The Buzz Media » Linux

The Growing Divide in Ubuntu – Apple’s Methods meets Linux Community

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:18:26 +0000

This article is my opinion. Mark Shuttleworth is dragging Ubuntu (and by extension) Linux, kicking and screaming into the “design-first” world of computing lead by Apple. This progress requires that he, to some extent, ignore an entire community that has never prided itself on or been particularly good at design aesthetics. Ignoring such a community has… it’s [...]

Amazon AWS Team Announces Official “Amazon Linux” AMIs

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:12:19 +0000

The Amazon Web Services team has announced the release of the first officially maintained “Amazon Linux” OS images (AMI) for their EC2 virtual compute platform. The images are actively maintained by the Amazon AWS team and are modified versions a CentOS or Fedora core (unspecified) that are bare-bones and specifically optimized to run on AWS. [...]

Optimizing WordPress Page-Load Pauses with PHP-CGI

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:18:11 +0000

For the last 6-months I’ve been trying to deal with mysterious “page load pause” issues with WordPress on my Apache/prefork/mod_php setup. Server load was low, hardware was a 4GB 2-core machine, spent 4 months of that time tweaking MaxClients and other Apache prefork settings until I finally gave up. The behavior I was seeing is hitting [...]

WordPress (PHP, Sendmail, Postfix) Keeps Sending Mail to Local Spool

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 01:32:17 +0000

Description of Problem You are running WordPress (or some other PHP-application on Linux) and you host your email with Gmail or Google Apps hosted account. Unfortunately, every time you try and generate an email from WordPress and send it with Sendmail or Postfix (on CentOS, Debian, whatever) it always ends up going into your local [...]

Google Chrome OS Based on Ubuntu

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:21:51 +0000

As we type this Google is in the process of announcing their new Chrome OS operating system at a Google Event (TechCrunch Live Coverage). Just like the Chrome browser is based on the Chromium OS project, Chrome OS will be based on the Chromium OS project. Glancing around the source repository for Chromium OS it [...]

Microsoft Games the Bing Search Results

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:48:22 +0000

Saw this on Digg, they are search result comparisons between Google and Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine with an $80 million ad campaign behind it: Given those results, I have to imagine Microsoft is going to allow advertisers to pay for higher search result placement — which, like this, will give us more helpful and [...]

This is Why Linux Will Never Compete on the Desktop

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:42:37 +0000

About a year ago I started writing an article titled “Linux on the Desktop: 10 Years of Wasted Time”. I was trying to summarize why Linux does not compete on the desktop for the mainstream computer user. As a Linux user since RedHat 5.0, then a Gentoo user for years then a Mandrake user for [...]

Floola as iPod Management Software

Ray Gomez — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:16:44 +0000

Looking for that great iTunes replacement app to run on Linux? Have you ever heard of Floola? Offering most of the features of iTunes, Floola now gives Linux users the ability to copy Music, Photos, Movies, and even YouTube and MySpace videos to their treasured ipods. For those whose music is encoded in ogg or [...]

Microsoft Will Never Understand Usability – Vista Device Driver Security Example

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:42:58 +0000

We took our first look at Microsoft’s inbility to create something genuinely useful and a minature review of Vista when we evaluated Windows Vista Backup at the beginning of the year. The premise of that article being that by evaluating a single program, and all the usability/functionality flaws it had, you got an impression of [...]

Linux Alternatives to Apple's Time Machine

Ray Gomez — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:46:42 +0000

Have you ever caught yourself drooling over Apples Time Machine, but just couldn’t bare jumping ship to MacOS X? You are in luck because you have a few projects to choose from. Most of these applications use rsync (a filesyncing program for *nix) and cron (a task scheduler) to mimic the characteristics of Time Machine. [...]

Stream Your Video Feeds with Palantir

Ray Gomez — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:57:50 +0000

Snapshot from palantir.santinoli.com: Over the past couple of weeks I’ve dabbled with the idea to add a webcam to my personal site that monitored a couple of pet furballs. The task was not too straight forward. I ran into many hiccups with alpha software and missing libraries. Most of the software related to setting up [...]

Sneak Peak at KDE 4.2

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:57:34 +0000

polishlinux.org has put together a great sneak-peak at the current incarnation of what will become KDE 4.2 directly from the SVN repo. Overall 4.2 is looking to be a natural evolution to 4.1, which was a surprising leap over 4.0 from a user’s perspective given how disappointingly 4.0 was received from the end-user community (4.0 [...]

Monitoring Multiple Servers with Thundera's Andutteye

Ray Gomez — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:02:34 +0000

Do you have multiple servers and just can’t find the time to monitor and manage each and ever one of them? Do you want to see what software is installed or need some usage statistics for load balancing? Most administrators spend a lot of time focusing on these problems. This is especially the case for [...]

Joe Window Manager for Speedy Desktops

Ray Gomez — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:24:21 +0000

Lightweight desktop users unite. The Joe Window Manager (JWM) aims to please with its minimalist approach to desktop computing. Ideal for older systems, embedded devices, memory stick distro users, or users needing a snappy environment, the JWM is here to serve. The window manager was created using only Xlib and needs nothing more than an [...]

Tomato firmware for WRT54G/GL/GS

Ray Gomez — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:52:40 +0000

Linux really is a robust operating system that can squeeze out the performance of even an unlikely candidate. I’m sure Linksys never imagined that including a Linux based OS into their firmware for the WRT54G wireless router would ever ignite a modder revolution. Over the last couple of years, the WRT54G has still remained popular [...]

NVIDIA's Linux Performance Woes… Especially on KDE 4.x

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:55:23 +0000

Reading through phoronix I ran across an article about NVIDIA’s updated driver release and some links to some forum posts about how NVIDIA’s 2D rendering performance has progressively gotten so bad as the Linux desktop had migrated towards more advanced rendering solutions like XRender (used a lot in KDE 4.x). Some members have said that [...]

OpenGL 3.0 Spec Released – Community Revolts

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:35:07 +0000

It looks like the OpenGL 3.0 spec has finally been released by the Khronos™ Group and so far the community response has been: “You can shove that right back up your ass, we are going to DirectX”. Ouch… Shortly after the announcement game development forums were a-buzz with negative reactions to the spec essentially saying [...]

PC Hardware Virtualization Basics

Ray Gomez — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:17:02 +0000

With single core processors reaching their peak potential, and the latest quad core processors either on the market or a short distance off (dual 4-core Penryn), we are left to wonder how consumer computing will change beyond editing Word documents and playing 3D photo-realistic games. Enter virtualization. Virtualization refers to virtualizing hardware in software, allowing [...]

KDE 4.1 Released – The Release KDE Users Were Waiting For

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:03:52 +0000

When KDE 4.0 was first released with major portions of the desktop rewritten and pieces of the desktop (from a user’s perspective) still left mostly raw or in some cases semi-functional, there was a large user lash-back to the “massive rewrite” approach taken; some calling to brand KDE 3.x and taking that branch forward instead [...]

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 3, Screenshots and New Theme Proposals

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:55:11 +0000

We don’t normally start tracking the Ubuntu releases until they hit about the Alpha 3 stage; after all the big software updates have made it in, any theme work is mostly done and the final release is starting to take shape. Well, that happened yesterday: Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” Alpha 3 was released. New Ubuntu [...]

GNOME File Manager Gets Tabbed Browsing and Column View Support

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:51:18 +0000

For GNOME fans out there that love the UI polish but are less than happy about the lack of tabbed browser in the file manager and sometimes obsessive use of the “spatial” paradigm, rejoice! It looks like GNOME developer Christian Neumair has been working on adding tabbed browsing to Nautilus (the GNOME file manager); which [...]

Nokia Buys Trolltech, Snubs Google's Open Handset Alliance

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:24:42 +0000

Nokia has agreed to purchase Trolltech (creators of the QT cross platform GUI Toolkit that KDE is based on, as well as the Qtopia cell phone platform) for $150 million. This is an interesting move as all the hub-bub surrounding Google’s announcement of the Open Handset Alliance and the new cell platform, Android, was surprisingly [...]

KDE 4.0 Released

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:19:22 +0000

KDE 4 has been released. This release includes… well… a rewrite of KDE. The entirely new desktop shell is called Plasma and includes Mac-esque additions with includes the 3D desktop effects that have been around as well as widgets for the desktop: The file manager was rewritten as well and is now known as Dolphin. [...]

OLPC Isn't For Giant-Handed People

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:53:12 +0000

Preston Lee blogs about Marc Chung’s newest toy: An OLPC. Notice from the picture above that Marc has been cursed with a disease that makes his hands roughly the size of Christmas hams… or the OLPC might just be a lot smaller than I expected (more shots here of Marc’s OLPC, thanks Preston!) Below is [...]