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Amazon announced this week that Prime users would now have access to a pool of free content to stream instantly from the video-on-demand portion of their website.

Sometimes you find the need to backup a personal DVD. There are many GUI tools available that are up to the task, but sometimes some good, old command-line magic is just what you need to get the job done... especially with some more troublesome tasks.

Had been doubtful this would work and upon initial searches, didn't think it should. But I found a way today to manage your iPhone photos with your linux machine without any tricks or hacks. Read on for the super easy and quick way.

We have been using kUbuntu for about 3 years now and have always been slow to upgrade to newer versions, fearing the impending bug, broken configuration with hardware, or grub issues. So when 8.04 rolled out, having been using a 'fairly' stable 7.10, we were quite hesitant to change. However, we had finally decided to upgrade this past weekend, and to our suprise, everything was smooth....well somewhat....

Shooting in RAW format is great for the photography buff. However, when it is time to share with others, post on your photo gallery, or print at the local photo printing shop, you want something more portable. Here we'll look at converting RAW photos (specifically Canon's CRW format) into JPEGs using a batch command-line approach in BASH.

The Slackware team has released some kernel patches to fix the local root exploit you have probably read about recently. It seems that the updated kernel was available yesterday, but a lot of people, including us, did not receive the security advisory email due to some recent work on the mail server.

If you are a Netflix member with and HD DVD player you may have received notice. But if you are still on the fence on choosing sides in the format war, take note: Netflix is now exclusively Bluray.

We use Gallery2 quite a bit for our photos and accordingly use a handy tool called Gallery Remote to upload images to the albums. Under Linux and OSX, there aren't really any efficient ways that I know of to upload lots of photos at once. Under Windows you can use an explorer type plug-in in the uploads section. Gallery Remote is a nice little java application which can handle drag-and-drop image adding, multiple photo addition, addition of captions and changing names, and some other features such as saving login information for multiple accounts or galleries. However, I have had trouble installing Gallery Remote on all of my Linux boxes so far, so I will show you the results of my Googling below and what has worked.

While perusing some Linux stories today, I came across a reference to using SBM, Smart Boot Manager. SBM runs from a floppy disk and allows systems to boot from a selection of disks, effectively allowing one to bypass an old BIOS and have more advanced boot options. From the SBM site: "Smart BootManager is an os independent BootManager which has easy to use interface and many other features. The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OS."

There exists no official flash package available for the 64bit architecture with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If you click the add plugin button when visiting a page with flash, you are taken to the official Flash site and will soon notice that there are no available 64bit downloads here either. There are some workarounds on ubuntu forums, however, they don't always seem to work and get complicated if you have compiled your own 32bit Firefox. We have been using both the official 64bit Firefox package from the Kubuntu repositories as well as a modified 32bit version I built quite a while ago to get around some stability issues with the 64bit version. So after about a year without flash support, we finally took the plunge and have built a quick and easy solution. Read on to see how you can add Flash and Java support to your 64bit system in under 1 minute. [Update] At the end of the article, you will see how we can install a 32bit version of Firefox.

In Slackware 12.0, USB plug and play support is not functional by default. In order to get such functionality working again, we will use a quick solution that will allow for use of HAL and enable KDE to recognize and automount our USB devices.

There was apparently some kinks to be worked out in this release with HAL and automounting of USB drives and so, according to the changelog, was disabled by default. We are going to enable this again and get USB plug and play working again in our KDE environment.

Today we will go through how to easily add a new (or old) hard drive to our server. We will specifically be using a Slackware box that serves up apache and a few others, but the principals remain essentially the same for another linux box such as Ubuntu. So we have run low on diskspace on our webserver since the addition of Gallery2 and need to add another hard drive to our setup. Our first drive was a 20GB drive that we will leave as the root (/) drive and will add a second 250GB ATA drive (western digital) to the mix.

So most of us with a LAN setup have run into this situation. We wish to connect to our LAN remotely while at work or at the coffee shop. Our firewall is setup and ready for NAT on our desired ports and our internal computers/servers on the LAN have the appropriate services running. But our ISP gives us our IP dynamically so it may stay the same for a month or maybe a couple, or maybe it will only stay at the current address for another day. Well let's figure out how we can find our IP in the sea of addresses when far from the comforts of the LAN.

My dirty walk-through to setting up an external modem in Linux using wvdial to dial into an ISP connection. I had some trouble finding a single place with a good write-up for doing such a task when I was setting up a Linux box for someone that had previously been using Windows and a little OS X. Finding dialing info, modem configuration, or slight troubleshooting, alone wasn't too difficult, but finding them in one place in a concise manner was. So I have attempted to compile what I have found, my tweaks and adjustments, and other hints that enabled me to setup a Linux box to use a dial up connection via external modem.

XMPP is an open technology for instant messaging and presence information. It provides the opportunity to build an open source and free messaging server to handle many applications in varied environments. We are going to setup a XMPP server on a LAN to handle communications between LAN and WAN contacts. By running our own server we can gain some insight into how XMPP and Jabber work, create an efficient and easy to use internal communications setup, connect our server to other servers and services including WAN communications, and last, but not least, we can have our own private communications using SSL. Read on for more on XMPP and how we actually set it all up.

As I'm sure you are aware, we have started our own Folding at Home (FAH) team here at Mutaku. We have been working on getting some more of our old hardware, that had been collecting dust on a shelf, back to work folding proteins. One goal in mind was to try and minimize the amount of power that each machine would require, as well as attempt to cut down on unnecessary heat and noise. The end result is today's guide. We will go through a brief HOW-TO on setting up a "thin" client running a Linux live-cd to add to our collection of boxes running the FAH command line interface (CLI) client.