My Linux Way

Finally, Fedora released their latest Fedora 11 Final. After more than 6 month development, and postponed twice on 26th May and 2nd June. Although I often discuss on my blog about Ubuntu tips and tricks, but Fedora really one of my favourite Linux.

One of the top discuss topic about Fedora 11 is the boot up time. Now the boot up time have reduced to 20 seconds, 10 seconds faster than Fedora 10. Let appreciate the boot up screen from Fedora team.

Download: Fedora 11 Final from official site

Download from Fedora 11 Final through bittorrent

Opera has just released their first Opera 10 beta to public. This version supports Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Solaris, QNX, OS/2 and BeOS.

There are some features why you would like to have the new version 10.

1. Opera turbo for fast browsing on slow connection
2. New visual tabs and sleek design
3. Speed dial
4. Web integration
5. Resizable search field
6. 40% faster engine and cutting edge Web standards support
7. Inline spell-check
8. Auto update
9. Email your way
10. Automated Crash Reporting
11. Opera Dragonfly evolved

Is that all? Hm. To Opera users, the Version 10 seem to be a very promising upgrade to them. But for other browsers users, the attractiveness is there yet. Quite a lot new features mentioned which already long impletemented on Firefox and Google Chrome already.

I do wish Opera could have more evolutionary move towards the next HTML5. Maybe to me support Acid 100/100 isn’t the key feature to make me use Opera.

Cheat-Sheets.org is the only place I have been visiting for any quick reference, not only for Linux, but also other programming and web developments languages. They even have cheat sheet on chemistry topic?!

Quoted from there, these are the Linux cheat sheet you might need.

• Linux Command Line Tips [html] (pixelbeat.org)
• Linux Shortcuts and Commands [html] (linuxshortcuts.shtml)
• Unix/Linux Command Cheat Sheet by Jacob [pdf] (fosswire.net)
• The One Page Linux Manual by Squadron [pdf] (homepage.powerup.com.au/~squadron/, digilife.be)
• Linux Administrator’s Quick Reference by Jialong He [pdf] (tiger.la.asu.edu)
• Linux System Calls Quick Reference by Jialong He [pdf] (tiger.la.asu.edu)
• Linux Security Quick Reference by Dave Wreski & Benjamin Thomas [pdf] (tiger.la.asu.edu, digilife.be)
• screen Quick Reference [html] (aperiodic.net)

While, Ubuntu One is still in closed beta, only through invitation to get access to it. I’ve applied it for more than one week, but still haven’t get any response from them. So, people very intuitive will take Ubuntu One and Dropbox for comparison, what so special about Ubuntu One?

Ubuntu One users get 2GB free storage spaces and for $10/month, you are able to get 10GB of spaces! But, with the same amount of money, I would able to get 50GB of spaces from Dropbox! And Dropbox not only run on Linux, but also Mac and Windows.

I think Ubuntu definitely lose its attractiveness compare to Dropbox. So, we will need to wait and see during the official release is there any more features can be provided from Canonical to gain back the attractiveness.

It has been a while I have been using kill command to stop the non responsive running process. But until yesterday then I found out there is a much simple linux command that can do the job of kill and even much better way.

It is pkill command. Pkill is written for Solaris7 and later has been implement for Linux and NetBSD. Unlike the kill command which you need to find out the specific process id to do the killing. With pkill, all you need is just to know the process name, if can’t remember the full or just maybe part of the process name.

So if I want to kill my firefox, just type in

pkill firefox

However, it might also kill process name match the search, maybe there is some other process also call firefox-bookmark or etc.

In PC industry, hardware outdated too frequent. Your hardware often too old and too slow for the latest applications or Operating System. But you can give life to your old desktop by installing some lightweigth Linux distro.

Here are 6 linux distros that are less that 350MB. The first four are less than 256MB, suitable for less RAM computer.

Slitaz – 30MB. All the graphical desktop requirement you need to have are all inside the 30MB ISO file. The core LiveCD includes Firefox 3.0.8, gFTP, LostIRC, ePDFView, mtPaint, Transmission, Osmo and Alsaplayer. The software you need for entertainment can be found inside.

Damn Small Linux – 50MB filesize, able to boot from USB pen drive and business CD. The minimum requirement for the OS is an Intel 486 processor and 16MB! Very suitable for very very old desktop.

PuppyLinux – 85MB filesize. Preinstalled with almost all the applications you needed for leisure. It has good graphic interface, suitable for linux beginners.

Continue Reading »
6 Linux Distros that can save your old hardware

There is a problem on showing purper desktop when using some ATI graphic cards. Here is one of the solutions I can find to solve this.

In the terminal, type the below command line by line to get the the open source ATI driver you needed for the problem.

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config git-core

sudo apt-get install libdrm-dev x11proto-gl-dev mesa-common-dev xutils-dev x11proto-xf86dri-dev x11proto-fonts-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev x11proto-render-dev xserver-xorg-dev

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati

cd xf86-video-ati

sudo ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr –enable-dri

sudo make

sudo make install

Transmission is a popular bit torrent client, but I don’t know why it is not officially inside the Ubuntu repository. So, if you want to run Transmission, you need to build it from the source code. And from Transmission official web site, it also doesn’t provide a very clear instruction how to do it.

Below a detail walk through:

First, download the source code.

Then while downloading it, you will need openssl-dev and libgtk2.0-dev to install on your desktop then your compilation will make it.

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libgtk2.0-dev 

Extract the source code. By default it will create in a folder called “transmission-1.32”

tar xvjf transmission-1.32.tar.bz2
cd transmission-1.32

Build the source code

./configure –prefix=/opt/transmission
make
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /opt/transmission/bin/transmission /usr/local/bin/transmission
sudo ln -s /opt/transmission/bin/transmissioncli /usr/local/bin/transmissioncli

Just type transmission then you can run it. While you can delete the temporary folder “transmission-1.32” you have created early.

One of my favourite applications on Windows, Launchy has finally come to Linux! I heavily rely on this software on Windows instead of looking for the software I want from the Start Menu.

Besides Launchy, there are also similar software for Linux, such as Gnome Do, but I’m still not very used to it. Gnome Do takes up to 20MB of space but Launchy takes less than 7MB.

On the latest Launchy 2.1.1 released on this 6 Aug 08 has deb package version and platform independent version.

Link: SourceForge

I think it is not a problem for many people to find out every time you start your Ubuntu and find out the boot up splash screen is 640 x 480, instead of your preset resolution. But for perfectionist, it is very suffering.

Ok, here is a 3 steps method to solve this.

type “sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf” in your terminal. After accessing with your root permission. You will see something like

# Usplash configuration file
# These parameters will only apply after running update-initramfs.
xres=640
yres=480

Just change the xres and yres to what your favourite resolution. Maybe 1024 x 768, then xres=1024, yres=768. After that, save it.

The last step, you need to type “sudo update-initramfs –u” to update your initramfs.

Reboot your PC and see whether you have a nice boot up GUI.