Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

Last week we took a look at the df command, which is for getting information on filesystems. A related command is the du command, which tells you how much disk space your files and directories use. I like the du -- disk usage -- command because it is faster and more powerful than clanking around with clumsy graphical file managers. It's familiar to Linux oldtimers, but perhaps not so familiar to newer Linux users. It tells you the size of a single file:

SparkleShare is an open-source file synchronization and collaboration tool that's powered by Git. After being in development for a long time, SparkleShare 1.0 was released on Sunday...

Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I've grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor...

Dot Categories: DeveloperThis week's KDE Commit-Digest brings three stories: recent KDE-PIM activities, changes in Strigi and Google Code-In. The commit list includes:

With the release of the Linux 3.7 kernel being imminent (it might even be out today), here's an overview of the features and highlights of this 2012 holiday release of the Linux kernel...

Ubuntu developers and users have brought back up the matter of zRAM and using it as part of the default Ubuntu Linux installation in some intelligent manner...

The Trojita program is becoming part of the KDE project. Trojita is a Qt-based lightweight email application...

In the week ending 8 December - Security to the fore as MySQL and SSH holes were exposed, routers could be hacked by email, password cracking powered up, and a Secure Boot bootloader for all Linux distributions was made available

Last month marked the release of Upstart 1.6 for the init daemon primarily used by Ubuntu. Coming out nearly one month later is Upstart 1.6.1 to deliver on some additional work...

ETC2, the new royalty-free texture compression method that's required by OpenGL ES 3.0, now has support within mainline Mesa. However, for now this ETC2 support is limited to the Intel DRI driver...

For those interested in Non-Unified Memory Access performance under Linux, here's an independent performance comparison that puts the mainline kernel against three other NUMA kernels...

Intel has released GraphBuilder, a library for Hadoop that allows scientists and developers to create graphs from large data sets for use in their applications. The tool is usable without specific knowledge in distributed systems engineering

By the time they reach market, however, they may find that another Linux-based OS has beaten them to the punch. Android is leading the way in low-cost smartphones, and increasingly, tablets, aimed at the new, budget-conscious middle classes in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other developing nations.

Most distros include Btrfs, and Btrfs has been included in mainline Linux kernels since the 2.6.29 kernel. To use it just install the user-space tools. So what's the story, is it ready for prime time or not?

LXer Feature: 05-Dec-2012

This is an important correction to "Linux Has Not Won, Microsoft is as Dangerous as Ever, Fie on Secure Boot" that explains correctly how the Platform Key works.

I call df, or disk free, the misunderstood command because new Linux users often expect it to tell the sizes of directories and files. But it doesn't do that-- it's for displaying useful information on filesystems. When you invoke it with no arguments, it shows free and used space on all mounted filesystems, their partitions, and mountpoints:

LXer Feature: 04-Dec-2012

I think UEFI Secure Boot is a shuck and a bald-faced Microsoft anti-competitive tool. I'll get to my reasons in a moment, because my most important point comes first:

Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever.

There is a Flash video problem that is peculiar to Linux users using certain Nvidia graphics cards, and that is YouTube and other Flash videos render everything with a blue tint, so that people look like Smurfs, or like the Na'vi in Avatar.

The only problem was that it comes with Windows 8 preloaded, but I figured I'm going to have to bite the bullet and have a go at Windows 8 sooner or later, so why not. The good news was that I checked the specifications very carefully, and there was no mention of "UEFI" or "Secure Boot" or "Made for Windows 8", so at least I shouldn't have to fight with that yet.

I'm pleased to say that a usable version of shim is now available for download. As I discussed here, this is intended for distributions that want to support secure boot but don't want to deal with Microsoft. To use it, rename shim.efi to bootx64.efi and put it in /EFI/BOOT on your UEFI install media. Drop MokManager.efi in there as well. Finally, make sure your bootloader binary is called grubx64.efi and put it in the same directory.