Showing headlines posted by linuxmag

When you install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition in October, don’t look for Firefox on the desktop -- it won’t be there. Chromium, Chrome’s open source cousin, is going to be taking its place. After years of desktop dominance on Linux, is Firefox losing its foothold or is this an anomaly?

Red Hat is the king of commercial Linux support, no doubt about it. Canonical has entered the market and with some refined support products could present a very compelling alternative. Is it enough to make the company profitable long term, though?

If you blinked you might have missed the announcement of the new 2.6.34 kernel. Things have been happening very quickly around file systems and storage in the recent kernels so it’s probably a good idea to review the kernels from 2.6.30 to 2.6.34 and see what developments have transpired.

Take some of the headaches out of managing sever farms with Cfengine 3. Use this automation introduction to save time, money and spare yourself crippling manual mistakes.

iPhone is becoming the standard-bearer, but Android is more versatile. Email was the killer mobile application for a decade or so. But not any longer.

Last week we provided an introduction to the Linux system logs. (See Logs: Your Linux System’s Lovable Worker Bees.) Now, what will you, as a system administrator, use to watch logs? Logwatch, of course. As so many others have succinctly put it, messing with log files is a royal pain in the backside. Logwatch makes the experience of keeping track of system activity almost painless for you.

When the Linux Foundation announced the MeeGo project earlier this year, they said it would "bring the magic to Linux." Now that it is finally here, does it deliver on its promise? It sure does.

Standalone Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers provide file level storage to heterogeneous clients, enabling shared storage. This article presents the basics of NAS units (NFS servers) and how you can create one from an existing system.

Mmmm…. bacon. This article examines two mechanisms to prevent data loss — write barriers and check summing. Both can be particularly important for drives with larger and larger caches. Pay attention: This can save your data bacon.

The long struggle for open video on the Web may finally be over for Linux users. Last week, Google announced WebM at its Google I/O conference. What’s it mean for you? In the long run, a totally open media format for the Web, plus the backing of enough companies and organizations to push open media over the top online.

Last article we introduced the SMART capabilities of hard drives (who knew your drives were SMART?). In this article smartmontools, an application for examining the SMART attributes and trigger self tests, is examined.

Now that Songbird has abandoned Linux, where will we turn for a browser-based music fix? Not to worry, you can still find plenty of add-ons and extensions for Firefox and Chrome to turn them into excellent tools for finding and listening to music.

A trip to New York City to discuss HPC is a nice diversion from the basement life style.

Fedora 13 is on the way and while it innovates in its own right, it also borrows some major features from other distros such as Ubuntu and Mandriva. This is looking to be yet another great release from the Fedora community!

Time to kill? Check. Running Linux? Check. Now, here’s the last piece of that puzzle: 15 current and future gaming options that don’t require Windows.

Opera is finally making with the snapshots for 10.50 on Linux, but is it really as fast as they claim? Opera’s upcoming release gets a shakedown this week, and the results might surprise you.

Is HTML5 going to put the hurt on Flash? Rumors of Flash’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, but the long term prospects for Adobe Flash seem pretty dim indeed.

The upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.04 is on the way and with its new theme, looks simply stunning. With an online music store built in, integrated cloud backup services and a strong focus on social networking, could this finally be the release consumers have been waiting for?

Still deeper into the dot (.) with an dive into access permissions. Study up because there’s going to be a quiz. In the previous article we saw how the hidden directory entries named . (dot) and .. (dot dot) tie the filesystem together. Those names are hard links that reference the actual filesystem object through the index number. A directory always has at least two names: . and its given name. You can always reach the parent directory through the .. entry.

Beginning with a brief tour of the filesystem, we take you deep into the dot (.) of your directory listing so you can get the most from your CLI.