At the recently held Linux Plumbers’ Conference, 2 Linux developers,  Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds flat. To demonstrate this, they used an Asus EEE PC using a modified Fedora and modified Moblin. In-fact the bootup was so fast that the they actually had to hold the EEE PC, as the bootup was completed well before the projector could warm up and sync.

To achieve this, they had to look up and identify what was slowing down the system, for this they used a tool, Bootchart, by Ziga Mahkovec, which displays the order of the booting sequence, which modules are taking how much time amongst other details. 

Today as I booted into my openSUSE box, for reasons unknown to me, my LVM partitions failed to mount. fsck didn’t help, and and LVM based container system meant that I couldn’t use the standard mount /dev/sdxx style of mounting as well. With my /home and / configured as a LVM, the root (/) partition was active, but the /home partition was not being mounted, as a result, X and KDM wouldn’t start, giving a console login. After a bit of digging around the man files, I found thw lvm manfile and started experimenting(remember, no net access too!) and found out how to mount the LVM’d partitions.

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

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!

The release KDE4 brought in the new kickoff menu, the slab-style menu which was first introduced in openSUSE 10.2. The premise is simple – instead of unfolding menu after menu, the submenu opens within the menu itself. What makes the Kickoff a killer is the inclusion of search.

While I love Kickoff menu and can’t live without it, lot many people prefer the old KDE style menu.

So lets see how to get the old traditional K Menu back – it’s simple, no editing of config files required!

Plasmoids are the little widgets that have made an appearance with KDE4. Plasmoids can basically do anything – from displaying your desktop and associated wallpaper to showing your laptop’s battery level,or even display the latest comics or post a tweet to twitter. While KDE 4 comes with some plasmoids, you can add extra plasmoids which do other things – from displaying your current system status to showing your current GPU temperature. Lets see how to do so.

Amarok is probably amongst the best audio player and jukebox software, bar none. This feature rich software is  also very flexible and extensible. By making use of third party scripts (and writing your own, if you know, say Python or Ruby) you can enrich your experience your Amarok experience. Here’s a list of some must have Amarok scripts

• weekalarm

weekalarm is one heck of a alarm script – you can set multiple alarms for the day, different times for different days, support for snooze and nap, make use of fading, and even use a separate playlist for your alarm tunes. Can’t imagine waking up without this one!

In this day modern day, most software installations can be done using repositories and package managers. However, you might face a situation of having only the source files availalble with you – you probably would want to try out bleeding edge software, which hasn’t been packaged yet, or isn’t available in the repos yet.

So if you really want to try it out, then the only way would be to download the source files and compile them.

Contrary to what most people think – Compiling from sources isn’t that complicated – the entire process takes 3 commands.

Admin’s Note: This is a guest post by Aditya. Though this post was drafted on 1st July, my work commitments and rather bad memory prevented this post being published. Due apologies.

I know that a title is a bit harsh but I am afraid it is true.

First lets get into some technical stuff.

Dream Linux is a Debian based distro(like Ubuntu) . It has both Xfce and Gnome interface. I’m reviewing the Gnome version.

The Installation

The first screen you get after booting into the CD ask you to choose the interface(Gnome or Xfce)

It also has memtest for testing memory but the CD cant be checked for defects, which is a very important feature, since the disk has to be free of defects as it is an operating system.

I choose the Gnome interface and booted. Here’s where I faced my first nightmare. The whole thing is pretty slow. Even after booting completely. I do know that a live CD is slow as it is limited by the optical drive but this was way slower than other live C.D’s.

A lot of you out there must’ve read Linux Hater’s Blog, a blog with (some valid) rants about what’s wrong about Linux. John M Anderson ponders over what made him shift from Windows to Linux and here’s some of his choice quotes

You just bought built a brand new computer and want to install the brand spankin’ new Windows Vista Ultimate, you plop down $300, and away you go! What does $300 get you? A bare minimum operating system with nothing but MS Paint and Media Player.

Anyone who’s worked on Linux must’ve come across a fair share of ACPI-related problems – lockups, standby problems etc. Some of the “solutions” is to disable ACPI support by passing the noacpi parameter during boot-up. So why is ACPI so problematic under Linux?

This is a guest post by Kunal Gautam. This article is aimed at RHEL and Fedora users.

If you’ve been using Linux for a while, then you’d know how much of a pain it is to install a software which runs into dependency problems. One way of getting around this is to use a repository.

What is YUM?

YUM or Yellowdog Updater Modified is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining system using rpm. Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.

Yum makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

After a long, long wait for SUSE maniacs like me, its finally here: Presenting the latest version of openSUSE, openSUSE 11.0

The new version features a slick shiny new installer, updated KDE 4.0.4, GNOME 2.22, Kernel version 2.6.25. If you’re still hesitant to jump to KDE4.0, you can use KDE 3.5.9 which comes with the DVD edition. And if you’re on a low-end spec PC, then just install XFCE!

On the applications front, openSUSE 11 features Firefox 3 Beta 5 which gets auto-updated to Firefox 3.0 via online updates. Also featured is Banshee 1.0, which has been re-written to improve performance and includes many new features, like video playback, better “shuffle” playback, support for iPods, MTP devices, and mass storage player devices, and support for podcasts and better Last.fm integration.

Moblin is an open source initiative bringing developers together all over the world to create rich media and internet experience based on Linux operating systems for Intel Atom processors.

Moblin event will be conducted in Hyderabad on June 26th, 2008 and in Chennai on June 27th, 2008.

Register for the event, or for the Webinar.

In my previous post, I’d mentioned about Virtualization – what it is, how useful it is to test new softwares, distros etc. Now while working in your virtual machine, you’d obviously save some data – do some wordprocessing, or compatibility testing of your programs, just to name some, all this would mean that the data would be stored in the virtual machine.

Now you would like to have this data on your physical machine. Or alternatively you may want to transfer data from your physical machine to your VM. Of course, you could always go about using the concept of shared folders, but this would require installation of guest-additions. On a linux-based guest, this would require running scripts, and these scripts most likely require kernel-header or kernel source files. Going by my past experience, in most default installations, the header files would not be installed, or simply be missing in all of Live-CD based distributions, requiring downloading of the packages from the Internet. Is there a simpler way of going about this? Yes! Lets see how.

It’s the season of Linux distribution releases! Ubuntu was released about 3 weeks ago, and now it’s time for Fedora 9, aka “Sulphur”. So What’s new?

PackageKit

Much Like Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs, Fedora gets a similar one, known as “PacakgeKit”.PackageKit is a cross-distribution package management solution that has a complete yum backend. It has been designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, and aims to unify all the graphical package management tools used in different distributions.

GNOME Desktop 2.22 Release

As with Ubuntu 8.04, GNOME 2.22 will power Fedora 9. GNOME 2.22 features lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

KDE Desktop 4.0.3

KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 was just released, and it looks very promising indeed! Here’s what bastion of PolishLinux had to say:

Desktop

First thing worth noticing is the new looks of KRunner. Unfortunately, on the current stage, it behaves in an unpredictable manner. In some cases after typing one letter I had to wait a few seconds for KRunner to catch it and prompt me with a list of available choices. What is more, it randomly hung up completely, exceeding the maximum response time, forcing KWin to kindly ask me to kill it.

Ever since being introduced to Twitter by Preshit, I’ve been addicted to twitter. While I prefer tweeting via IM or Twitter’s homepage, Few of you would love to use a twitter client. Here’s a list of some twitter clients for Linux

Quite a lot of people have been waiting for the latest release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 dubbed the “Hardy Heron” – primarily because it’s a LTS release. So how does the Hardy Heron stack up? I decided to jump into the Hardy Heron brigade and have a look. Is it worth the upgrade?

Read on to find out more!

System Specifications

I used my beloved Dell Inspiron 1520(Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM, nVidia 8600m GT, Intel 3945 Pro/Wireless) for testing out the Hardy Heron.

I had a pretty bad time with Gutsy – no sound despite the sound card being detected, LCD brightness varying as if its possessed etc – these resulted with me removing Gutsy and going back to openSUSE 10.3.

Also, generally I’ve always tested the 32-bit versions of most distros. This time I decided to break the tradition and go with the 64-bit version.

Last week,  the openSUSE team announced the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! Some of the many  enhancements and features in the new release include  the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

It’s that time of the year. Everyone’s excited and looking forward to it. Ofcourse it’s the release of the next LTS version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, aka Hardy Heron. So what’re new features expected in Hardy Heron you ask? Well here are some of them

Unless you have been living under a stone, you should be knowing that Compiz Fusion transforms your Linux 2D desktop, with virtual desktops into a 3D one, complete with Cube plugin(amongst others) which transforms the virtual desktops into a cube.

Developer Dennis Kasprzyk has finally finished his idea to implement a cylinder deformation for the cube plugin. The result is that Cubereflex plugin has now been rename to Cubeaddon, and it comes with a new effect, “CYLINDER”. Here’s a screen shot of the plugin in action

Introducing Ubuntu Mobile – full Internet, no compromise

Ubuntu Mobile is an Ubuntu edition that targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices.

Ubuntu Mobile, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MID hardware from OEMs and ODMs, are redefining what can be done in mobile computing.

Ubuntu Mobile, a fully open source project, gives full Internet, with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs and popular third-party applications.

• Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more
• Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation
• A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go
• Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps, in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as a compact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the open source community, Ubuntu Mobile is the software that makes it all possible.

Almost everyone would be knowing about ASUS eeePC by now. For the uninitiated, The ASUS eee PC is a subnotebook. The eeePC is powered by a 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 processor, features 512MB of DDR2 RAM and uses Xandros as it’s OS and has an Integrated Intel GMA 900 as its graphics processor. The GMA 900 means that technically the eeePC is capable of running Compiz Fusion. So has anyone done this?

Yes! Someone has! Fred Welland, who received an ASUS eeePC for his birthday according to his blog, has gone ahead and installed Fedora 8 on his eeePC and has mentioned that Compiz and Compiz Fusion are running well on the eeePC.

Here are some excerpts from his Blog:

I got a eeePC for my birthday, in mid-November 2007. It is a wonderfull little machine, that is a nice compliment to my Dell Latitude D820 and various and sundry desktops. The top of this page will be devoted to how I installed Fedora 8 on my eeePC. The bottom part of the page relates my experience with eeePC in general.

Fedora 8 Install Goals

Being a Linux user can be really funny. You just go =)) reading few ignorant Windows users’ comments on How Linux is crap bla bla bla. Today’s source for making me laugh comes by way of Christopher Dawson’s article on ZDNet on Why Linux Will Not Displace Windows(a rather nicely written article, though). The best thing about such articles are the comments written by, let’s saw, rather “well informed” users.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Virtualization is a concept most likely you will be familiar of.

Take an example. Consider PSCX. It’s an emulator, which allows you you to play PS2 games on a PC right? That’s basically virtualization at work. Virtualization is a fancy name for emulation. Virtualization software allows you to virtualize a machine, create a “virtual” PC – you can do anything on the virtual pc as you can do on a normal PC – Install an OS, run applications, compile applications, surf the web, the applications are limit less. So why virtualize you may ask?

Well that depends on what you want to do. If you’re a developer, wanting to test cross-platform applications(ie, applications that will run across multiple OS) virtualization provides you to do so without the hassles of actually installing the required OS.

Some terminology:

While browsing through TuxMachine’s articles, I read this article. Budding people interested in creating a Distro, make sure you read this.

One of the core principles of open source development is “freedom”. As such, there are few limitations for developers and end users to take the work of others and move it into a direction they deem better. This has led to a proliferation of Linux distributions, remasters and scores of applications that sometimes are hard to distinguish from other

distributions, remasters or applications. It’s not an ideal situation but somehow quality material always seems to stick around, while the rest sinks back into oblivion.

Another core principle is perhaps “respect”. Freedom is never an absolute. You can fork a distribution or an application, but you don’t have the freedom to remove or change the underlying licenses. You respect that. Why this introduction?

The case of Ultumix

One of CHIP-India’s forum members, Sujith Poojari had posted a link to 25 Top 3D games for Linux. Some of them I’ve already played like Armagetron Advanced, BZFlag, Sauerbraten, Scorched 3D, TORCS while some others unknown to me, such as Racer(been playing it recently, good graphics! controls need refinement though), PlaneShift etc. So enjoy these games and have a blast!

Armagetron Advanced

Armagetron is a multiplayer game in 3d that attempts to emulate and expand on the lightcycle sequence from the movie Tron. It’s an old school arcade game slung into the 21st century. Highlights include a customizable playing arena, HUD, unique graphics, and AI bots. For the more advanced player there are new game modes and a wide variety of physics settings to tweak as well.

With the first release of KDE4 framework, KDE 4.0 just few days away — as the above counter shows, the next few articles will have a look at some of the features new to KDE 4.0

In case you’re still wondering what the KDE4 hoopla is all about, then keep reading. KDE4 is the next-generation of the immensely popular K Desktop Environment. KDE seels to fulfill the need for a powererful yet easy to use desktop for UNIX and Linux workstations. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and

connecting different components in any way they want.

KDE4 introduces and updates many of KDE’s core components, notably a port to Qt 4. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets. The port to Qt 4 will facilitate support for non-X11-based platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. One of the overall goals of KDE 4 is to be more easily portable to different operating systems.

Due to the licensing restrictions, like most distros, openSUSE don’t have the codecs bundled along with the installation DVD. But thanks to their 1-click installer, it isn’t hard to get the Green Chameleon to start playing all those mp3’s/videos of yours.

It involves just 2 steps!

First, get the Restricted Format 1-click installer. Here’s the links:

Contrary to what most people think, it is possible to get all those effects on their Intel based onboard graphics. Now I’ve helped a few friends to get Compiz Fusion running on their Intel cards, and I was requested by them to post this tutorial, so here it goes.

First up, download the required Compiz Fusion packages via 1-click install; Here are the links:

[

1-Click Installer for KDE]1

1-Click Installer for GNOME

1-Click Installer for Compiz Manager

We’ll have make some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well.

In my previous post, I’d explained on how to install Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu Fiesty. This post will outline the simple steps for installing Compiz Fusion on openSUSE 10.3. This article is written from an nVidia user’s point of view.

First, you’ll have to download nVidia’s drivers. You can get it, via the 1-click install(for Legacy cards, click here). I’d recommend downloading the latest drivers from nvidia’s site and doing a manual install of the drivers.

Manual install of nVidia drivers

Pre-requisites:

• compiler gcc,
• program make and
• package kernel-source

For the uninitiated, smart is the openSUSE equivalent of apt-get found in Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu.One of the biggest problems people who are used to apt-get face in openSUSE is that apt-get and Synaptic aren’t available in openSUSE and then they have no idea as to how to install software on their openSUSE machines. For them, and for many others, smart is the ideal solution. You can isntall software using the smart command prompt(“smart install ” or via the easy to use GUI. Like apt-get, smart also can resolve dependencies automatically. Here’s an easy guide to install smart on openSUSE 10.3.

Consider this: You’re sitting infront of your desktop, with the login screen infront of you. However, you can’t seem to recall the username/password combo. Frustrating isn’t it? Here’s an application which is a fit solution for the problem: Revelation.

Revelation is a password manager application, mainly designed for the Gnome desktop. (This doesn’t mean however that you won’t be able to used in other desktop environments such as KDE or Xfce, it’s just that you won’t be able to enjoy the full features package.) It stores all your sensitive data in an encrypted XML file, protected by AES encryption which you can access using a master password. Basically, if you decide to use this program, the master password will be the single one you’ll even have to remember from now on, for the rest of your (online) life.

Features:

Ubuntu Gutsy has been receiving a huge amount of hype and fan fare recently, and I’ve been following Gutsy closely, from Ubuntu Fridge’s 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days to fellow bloggers and Linux users posts on Gutsy. Naturally after their Feisty launch, expectations were high(from my side). Now I’m not Ubuntu’s biggest fan(I’m a SuSE fellow, Novell haters, meh!), but I appreciate what Ubuntu has been doing for newbie Linux users in general.

I was patiently waiting for the December issue of CHIP magazine and picked it up immediately when it hit the stands, ripped apart the packaging and took out the DVD(yup, that’s right CHIP this month had a bootable DVD of Ubuntu Gutsy :D ) and started about installing it. Launching into the live environment took a good 2 minutes, uncharacteristic of Ubuntu.

Though it’s been a while since Gutsy was released, I couldn’t try out for various reasons. But finally I got my hands on Gutsy DVD edition, and I sat about installing it on my Dell Inspiron. I noticed first signs of trouble when Gutsy was taking unsually long to boot up. Switching to verbose mode, I knew something wrong when I saw

hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout

Initially I thought it was a problem with the live environment, however when install was done, my fears were confirmed. Indeed, Ubuntu wasn’t able to play any sound. This was a bit surprising since openSUSE 10.3 detected all of my hardware flawlessly(even more weirder was that Kubuntu Feisty had no problems with the sound!)

A bit of Googling and I found there are few solutions to this problem, which is because of ALSA. Apparently version lower than 1.0.15 has bugs and problems especially with Intel HDA codecs. So let’s see some solutions:

Found this really easy tutorial on setting up a LAMP server at UbuntuGeek. As the Geek says,

In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.

The LAMP option means you don’t have to install and integrate each of the four separate LAMP components, a process which can take hours and requires someone who is skilled in the installation and configuration of the individual applications. Instead, you get increased security, reduced time-to-install, and reduced risk of misconfiguration, all of which results in a lower cost of ownership.New pre-configured installation options have been added to the Ubuntu Server. Mail Server, File Server, Print Server, and Database Server options join existing LAMP and DNS options for pre-configured installations, easing the deployment of common server configurations.

Ubuntu LAMP server Install the following Versions

• Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10
• Apache 2.2.4
• Mysql 5.0.45
• PHP 5.2.3

We have already told you why you need to shift to linux now we tell you how to shift to it

We have choosen Ubuntu as our distro. Why?

Well Ubuntu is the one, our saviour, our salvation……..

Ok coming back to the topic well Ubuntu is the most user friendly distro I have come across. Though Xubuntu is more user friendly due to its minimalistic nature it will take more of your precious time.

The Installation

All the buntu’s follow the simple 7-step installation procedure.

One you go through the steps you will find that there is really no need for this guide but I’ve run out of ideas for articles so I thought of doing this ;).

It’s been a while since I’ve used openSUSE, as I was without a computer or a laptop for over 4 months. But now that I’ve got my laptop back, It’s good to be with openSUSE!

Alright so let’s have a look at how to change bootsplash screen. Note that this is written with openSUSE as the target distro, the same steps should work with all distros which have bootsplash package installed, if you don’t have it installed or are unsure if bootsplash is present, head over to http://www.bootsplash.org/ and check it out.

Boot splash screens are the screens that show up when you’re booting up or shutting down Linux. Basically while Linux boots, there are 2 modes-silent mode and verbose mode. In silent mode only the picture is shown, while in verbose mode the pictures as well as boot up messages are shown.

The bootsplash actually is a theme. The theme file(or rather theme directory) is stored in /etc/bootsplash/themes/ directory. The theme directory consist of 2 more directories: images and config. In addition to these, the theme directory optionally has animations and bootloader directories/ The directory naming convention is self-explanatory so I will not go into more details into these.

So let’s get to the action and start changing!

When I got my Dell Inspiron, the first thing that I wanted to do was install openSUSE 10.3 on it. After all openSUSE has been serving me well all these years! Because of time restrictions and office workload being too much, I couln’t do it. So when the weekend arrived, I decided to install it!

             Since I dont have an Internet connection, downloading it was out of the question, so I had grabbed a copy of last month’s Digit magazine which had a Bootable openSUSE10.3 version on it. Initially I was weary, especially with the partitioning and the bootloader settings(I’ve done this lots of times, my hesistation was because of Dell MediaDirect occupying the first partition of the HDD. But then I just threw all fear and caution out the door, inserted the DVD and booted up my laptop.

             The green “Welcome” openSUSE splash screen is just awesome and put me in the right mood. After clicking on next couple of times, I ran into trouble. The installer’s partitioning tool informed me saying the NTFS partition could not be resized, as there were inconsistencies in the filesystem and informed me to do a file system check.

Laptop Review:

As few might be knowing I’ve purchased a Dell Inspiron 1520. Here’s a short review on it.

Laptop Specifications:

• Processor: Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache
• Main memory: 2x1GB DDR2 667 MHz Dual Channel mode
• HDD: Fujitsu MHW2160BH 160GB SATA
• DVD-RW: TSSTcorp DVD+/-RW TS-L632H 8X
• Sound Card: Intel HDA ICH8(82801)
• Graphics Card: nvidia 8600m GT with 256MB RAM
• NIC: BroadCom BCM4401 100
• WiFi: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
• Bluetooth: BroadCom BCM2045
• System Chipset: Intel GM965
• Expansion & Misc ports: 4xUSB, 1xIEEE1394, 1xRJ-45, 1xRJ-11, 1xVGA Out, 2xExpressCard 54, 1xHeadphone out, 1xMicrophone In, 1xMedia Card reader(SD/MMC/MS Pro).

In an interview with the IT news magazine, InformationWeek Linus Torvalds speaks on where Linux is heading in 2008. He says that he is very gung-ho about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualization despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

Phoronix reports that NVIDIA’s 169.04 driver brings out a lot of improvements over its predecessor. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. 

What Phoronix had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

I found this blog giving a step-by-step tutorial on how to get Direct 9.0c installed on your Linux box. Worthy of a look I say!

Excerpts:

About DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. DirectX, then, was the generic term for all of these Direct-something APIs, and that term became the name of the collection. Over the intervening years, some of these APIs have been deprecated and replaced, so that this naming convention is no longer absolute. In fact, the X has caught on to the point that it has replaced Direct as the common part in the names of new DirectX technologies, including XAct, XInput, and so forth.

This for all those guys who don’t know which linux to try. These are the ones that had us awed at their usability and features.

Aditya’s Picks:

• Ubuntu
• Xubuntu
• Puppy

My Picks:

• openSuSE
• Kubuntu
• DreamLinux

Windows vs Linux in a friendly fight to be choosen as the right OS for basic everyday use.

How we ranked

• Installation

Installation shouldnot be too messy and should be user friendly. A GUI is preffered and faster installation obviously scores well.Live Cd’s/DVD’s score plus points.

• Default Software

The operating system must come with a good suite of softwares to take care of all your needs.

• Stability

This is the place where the Operating System has to score. It is very important that it doesn’t spur problems routinely.

• Easy Availability and Installation of Softwares

Softwares for the Operating System should be easily available and easily installable.

• Light on System Resources

The Operating System Should not hog your system resources. By hogging you system resources you will get very little performance out of your system.

Introduction to the contenders

NVIDIA has released new BETA drivers for x86 and x64 (AMD64/EM64T). This new driver is now off of their latest 169 code line and will possibly net some performance benefit on top of the long release highlights list:

• Added support for GeForce 8800 GT.
• Improved modesetting support on Quadro/GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 6200/7200/7300 GPUs multi-core/SMP systems.
• Improved hotkey switching support for some Lenovo notebooks.

Penguin as logo/mascot for Linux was discussed first in early 1996 by several people in the linux-kernel mailing list. The idea of such mascot came from Alan Cox first. Among many other suggestions made by different people there were parodies of other operating system logos, sharks or even eagles.

At some point Linus Torvalds casually mentioned that he was rather fond of penguins and it stopped the debates at once.

The first person called the penguin “Tux” was James Hughes who said that it stood for “(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)”. Tux was designed for a Linux logo contest.

Hakan Bayindir at Phoronix writes about ATI’s new drivers, their performance(Non-performance, should I say ?).

It’s been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life. Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support (AMD 8.42 Linux Display Driver). Was this release worth the amount of hype and did it solve everyone’s problems? For me, simply, no. After seven months of waiting, updating, and struggling, things are not good for me, in every possible feature of the ATI Linux driver I use.

ATI released six drivers since the first article I wrote at Phoronix and I have installed and used all of them. While some of the drivers showed some improvements over my problems, nothing has fully recovered. I am still having some problems, which can be grouped as follows:

· Hardware issues
· 2D acceleration & video playback issues
· 3D acceleration & AIGLX issues

Re-buntu:-The reviewing distro

Finally a distro that beats ubuntu. Hold your breath and witness the miracle

So which one is it? This is a distro that’s been released along with ubuntu 5.10(no it’s not Kubuntu). Though many know about it is seldom used. Ok lets cut the suspense it’s Xubuntu-7.04. No don’t close the page read the review to find out why it really beats Ubuntu.

Why the hell did I even try out Xubuntu?

Well I needed to install it on a pretty old system(Pentium-3 700Mhz and 256Mb RAM. So what better than the good old XCFE desktop. While puppy(an 90mb distro using XCFE) misbehaved on this system, Xubuntu did not. It worked like a charm although with slow startup time but still very user friendly.

TechieMoe has put up an interesting article on his experience in getting Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon up and running on his MacBook Pro. Here’s what he writes:

Introduction:

Many times on LinuxForums I’ve come across folks who wanted to run Linux on an Apple computer. Most of the time the first question I ask of them is “If you have an Apple computer, why not just run OS X?” Until this past week, I could not have answered this question.

For several years I’ve run OS X on my Macbook Pro and been quite happy with it. The OS did what I wanted it to do and didn’t get in my way. I’ve been able to do work and play on it just fine. For those of you unaware, I write Java software for a living. I also sometimes coach a high school computer science competition. I spend a lot of time writing Java code and investigating new and exciting features in the language. One such feature is JavaDB. It’s completely new in Java 1.6, and can only be used with that version.

Every one is trying out linux, if you don’t want to be left out read on.

This topic covers what you need to know to shift to the boon called Linux.

Firstly why do you need Linux? Linux is for geeks and their geek factor right?

Well the answer is no. Linux is for those who need a peace of mind.

Let’s take an example here.

You come home tired after a long day’s work and all you want to do is sit in front of your computer and relax but as soon as you turn it on you get a message could not find system32 and windows wont start whatever you do.

So you call your system mechanic and he will comes the next day reinstalls windows an charges you a good 500 bucks. Now your system runs fine and also faster than before and all is well again right?

Again the answer is no.

Within a month or two you will experience the same or a new problem and again its 500 bucks gone.

Now you might ask if I mean to say that Linux is problem-free. I would say no to that. At present all Operating Systems do have their own problems but in the case of Linux it is lesser and you will find more stability and configurability. If this is not compelling enough then read on and I am sure you will reconsider.

Max Spevack, Fedora’s Project Leader speaks about the release of Fedora 8 at the [Mailing List

]1

On Thursday November 8th (about 3:00 PM GMT), Fedora 8 will go live to the world, and you will be able to download it at http://fedoraproject.org

The bits are all finalized, the mirrors are synced, and the torrents are primed. But until we flip the switch, you will have to tide yourself over with this — my personal Fedora 8 release announcement.

Fortunately, it’s pretty long, so if you read it all, Fedora 8 might be released by the time you have finished!

This excellent Linux installation guide was written by my friend, “The Trojan” initially on the CHIP forums. So all credits to him, for writing this excellent post(and note that I’ve taken his permission to reproduce it here).

I am writing this down considering the fact that most of the newbies who want to try out Linux or want to make a shift to it or want to use it along side with Windows are afraid of the installation and the “GEEK” status of the Linux OS. I will try to resolve the issues with both the mental fear of geek status of Linux and the small technical fear of a new operating system.

First with the mental fear as it is necessary that you are mentally ready to do something before actually trying it out! So, what is the reason people fear that Linux is tough to use. Well, Linux is not tough to use, its only that it is a bit more difficult to administer it when compared to Windows Operating systems. So first of all, before installing Linux, be ready that you will have to learn new things and some really interesting facts about the real potential of your hardware and its details will be shown to you. The rules of Linux are much different from that of Windows. But there is JUST NO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF LINUX. It will become easier as you keep on using it.

This is the first BETA release of Linux Mint 4.0, codename Daryna, based on Celena and compatible with Ubuntu Gutsy and its repositories.

Daryna is using Gutsy’s package base (kernel 2.6.22, Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3, Thunderbird 2.0…etc).