BeautyandBoost.com
4:59pm
Music
‘linux’ Archives
Why PulseAudio?
PulseAudio has been on the receiving end of quite a bit of flaming. Some deserved, a lot not. Most critics have been appeased as PulseAudio has matured and distros make setup smoother, but there are still a number of troll users who trash it at every opportunity. Common objections to PulseAudio includes: “We don’t need another sound [...]
W7 Theme for Ubuntu brings Windows 7′s familiar GUI to Linux
W7 is a tool that changes your Linux GUI to a more familiar Windows interface. Linux has a highly configurable GUI, but if you long for the more well-known Windows interface, this script will do a remarkably good job of making Ubuntu look like Windows 7. You can download either a GNOME and KDE version, as well as one of a few Firefox themes [...]
HOWTO: Block brute force attacks on your SSH server
You have probably seen very simple iptables rules to do this. This is a little bit better. -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name SSH --rsource -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m recent --rcheck --seconds 30 --hitcount 4 --rttl --name SSH --rsource -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset -A [...]
HOWTO: Create a shell script to monitor load average on a Linux server
Load Average on a server reflects the current state of the server. Higher the load average, poorer is the server performance hence it is a necessity to monitor the load average on the server. The following shell script monitors the load average on the Linux server and inform the server administrator with the current running processes of the server [...]
Linux is winning
Good article, but to be honest, most people have no idea Android is based on Linux or is Open Source at all. So its not like the general public is choosing Linux over other platforms on purpose, its because to them Android can do more than the iPhone and iPad OS. As for the video codecs, its more nerd stuff that the general public wont care [...]
HOWTO: Move your logs and temp files to RAM
While working with netbooks and other portable computers over the years I have always looked for new ways to improve battery life, but I have also been concerned with maximizing performance of these small systems. Today I would like to share with you a simple trick to improve performance and the overall "feel" of your computer. To improve [...]
UK Officials: Dump Microsoft and Use Linux to Save Money
Although they say this every year or so, it never happens. It's just so they can get Microsoft to give them a nice fat discount when they need to upgrade. You could say that it's a cost-cutting measure in itself. "In terms of spending less, what about migrating the whole of government (the NHS, education etc.) from Microsoft products to Linux [...]
Novell Wins!
Someone needs to do a "Here's all the things that came out while Duke Nukem Forever was in development" time-line for this. I'm fairly sure a good portion of my IT career fits in that scope. Here you go, munchkins. Judge Ted Stewart has ruled for Novell and against SCO. Novell's claim for declaratory judgment is granted; SCO's claims for [...]
Adobe discontinues (beta) 64-bit Flash support for Linux
With Flash 10.1 release, Adobe discontinues (beta) 64-bit Flash support for Linux. Unusable nspluginwrapper or a 32-bit browser is all what is left. Sadly this is both endemic of Adobe and Linux. Adobe makes crap that doesn't work on anything outside of Windows just barely and Linux is left at the behest of the development community as far as [...]
HOWTO: Linux SAN Multipathing
There are a lot of SAN multipathing solutions on Linux at the moment. Two of them are discussed in this blog. The first one is device mapper multipathing that is a failover and load balancing solution with a lot of configuration options. The second one (mdadm multipathing) is just a fail-over solution with manual re-enable of a failed path. [...]
Google to employees: “Mac or Linux… but no more Windows”
We first heard rumors of this policy change a couple of months ago, but now it's made the papers: the Financial Times is reporting that Google is phasing out the use of Windows internally, as employees are migrated to either Linux or Mac OS X on machine turnovers or new hires. The policy change was precipitated in large part by the security breach [...]
Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox
Ubuntu's longstanding policy of not pulling in new major versions of packages into their stable repositories is facing a slight change. Canonical along with the Ubuntu development community have been making it easier to deploy Mozilla Firefox web-browser updates into existing Ubuntu releases. Rather than dealing with back-porting security [...]
HOWTO: Add a progress bar to Linux shell commands
How many times have you wished there was an easy way to view the progress of a gzip? a grep? redirected file read/writes? file copies? There are many situations where the addition of a simple progress bar would make the user experience 1 million times more bearable. Several years ago I had read about pipe viewer, or pv for short. This is truly the [...]
Novell and Red Hat defeat Linux patent lawsuit
A US federal jury found that Novell and Red Hat were not guilty of infringing on user interface patents held by IP Innovation. IP Innovation, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation, brought the suit against the two companies in 2007, claiming that they had infringed on three patents. The patents, [...]
fail2ban and SSH public key authentication
Using fail2ban is a great way to prevent dictionary attacks on SSH but I encountered an unusual problem with it: I sometimes got banned after frequent successful logins. The reason was that I had public key authentication set up for another user on the same host and ssh was trying to use it for all the other accounts before prompting me for a [...]
Free GNU/Linux Advanced Administration eBook
FTAcademy.com offers downloads of its GNU/Linux Advanced Administration eBook for free. It's a 545-page .PDF that covers installation and configuration of several GNU / Linux services and how to optimize and synchronize the resources. The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind [...]
Ubuntu gaining traction in Cloud Computing markets
As Ubuntu's presence in the server space grows, it is showing up in some unexpected places. Weta Digital, the New Zealand company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings and some of the 3D rendering for Avatar, reportedly runs Ubuntu on its 35,000-core render farm and virtually all of its desktop computers. The Wikimedia Foundation, the [...]
PS3 Linux is dead
It looks like Sony's experiment with Linux is about to end with the new v3.21 firmware which disables the OtherOS option. They cite security as the prime mover and they are right. George Hotz has accessed the hypervisor which is the PS3's 1st line of defense and it's a matter of time before backups can be played via this Linux backdoor. I guess [...]
This is why I love Totem
I love Totem. It's so laid back and relaxed. Other programs would be like "ZOMG DUDE THE FLUX CAPACITOR IS OUT ERROR CODE 0xa;sdlgkapbhepogerpbvifrh" but Totem is just like "no reason brah, shit's cool, pick a different disc".
