here’s what two of the world's most popular sites - Wikipedia and Digg - went with, and it wasn't Windows."
Sun Pushes ZFS Deeper Into Solaris (Nov 1, 2008, 10:02 UTC) (2866 reads)
(5 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "Sun finally extends the file system with its Solaris 10 update -- giving new capabilities to system admins that had already been available elsewhere in the OS."
A Better File System for Linux? (Oct 30, 2008, 20:36 UTC) (2939 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "Oracle's Better File System for Linux (BTRFS) is gearing up but what will it do and who will use it?"
Linux/Unix Shell Script To Find Your Google Page Rank (Oct 28, 2008, 22:02 UTC) (1461 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "While our index rank script took a URL and a search term (or terms) and returned your relative index rank at that particular moment in time (e.g. It would let you know that your website was the 435th listing in a search for "fig trees," or something of that nature), this script focuses, simply, on the Google Page Rank (PR) of any specific URL."
It's Time for a FOSS Community Code of Conduct (Oct 28, 2008, 19:02 UTC) (1188 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) Datamation: "Personal abuse, quotes taken out of context, misrepresentations, outright lies -- if you have any visibility in the free and open source software (FOSS) community, the chances are that you regularly face all these kinds of attacks. You can try to answer them, but the people responsible seem to have endless energy for debate."
Open Source Software Proves Affordable, Flexible for NIH, DoD (Oct 23, 2008, 07:31 UTC) (1633 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Federal Times: "This system, known as Biowulf, has 6,500 processors communicating over a fast network and 8,800 gigabytes of memory. It would have cost the agency millions of dollars to buy enough software to make such a supercomputer possible."
IBM Launches Linux 'Baby' Mainframe (Oct 23, 2008, 04:31 UTC) (2526 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Computerworld: "IBM is targeting mid-size business customers that use Linux with a new "baby" mainframe that costs just a fraction of the amount charged for the high-end mainframe IBM released in February."
Mr. Wi-Fi Goes to Washington? (Oct 22, 2008, 22:01 UTC) (1006 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "As the presidential election approaches, there's little discussion in the media of the leading candidates' positions regarding technology issues. While that's more than understandable when immediate concerns like the economic crisis loom large, the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama on technology policy are worth a look."
Researchers use Open Source Virtual World for Language Teaching (Oct 16, 2008, 10:34 UTC) (1140 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IT News: "Dubbed 'Realtown', the newly-developed wireless environment incorporates a virtual supermarket, schools, pharmacy and bank, as well as background sounds that may be enabled to increase the environment’s realism."
Virtualization With XenServer Express 5.0.0 (Oct 16, 2008, 07:34 UTC) (1860 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) HowtoForge: "This Howto covers the installation of XenServer Express 5.0.0 and the creation of virtual machines with the XenCenter administrator console. XenServer Express is the free virtualization platform from Citrix, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine."
Opinion: High-Performance Nonsense (Oct 13, 2008, 15:45 UTC) (2207 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Computerworld: "Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?"
Shell Script To Back Up All MySQL Databases (Oct 11, 2008, 02:07 UTC) (2808 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) HowtoForge: "This script will create a backup of each table in every database (one file per table), compress it and upload it to a remote ftp."
Ubuntu's Balancing Act (Oct 10, 2008, 18:35 UTC) (2729 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Open Enterprise: "Once it emerged that Google ran on GNU/Linux, there could be no more argument about the latter's suitability for the enterprise. Similarly, MySQL's adoption by just about every Web 2.0 company meant that it, too, could no longer be dismissed as underpowered."
Lessons Learned From AMD's Barcelona Mess (Oct 9, 2008, 09:35 UTC) (1921 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "AMD's Barcelona launch was bumpier than a 737 departing Chicago into a storm off the Great Lakes. Plagued by delay after delay, then by a bug in the processor after it was supposed to ship, Barcelona was a lesson in how not to launch a new product."
Create CentOS 5.2 Domu on Ubuntu Hardy Dom0 (Oct 9, 2008, 03:05 UTC) (1721 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) HowtoForge: "This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Images of xen on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) server system (i386). Linux distributions that can run as Xen guests out of the box, obviating the need to create your own custom filesystems. The filesystems on jailtime.org have already been tweaked to deal with Xen's idiosyncracies, and are also designed to be lightweight and minimally divergent from the original distribution."
CERN Fires Up Massive Grid (Oct 7, 2008, 20:05 UTC) (1383 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Grid Computing Planet "The grid combines the computing resources of more than 100,000 processors from 140 institutions in 33 countries, creating a massive distributed supercomputer that will provide more than 7,000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data and the power to process it, CERN said."
Data Processing Scores Big Success! Linux Loses, Again! (Oct 6, 2008, 15:33 UTC) (2976 reads)
(4 talkbacks)
(feedback) Managing L'unix: "At 8:30 AM in our national capital (Ottawa) on September 30th, the only response available from the https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca site was that: "The site is down for planned maintenance.""
When It Comes to Openness, Think Beyond the Code (Oct 2, 2008, 20:32 UTC) (1533 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) OStatic: "Yes, its date of publication was 1997. What makes this brochure different is that it is open. Perhaps this is less impressive in light of the advent of wikis, but the purpose and intent of the brochure is still remarkable, and well worth expanding upon."
