In my previous posts, I’d mentioned about Canonical’s Ship It program, which sends Ubuntu disc for free to your door step, Fedora’s Free Media program, which ships Fedora media wherever you it shipped. .I’d also mentioned Oracle sending their Oracle Unbreakable Linux for free(though to date I haven’t received them). 

Now, Sun Microsystems joins the list of vendors offering free media. Head over to this page and fill in the form and request for your OpenSolaris CD.
Thanks, Arun aka mixdev

Consider this situation. You have multiple programs installed for a particular file type. Now double clicking it opens an application, but you want it to open in another application.

For example, you want your images to open in showFoto instead of Gwenview, so how do you go about doing this? Let me show you how to do so!

[...]

Recently, Adobe had released the beta version of Adobe Integrated Runtime, more commonly known as AIR, for Linux. While this is indeed good news, unfortunately it isn’t available via repositories, meaning you’ll have to download the binaries, set the permissions and install it by launching via command prompt. While this seems pretty complicated, its not really.

Let me show you how to go about installing Adobe AIR and AIR applications on your Linux box.

[...]

Most of the how-to’s and fixes posted here, are generally my experiences and I post them on how I went about fixing it. This particular how-to was mentioned to me by my very good friend, Bharath, who had this annoying problem of the title bars of every window crashing and disappearing when Emerald is chosen as the decorator.

Generally, I’d recommend running gtk-window-decorator --replace or metacity --replace in terminal – that generally does reinitialize the window decorators. However for Bharath, this particular solution didn’t help and he kept facing the same problem

[...]

By now, you must’ve heard of Ubiquity. If not, well read on!

Ubiquity is an add-on to Mozilla’s extremely popular Firefox browser. Ubiquity allows you to do things – say search for something, get the latest weather updates,  book reviews, so on and so forth, just by typing the commands into the Ubiquity input box – rather than by going over to address bar, typing the URL for each individual site, etc. Now most people fear by the word – “commands” – OHHH! will it be cryptic, confusing? Well, NO! Rather than me explaining, just have a look at video above

 

I use Lincr a LOT – for the uninitiated, Lincr is a URL shortening service, by Aalaap. So why Lincr? Well TinyURLs are no longer tiny, Lincr’d URLs are, and hey – the name’s catchy! 

Anyways, I use the Lincr bookmarklet prettty often, and while trying out Ubiquity I thought why not try it out for Lincr, and bingo, here you go! If you’re using Ubiquity, you should get a prompt asking if you want to subscribe to Ubiquity command. Accept if you want to

If you wish to Lincr, just hit Ubiquity shortcut key, and type lincr (<url to be lincr'd> ).

So if you find this useful just subscribe to it, and drop a comment here!

The guys at Phoronix have written made an intresting article, comparing the performance of the Asus EEE-PC 901 with its Intel Atom processor
Here’s some quotes from the article

Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel’s Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

The Linux distributions we used included the ASUS-optimized Xandros operating system that ships with the Eee PC 901, Fedora 10 Alpha, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 with daily updates as of August 26, and Mandriva 2009 Beta 2. The Xandros OS ships with the Linux 2.6.21 kernel, X Server 1.4.0.90, and uses GCC 4.1.2. Fedora 10 Alpha uses the Linux 2.6.27-rc0 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.905, and GCC 4.3.1. Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 with the daily updates still uses the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.905, and GCC 4.3.1. Finally, Mandriva 2009 Beta 2 is using the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X Server 1.4.2, and GCC 4.3.1.

In some tests the stock Eee Linux distribution was running quite slow and placing far behind Mandriva, Fedora, and Ubuntu, but when it came to the solid-state disk performance Xandros had the lead. Overall though, it appears that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 had delivered the best performance on the Intel Atom architecture. These are just our initial figures though. We are still running some additional benchmarks on the Eee PC 901 to look for the best Linux OS, but it looks like it is a toss-up right now depending upon how the system will be used. With Ubuntu 8.10 now using the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, the results of the final release will certainly be different.

To read the full article head over to Phoronix

In the past I’ve done couple of posts explaining few of the common commands. A handy one-glance reference guide is always nice, and that’s exactly what Sindhu has posted.

Have a look:

Thanks, Sindhu

Update: Andre was kind enough to forward me a copy he had created specifically for netbooks. Thanks dude, you rock!

The good people over at WordPress released WordPress 2.6.2 today. And unlike the previous 2.6.1 release, this release is a mandatory release, to fix a loophole which occurs if your blog has registrations open.

From the horse’s mouth:

If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade.  With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.  The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit.  However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

Certainly seems a very important reason to update to 2.6.2. And if you find the process of upgrading WordPress blog a pain, here’s an effortless way of doing it.

WordPress follows the Open Source policy of release early, release often. While this is a pretty good thing – you get fast releases to security exploits and loads of new features – but updating can be a rather problem, especially so if its something as important as your site’s CMS.

Fortunately Keith D’Souza has written a VERY NEAT plugin – WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin which makes it a painless affair to upgrade your WordPress installation. WordPress Automatic Upgrade updates WordPress installation in a step by step manner. 

[...]

Dropbox – the awesome online file-storage, and syncing utility finally gets a Linux client! The developers have been promising a Linux client since day one and though it took them a while to get it – it’s finally here!

[...]