July 2008

Bandwidth caps

Submitted by Don Watkins on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 18:13
ShareThisWith the coming of bandwidth caps at Time-Warner and elsewhere users are going to look at ways to minimize their usage. If you've ever considered how much Windows updates and antivirus updates add to your total bandwidth it might be enough to consider moving to another operating system like Linux, Unix or the MacOSX. I haven't read much about this topic yet, but I know it's something I've been thinking about.

Got an EeePC?

Submitted by Don Watkins on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 16:08
ShareThisIf you've got an EeePC and you'd like to install Ubuntu on it, I came across a nice article that describes how to do just that.
The Eee lacks an optical drive, so I had to use the SD slot in order to perform the installation. This is the trickiest part of process, but it is significantly simplified by UNetbootin, a user-friendly tool for putting ISO images onto flash media.

Anatomy of The Linux Kernel

Submitted by Don Watkins on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 15:50
ShareThisThe Linux kernel is the core of a large and complex operating system, and while it's huge, it is well organized in terms of subsystems and layers. In this article, you explore the general structure of the Linux kernel and get to know its major subsystems and core interfaces. The Linux kernel is over 6 million lines of code... read more | digg story

Linux tools to convert file formats

Submitted by Don Watkins on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 01:58
ShareThisLife would be a lot easier if we could live in a Linux-only world and if applications never required data from other sources. However, the need to get data from Windows, MS-DOS, or old Macintosh systems is all too common. This kind of import process requires some conversions to solve file format differences; otherwise, it would be impossible read more | digg story

Open source skills

Submitted by Don Watkins on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 23:59
ShareThisKevin Chin's got a good piece about adoption of open source in data centers and increasing your own marketability by honing your open source skills.
You’ve seen the stats… 70-85% of all IT shops have Linux in use.  More and more of them are using Linux and open source for “mission critical workloads”…  Bill Snyder from InfoWorld posted a blog entry that highlights a report that indicates what he calls “the open source jobs boom”.

Backups are important

Submitted by Don Watkins on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 02:50
ShareThisFor the second time in three years I've survived a catastrophic hardware failure with a Lotus Domino server. Early Wednesday morning as I was trying to resurrect the crashed server I prayed that my backup plan had worked. In June I described how I use Rsync and some scripts to backup our Domino server. My prayers were answered on Wednesday morning as we rebuilt the Domino server from the backups. I had to put Domino on an extra Windows 2003 server temporarily and already it's been more work.

Shuttleworth: Make Desktop Linux Better than Apple

Submitted by Don Watkins on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 22:23
ShareThisMark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS. read more | digg story

Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests

Submitted by Don Watkins on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 21:13
ShareThisWindows ’ memory usage went up by 0.07GB, or 71.68MB. The CPU still fluctuated madly but hung around 20%. Under Fedora, memory usage increased by only 50MB and with a maximum processor utilisation of 4%, shortly resuming to 1% while sitting idle (with Windows still jumping all about.) read more | digg story

Open source scanning

Submitted by Don Watkins on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 19:53
ShareThisUntil earlier this morning I'd never used XSane. It's really easy to use and I'd recommend it. I was using a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Ubuntu 7.10 and a USB cable connected to my Hewlett-Packard 3100 PSC. Very straight forward process and easy to use. XSane can scan to JPEG, TIFF, Text, PDF, PNG and some other formats. It's easy to use and intuitive. I'd recommend to anyone using Ubuntu. I've got some pictures and documents I wanted to scan and this is the ticket. It has an OCR feature which I did not use.

Dell upgrades to Hardy Heron

Submitted by Don Watkins on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 07:23
ShareThisRead more on Dell's blog about what's happening with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on Dell systems. If you'd like to purchase one of these systems follow this link.  I've been using Ubuntu on Dell for over a year and I'm excited what this option has to offer.

After extensive development and testing, Dell PCs featuring Ubuntu are now shipping with version 8.04.