GroundWork Monitor Community Edition provides a essential IT monitoring solution that enables you to maintain network visibility and control.

This is a single server deployment that leverages the strengths of 15 other open source projects such as Nagios, rrdtool and nmap. It combines the results of these projects in to a system that evaluates the status, events and performance of monitored devices and presents these results in an easy to understand web application.

This open source project distributed on sourceforge.net is available under the GNU Public License (GPL v2). It is ideal for operations who already have deployed one or more open source monitoring projects and need to expand its capability.

Run these 3 commands from shell. SUDO not required.

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort” 2222

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort” 22

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol” TCP

Where…

• “name of vm” is your virtual machine name
• ssh is the name of the service. This is _required_ to be unique among the three commands.
• Ports 2222, 22, TCP respectively with your desired host port, guest port, and protocol.

…then shutdown your VM and Virtualbox host application, and restart them.

To Confirm the above settings are in place:

VBoxManage getextradata “name of vm” enumerate

To remove the settings made above from the VM: (again substituting the variables as appropriate).

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort”

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort”

VBoxManage setextradata “name of vm” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol”

Likewise Open is a free, open source application that joins Linux, Unix, and Mac machines to Microsoft Active Directory and securely authenticates users with their domain credentials.

Click here for details:

Another way to do this is to use CloneZilla.

1) Dell: Dell is currently selling four laptop systems starting from $549 to $1049; the linux desktop system available starts at $448. All these system are pre-installed with Ubuntu 8.04. here:

2) system76: They are Mark Shuttleworth’s personal favorite Linux pre-installed reseller. Like Dell they only sell pre-installed Ubuntu Linux. But they have a wider choice in systems and hardware configurations. Their cheapest laptop starts at $869. More information here.

3) The Linux Laptop Company: As the name suggests they are specialized in selling pre-installed linux laptops; like the previous two vendors their distro of choice is Ubuntu 8.04. They currently sell four models of laptops and the price starts at $699 to all the way up to $1299. More information here.

4) ASUS EeePC: Based on Xandros Linux Asus EeePC is perhaps the most widely used pre-installed linux subnotebook ever sold. There are several resellers for ASUS EeePC, but my favorite is newegg; where the listed price for 1000H 40G is $669. You can get more information about the system here.

5) Linux Emporium: Based on UK, they are Thinkpad resellers with three choices of Linux distro. Their systems can be configured for Ubuntu, Suse or Fedora. Prices start at £376. Get more information here.

6) Linux Certified: They sell a wide variety of laptops with six choices of pre-installed Linux Distros. Fedora 8, Ubuntu 8.04, open SUSE 11, RHEL 5, CenOS 5, Oracle Linux. Their LC2000 series laptops start $699. here.

Source: LinuxHaxor.

The GNU MP3/Media Streamer is a simple application which makes it possible to navigate through your audio and video collection via a browser, and stream playlists across a network.GNUMP3d is a streaming server for MP3s, OGG vorbis files, movies and other media formats.The software supports browsing, searching, and streaming all via your browser with support for MP3, OGG Vorbis, WMA and many other types of audio files.

Click here for more info and configuration information.

GnuMP3d home site.

your mileage may vary:

_______________

Harder:

- Anatomy of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux)

- Understanding AppArmor

- grsecurity

- What is Linux Security Module?

- 10 Basic Linux Security Tips to Implement

- The Best Linux Security Tools

- Linux Audit and Intrusion Detection

- The Unix security audit and intrusion detection tool

- Top 100 Network Security Tools

- The short life and hard times of a Linux virus

- LIDS Secure Linux System

- 10 ways to secure your Linux desktop

Better:

- Beautiful Conky Setup

- Building a Better (Linux) GPU Benchmark

- Last-Exit: A Better Linux Client for LastFM

- The best Linux system repair distribution

- A Better Introduction to Linux User Interface

- Better Linux Dock

Faster:

- How to make Ubuntu extremely fast

- Booting Linux in five seconds

- Improving boot time on a general Linux distribution

- Reboot Linux faster using kexec

- Make Linux Faster and Smoother

- A better, faster desktop search for Linux

- 10 ways to make Linux boot faster

- Fast file copy in Linux

- How fast does Arch Linux install? (video)

Unless you have fully embraced the virtualization movement, you probably have more than one machine in your home or office, particularly if you run more than one operating system, and you probably have more than one keyboard and mouse on your desk. If you would like to regain some desk space without having to purchase a KVM switch, x2x may be the solution. Simply put, x2x takes advantage of the X Window System’s ability to run a display over a TCP/IP network. In this case, you are not running a display as much as you are taking charge of another display’s mouse and keyboard.

More can be found here.

Here’s the full howto.

Howto use Cryptsetup with LUKS support. (Debian Linux).

Linux Command Reference

Linux Security Quick Reference

The Gimp Hotkey Reference

Gmail Account Hacking Tool:

A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool is planning to release it in two weeks.

When you log in to Gmail the website sends a cookie (a text file) containing your session ID to the browser. This file makes it possible for the website to know that you are authenticated and keep you logged in for two weeks, unless you manually hit the sign out button. When you hit sign out this cookie is cleared.

Even though when you log in, Gmail forces the authentication over SSL (Secure Socket Layer), you are not secure because it reverts back to a regular unencrypted connection after the authentication is done. According to Google this behavior was chosen because of low-bandwidth users, as SSL connections are slower.

The problem lies with the fact that every time you access anything on Gmail, even an image, your browser also sends your cookie to the website. This makes it possible for an attacker sniffing traffic on the network to insert an image served from http://mail.google.com and force your browser to send the cookie file, thus getting your session ID. Once this happens the attacker can log in to the account without the need of a password. People checking their e-mail from public wireless hotspots are obviously more likely to get attacked than the ones using secure wired networks.

Perry mentioned that he notified Google about this situation over a year ago and even though eventually it made this option available, he is not happy with the lack of information. “Google did not explain why using this new feature was so important” he said. He continued and explained the implications of not informing the users, “This gives people who routinely log in to Gmail beginning with an https:// session a false sense of security, because they think they’re secure but they’re really not.”

If you are logging in to your Gmail account from different locations and you would like to benefit from this option only when you are using unsecured networks, you can force it by manually typing https://mail.google.com before you log in. This will access the SSL version of Gmail and it will be persistent over your entire session and not only during authentication.

(To turn on SSL in GMail, go to SETTINGS, GENERAL, and at the bottom make sure to select ALWAYS USE HTTPS under the BROWSER CONNECTION item.)

There is a simple applet (reached via the menu “System | Preferences | Keyboard Shortcuts”) which allows you to specify which keys should be used for common activities.

Using the applet you can, for example, setup the keybinding Ctrl-Alt-t to run a terminal. However the list of actions is static, and it isn’t possible to add a new command there.

If you wish to bind Ctrl-Alt-e to launching emacs you’re out of luck - to do this you must use the gconf-editor.

Launch the editor by opening a terminal and running:

skx@pies:~$ gconf-editor

Using the gconf-editor we will need to do two things:

• Define a new command.
• Define the shortcut which should be used to execute that command.

So first of all navigate to “apps | metacity | keybinding_commands“. Once there in the righthand pane select “command_1″ and change the value to /usr/bin/emacs.

Now we need to define the shortcut which will execute it, we do that by visiting the key “apps | metacity | global_keybindings“. Choose “run_command_1″ and set the value to be “<Control><Alt>e”.

Now you should find that pressing Ctrl+Alt+e will launch emacs.

I hope in the future the keyboard shortcut application will allow you to define arbitrary commands and their associated shortcuts.

Preparing for backup

• Depending on why you’re backing up, you might want to:

  • Delete all your emails
  • Clear your browser search history
  • Wipe your saved browser personal details

    If you are not worried about the security concerns, this step is not necessary. Many users explicitly want backups of their email and browser settings.

• Unmount any external media devices, and remove any CDs/DVDs not needed for the backup process.
  • This will lessen the amount of exclusions you need to type later in the process.

Backing up

• Some directories require root or superuser permissions to successfully backup. Gain superuser access by opening a terminal and entering:

  sudo -s -H

• Go to the root of your file system:

  cd /

  We use the file system root in our example, but you use any target destination you want. You can use remote or removable drives as your backup destination.

• Create a backup of your system:

  tar -cvpzf /backup.tgz –exclude=/proc –exclude=/lost+found –exclude=/backup.tgz –exclude=/mnt –exclude=/sys /

• Now, lets explain this a little bit:

  • ‘tar’ is the program used to do a backup
  • c - create a new backup archive
  • v - verbose mode, tar will print what it’s doing to the screen
  • z - compress the backup file with ‘gzip’ to make it smaller

  • f <filename> - specifies where to store the backup, /backup.tgz is the file used in this example

  • Now come the directories we want to exclude. We don’t want to backup everything since some directories aren’t very useful to include.
    • Make sure you don’t include the file itself, or else you’ll get weird results.

    • Don’t include the /mnt folder if you have other partitions mounted there.

      • If you have Partitions in /mnt that require backup, you will need to exclude the folders you do not want backed up.

        –exclude=/mnt/<unwanted_partition>

    • Make sure you don’t have anything mounted in /media.

      • Remove CDs/DVDs and removable media that you don’t need backed up. You can selectively exclude directories in /media if you want removable devices backed up.

  • After all of the options is the directory we want to backup. Since we want to backup everything we use / for the root directory.

• If you want to exclude all other file systems you can use the –one-file-system option in addition to or instead of –exclude.

  • With the –one-file-system option, only the “local” file system is backed up.

    The “local” file system is the file system you have specified, not the file systems mounted under it in the file hierarchy. Use df to see which file systems you have mounted.

    

    tar -cvzf /backup.tgz –one-file-system –exclude=/lost+found –exclude=/backup.tgz /

• Relax while Tar creates a backup of your system. This make take awhile depending on the amount of data that is being backed up and the speed of your processor. When the process is complete you will have a file named backup.tgz in the root directory of your file system. This file may be burned to a CD/DVD, moved to another partition/drive, or even stored on another machine.

• Files that are bigger than 2GB are not supported by some implementations of ISO9660 and may not be restorable. So don’t simply burn a DVD with a huge .iso file on it. Split it up using the command split or use a different way to get it onto the DVD. See man split for further information on split.

  • A possible workaround is the following:

    sudo tar –create –bzip2 –exclude /tmp –one-file-system –sparse / | growisofs -use-the-force-luke -Z /dev/hda=/proc/self/fd/0

    • Note that this only backs up one file system. You might want to use –exclude instead of –one-file-system to filter out the stuff you don’t want backed up. This assumes your DVD drive is /dev/hda. This will not create a mountable DVD. To restore it you will reference the device file:

      sudo tar –extract –bzip2 –file /dev/hda

      At the end of the process you might get a message along the lines of ‘tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors’ or something, but in most cases you can just ignore that.

    • Another workaround would be to Bzip2 to compress your backup. Bzip2 provides a higher compression ratio at the expense of speed. If compression is important to you, just substitute the z in the command with j, and change the file name to backup.tar.bz2. That would make the command look like this:

      tar -cvpjf /backup.tar.bz2 –exclude=/proc –exclude=/lost+found –exclude=/backup.tar.bz2 –exclude=/mnt –exclude=/sys /

Backup over a network

• It is possible to use netcat to transfer the backup between computers.

  • On the receiving end you’ll setup netcat to write the backup file like this:

    nc -l -p 1024 > backup.tar.bz2

  • Then you pipe the tar command without the f flag through netcat on the sending end like this:

    tar -cvj <all those other options> / | nc -q 0 <receiving host> 1024

    • In the above commands 1024 is just a random port number, anything from 1024 and up should work.
  • If all goes well the backup will be piped through the network without touching the file system being read.

• You can also use SSH:

  tar zcvf - /home | ssh <backuphost> “( cat > home_bkp.tar.gz )”

  • In this example:

    • The directory to backup is /home

    • The backup destination is home_bkp.tar.gz on the machine called <backuphost>.

    • The hyphen before /home tells tar to send output to stdout rather than to a file.

    • Adding the ‘p’ option to tar would preserve file permissions.

Restoring

For the purpose of this tutorial we will assume your backup file is stored in the file system root. We will also assume that you have already gained superuser access through sudo.

• Restore your backup:

  tar -xvpzf /backup.tgz -C /

• If you used bz2:

  tar -xvpjf backup.tar.bz2 -C /

  • A brief explanation:

    • The x option tells tar to extract the file.

    • The -C <directory> option tells tar to change to a specific directory before extracting. ” / ” in this example.

    • The p option preserves all file permissions. This is default action for tar when used by the superuser.

  This will overwrite every single file on your partition with the one in the archive.

• The restoration process may take awhile, depending on the size of the archive and the speed of your computer.

• Once the extraction is complete, re-create the directories which were excluded.

  mkdir /proc /lost+found /mnt /sys

• Reboot and everything should be restored to the state of your system when you made the backup.

  It may not be exactly the way it was when you made the backup, because files created after the backing up won’t be deleted.

Restoring over a network

• If you used nc to backup to another computer the commands to restore are:

  • On the sender side, the side that has the backup file:

    cat backup.tar.bz2 | nc -q 0 <receiving host> 1024

  • On the receiving side:

    • Mount the disk (if you are running from a LiveCD)and type:

      nc -l -p 1024 | tar -xvpjf - -C /mnt/disk

      • The - character will tell tar to accept the input from stdin, the pipe.
      • The backup file will be expanded without being saved on the disk on the receiver, like when the backup was made.

      • “-xvpjf is for a .bz2 file, change j to z if you used a tar.gz backup.

Reformatted Partitions

• If you had to format partitions, update the /etc/fstab file after restoring the backup.

  1. Mount the reformatted partitions on a LiveCD.

  2. Open a terminal and type

     blkid

  3. Making note of the UUIDs, edit the /etc/fstab in the restored root partition.

     sudo nano /mnt/disk/etc/fstab

     Change the UUIDs to match the results of your blkid command.

Restoring GRUB

• In most cases restoring GRUB should not be necessary.

  • If you need to reinstall grub GRUB see this page.

Additional resources

• “Backing Up Ubuntu”

• “Wei’s world: HOWTO: backup my Ubuntu”

From the article . . .

All of a sudden, Yahoo and Google want to make it easy for you to opt out of their ad targeting on both their sites and across the Web. Yahoo announced a new one-click opt-out policy today, and Google made it possible to opt out of both Google and Doubleclick ad targeting with one click yesterday.

At least Yahoo was honest enough to come out and say that the new policy was a direct response to Congressional scrutiny over the intrusiveness of online advertising and behavioral targeting. Google’s announcement was buried in a blog post about Doubleclick cookies.

. . . if you don’t want those cookies, you can decline Yahoo’s here and Google’s here.

Click here for more information from VMware.

1. You’ll need to connect the new drive onto the IDE cable. Most IDE cables have two plugs for hard drives. The headache comes with determining which drive is a master and which a slave, so the computer knows which one to boot to. No two hard drive manufacturers have the same standard for setting those tiny little jumper pins on the unit, so you’ll have to read whatever diagram they have and fiddle with tweezers moving them around and such.

Also, most PCs allow you to select boot order from the BIOS, or with what order you go by on the cables. Our troubles begin when we have a drive with the pins in the wrong place and a BIOS that disagrees with it. You’ll know that you have it all straightened out when you have your original drive as “/dev/hda” and your new drive as “/dev/hdb”. Start it up and test for this, then shut it back down. (Lyle’s edit: Often these days, hard disks are now labelled /dev/sdX, where X are letters of the alphabet, starting with ‘a’.)

2. Disconnect the original drive (so you don’t accidentally mess it up!) and boot the machine from your choice of any live CD distro or “Tom’s root-boot floppy“. Tomsrtbt has the benefit of being fast, having all the tools you need for disk maintenance, and virtually guaranteed to run on any old toaster you have. It’s saved my bacon dozens of times, so another big, whooping shout out to Tom. (Lyle’s edit: You can also use GParted’s Live-CD, very useful).

3. If it’s a used drive, use “fdisk /dev/hdb” to delete partitions. fdisk is really simple. The commands are all one-letter.

• m - The “manual”, it will print all the commands available.
• p - Prints the partition table.
• d - Deletes a partition. It will prompt you for a number, if there’s more than one.
• w - Will write the changes to the drive permanently.
• q - Quits fdisk.

After this, I always use “dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb” to wipe the new hard drive completely. If it’s factory-new, you can skip these steps. Using “dd” will take a while for a large drive. Figure roughly one hour per ten Gigabytes. Leave it run while you go play Sudoku.

4. Now you will want to set up the new drive’s partitions with fdisk. Once again, use “fdisk /dev/hdb” and type your letters; Linux distros will usually need partition #1 to be the boot section, #2 to be swap, and #3 to be the “/” root directory. But these differ. Some distos want to split up the root partition into multiple sub-partitions, with “/usr/” or “/home/” going on a separate partition.

• n - New partition. You will be prompted to answer whether it’s to be a primary or extended partition, enter a partition number, and specify the beginning and ending blocks. For anything less than four partitions per disk, make them all primary.
• a - make a partition “bootAble”. Usually only the first partition - boot, naturally!
• t - Change a partition’s system Type. By default, fdisk on Linux will make every partition type #83 - native Linux. The only one you will have to change is the swap one, to #82.

Here is a typical Linux setup from a different machine:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1           9       72261   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              10         140     1052257+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3             141        1550    11325825   83  Linux
/dev/hda4            1551        9729    65697817+  83  Linux

Check the start and end cylinders for each partition. The boot partition (#1) only needs to go from 1 to about 9, since the boot section only needs a few MBs. The swap partition… is the subject of controversy. Nobody ever knows exactly what to make it. Just take a guess close to what most systems seem to install by default and go from there. The rule of thumb is “twice your RAM size”, but in real life I’ve found that the minimum you need should be about 256MB (1/4th of a Gig) and the most about a Gig. For a home system, anyway.

Because I have to have huge amounts of disk space for home (backing up the website, archiving my graphics art and writing work, emulating systems), I have 62 Gigabytes here for /home/ and only 11 Gigs for the “/” partition, which is extremely generous for most Linux installs even with more stuff on it than anybody would need.

5. Anyway. Now that you have the disk partitioned, make a file system on all partitions with type #83. “mke2fs /dev/hda1″ and do the same for /dev/hda3… etc.

6. Now you’re ready to shut down, reconnect the main hard drive, and boot back to your main drive. Mount each partition from both disks in tandem - “mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1″ and “mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1″ for instance. Then copy everything from one disk to the other, one set of partitions at a time, repeating for hda3, hda4, etc. If you use “cp -pR /mnt/hda1 /mnt/hdb1″, that will copy everything Recursively (R) (all folders, subfolders, and files for the whole file tree), and preserving permissions (p). Do not copy the swap partition, of course!

7. And… one last step. You need to use either Grub or Lilo to write to the Master Boot Record of the new hard drive. I use Grub, since… well, I dunno, I like it! And it’s flexible. The only problem with grub is that its syntax is so alien. Here’s a good tutorial on Grub. My only habit is to mount the old boot partition and make a copy of the menu.lst file to somewhere else, then after I use Grub to create the bootable record on the new disk, I copy over the menu.lst file to it. Providing, that is, that the old system also used Grub and I’m not changing anything.

8. Finally, shut down yet again, remove the old hard drive, change the new hard drive so it will be the master disk instead of the slave, checking jumper pin arrangement on the drive, cable position on the IDE cable, and BIOS boot order. Congratulations, you did it! But do check to make sure the system is stable and no file data has been lost before you go wiping the old hard drive… this is why we copied files instead of moving them!

This was just a quick overview of the process. There’s a lot of details for each of the steps. Consult documentation for specifics, and if you’re not at least competent with the tools involved, try practicing on a scratch monkey computer until you get the hang of it without risking your valuable data.

And be sure to check the comments for all of the corrections left by visitors pointing out where I goofed this up!

Related: Ten Dell models have defective Nvidia GPUs.

(HP and ASUS and all other vendors are equally affected as the NVidia chips themselves are faulty).

1) To rename filenames with CAPS characters to lowercase:

rename ‘y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

2) To remove <spaces> from filenames:

rename ’s/ /-/g’ *

3) To strip files with the .bak extension:

rename ’s/\.bak$//’ *.bak

Free: The free command displays the amount of free and used memory in the system. For example, free -m gives the information using megabytes, which is probably most useful for current computers.

lsb_release -a: The lsb_release command with the -a option prints version information for the Linux release you’re running

sed: The sed (or Stream EDitor) command allows search and replace of a particular string in a file. For example, if you want to find the string “cat” and replace it with “dog” in a file named pets, type
sed s/cat/dog/g pets.

grep: An excellent tutorial.

Running commands sequentially in one command:
If you need to execute multiple commands in sequence but don’t need to pass output between them, there are two options based on whether or not you want the subsequent commands to run only if the previous commands succeed or not. If you want the commands to run one after the other regardless of whether or not preceding commands succeed, place a ; between the commands.

For example, if you want to get information about your hardware, you could run lspci ; lsusb which would output information on your PCI buses and USB devices in sequence.

However, if you need to conditionally run the commands based on whether the previous command has succeeded, insert && between commands. An example of this is building a program from source, which is traditionally done with ./configure, make, and make install.

The commands make and make install require that the previous commands have completed successfully, so you would use ./configure && make && sudo make install. Usually you’ll need an SUDO, for the last command, so make sure you’ve authenticated SUDO prior to running that command.

Learning the Linux Shell: A great tutorial.

last edited 2008-07-16 22:14:39 by JohnCrawford

Tips from IBM, not all that complicated, but worth looking at.

Other tips include…

• Sharing computers on a Linux (or heterogeneous) network.
• IBM’s top 10 Linux articles and tutorials.
• Miscellaneous tips.
• Linux-powered networking: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
• Industrial-strength Linux box lockdown, a howto: Part 1 and Part 2.
• Introduction to cryptology concepts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Note: Some of these links requires registration.

Essentially RTorrent, CTorrent and Transmission-CLI.

This is an excellent treatment on advanced file permissions in Linux, though centered on OpenSUSE, it’s still very helpful and applicable to any distro.

Though John credits this source for working with advanced Linux permissions in Ubuntu under Nautilus (Gnome).

2. The watch command.

3. Command line intro summary, with some rarely used switches (TLDP).

4. If you’re using a system which has a lot of users, and you’d like to see who has started a particular script, daemon, or binary, then the pstree utility is very helpful. It draws a tree of all currently running processes - allowing you to see which processes are related.

A gallery of what people have done resides here.

SSHMenu is much like Putty, in that you can set up individual address book style destinations to SSH into, and save settings for each. While scripting them from the CLI and applying a chmod +x, I can see the benefit of using a centralized GUI.

From the site:

Each menu option will open an SSH session in a new terminal window. You can organise groups of hosts with separator bars or sub-menus. You can even open all the connections on a submenu (in separate windows or tabs) with one click.

Here’s a killer feature: imagine if every time you connected to a production server the terminal window had a red-tinted background, to remind you to tread carefully. Using terminal profiles, SSHMenu allows you to specify colours, fonts, transparency and a variety of other settings on a per-connection basis. You can even set window size and position.

It also leverages Gnome terminal profiles, so you can set up unique profiles to specify transparency, text color and background to remind you of which SSH Host you’re in. It’s written in Ruby, so once you add the source to your /etc/apt/sources.list you’ll need to sudo apt-get update, and import their GPG keys, and re-update again, then install.

Sources: Linux.com, SSHMenu.

Firefox 3 promises to be a great release. I do hope all the plugins and addons we enjoy using are ready for it.

Debbie Richardson has written a great field guide for Firefox 3 with all it’s improvements itemized.

From the guide, one of the most notable improvements: “Firefox 3 is the fastest, slimmest version of Firefox yet. Speed tests are showing a 2-4x improvement over Firefox 2 and 9x over Internet Explorer 7. Memory usage tests measure that Firefox 3 is 2x more efficient than Firefox 2 and 4.7x more efficient than IE7. There’s been a tremendous focus on performance for this release, and an incredible amount of effort has gone in to achieving these numbers.”

Click here for in-depth details on the major improvements in Firefox’s memory usage.

HOW TO’s:

Ubuntu Studio 8.04 Desktop:

Ubuntu Studio 8.04 Server:

–

Ubuntu Studio homepage:

I wonder if it will also run Linux? I hope so. The unit looks quite slick, I might even consider getting one myself — but only if it runs Linux, of course. The unit specifications are expected to be as follows: Atom 1.6 GHz, 3 USB ports, Ethernet, Card reader, Kensington lock, Adapter socket, Mic/line-out, VGA port, screen resolution at 1280×800. The unit is expected to price at less than $500. Yay!

Source: Gizmodo.

Source: Not From Concentrate.

[[Reality and mathematics are truly one and the same.]]

I expect the concept of the on-chip OS to catch on quickly, and if they ultimately offer package management (such as APT) and allow a /home partition on a hard disk (or even a solid state drive!) this could become extremely popular.

ASUS has branded Splashtop “Express Gate”. It will run off a chip, and will be an instant-on OS. At any time you can click a reset button on screen and boot up to a “traditional” OS off a hard disk. It even recognizes wireless interfaces!

If they’d allow for a VNC/RDP client — then this would be a an amazing offering as a base OS on a mini laptop to compete with the likes of the EEE PC.

Source: Splashtop (manufacturer blog article).

One caveat: All your DNS lookups will be unencrypted, an easy way to correct this in Firefox is to go to the about:config page (just type about:config in Firefox’s address bar) and go down to network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = false and change “false” to “true”, which will force Firefox to use the SSH server (via the encrypted tunnel) for all DNS lookups.

A simple article on how easy it is to hack WPA / WPA2, also known as ROT-26 security.

Technically speaking, ReiserFS is an amazing file system, my preferred file system for all my external drives and internal systems. While Reiser4 was being worked on, it’s not ready for primetime and likely never will be ready. It appears other large distros like SuSE have switched back to ext3 since ReiserFS may become a dead filesystem now.

I feel that ReiserFS is itself a tried and tested file system, though I do have great concern about this development. I never cared for the performance of ext3 and while ext4 is in development, it will be some time before it’s ready.

For my own systems I plan to stick with ReiserFS for now (not reiser4) and perhaps consider XFS or JFS (my research shows XFS to be one of the better file systems, but I have not yet personally tested it.)

Here are a few good artciles on the possible fate of ReiserFS due to Hans Reiser’s current real life issues.

1. ZD Blogs

2. IT News.au

3. Daily Tech

4. CNN

Quite helpful for monitoring multiple systems at once. Runs on Windows, OS X and Linux via Java Jar (for linux, just execute as …)

java -jar ./VncThumbnailViewer

You can then specify hosts/ports/passwords in command line, or save them to a host file for future loading as plaintext or encrypted.

Sources:

VNC Thumbnail Viewer.

Linux.com Article on the subject.

SUN announced that they’re going to further certify their servers with Ubuntu Linux. At this time there’s no plans to release Hardy Heron (8.04) for the SPARC processor, though SUN will be certifying their x86 line of servers with Ubuntu, and their more of their SPARC servers with earlier versions of Ubuntu which have been released for