It’s that time again when Canonical drops their second stable release of the year. The new 12.10 release named Quantal Quetzal, whatever that is, is now flooding the torrents and available on their website. This 12.10 release has many changes: New GRUB 2 boot loader Graphics makeover for Ubuntu Greeter Remote login/remote desktop access added to Greeter log-in prompt Nautilus file manager sticks at version 3.4 Linux kernel 3.5 Unity versions 6.8 and Unity 2D is dropped New Software Updater Dash search returns online results from Ubuntu One and Amazon Dash preview New Dash Photo lens New Share Links tab in Ubuntu One…
Author: Ryan
Recently the readers of Slashdot had the opportunity to submit questions to the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds. Out of all the hundreds of questions that were submitted, the top 12 were chosen based on popularity and sent to Linus. There are some interesting insights and thoughts on copyright and licensing, monolithic vs. micro-kernel architecture, git, forking and fragmentation, and computer hardware. He also goes into what he would have done differently with Linux if he could do it over again, as well as his future and him passing the reigns of Linux to someone else (spoiler: Not anytime soon!). You…
A couple weeks ago I set down at my desk one morning only to discover my trusty Dell laptop had finally bitten the dust. While one side of me would miss that old workhorse which had served me so faithfully, another side was excited at the opportunity to see what the latest and greatest laptops had to offer. After some research I finally settled on the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A-DB71, and after a few weeks of use I can say that I’m glad I did. Since there are plenty of reviews out there for the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A I won’t try…
ASUS made quite a splash with the new Zenbook Prime UX31A and UX21A. Although there is a lot to like, there are a few customers that feel a bit cheated by an underperforming SSD that is included. The problem is that the Zenbook Prime ships with one of two very different SSDs which have the same capacity but dramatic differences in performance. When you open the box you will either discover a fast ADATA XM11, or incredibly slow Sandisk U100 SSD. The model numbers are exactly the same so until you have the box in your possession and look at the…
Th steam store is finally coming to Linux. A Left 4 Dead 2 blog post confirmed that Steam is coming to Linux “the middle of next month”. All of this will also be available not just on the PC and Mac, but also for Linux users as well starting in the middle of next month and rolling out from there. We will have more details as we get closer to launch. L4D confirmation blog post
Here is a great infographic with information on the history of Linux. It gives a good synopsis from the creation of GNU by RMS, to Minix and the initial version on Linux, and finally the current state of Linux today including Android. It is a very interesting read if you are a Linux geek, which you most certainly are if you are reading this site!
I recently ran into a problem where one of my CentOS machines was taking a very long time (a couple of minutes) to start the sendmail and sm-client servies at boot time. I found the fix was quite simple. The problem in my case was resolved by making sure the hostname was correctly added to the loopback entry at the top of /etc/hosts. 127.0.0.1 thehost localhost.localdomain localhost
FFmpeg contains a number of tools to record, convert, stream and play multimedia content. The following tutorial will guide you through the installation of FFmpeg on either RHEL 5 or CentOS 5. I have chosen running on CentOS but it shouldn’t make a difference either way. Lets get started! Adding the DAG repository The first thing that you need to do is set up the DAG repository. This repository contains a large amount of very handy packages not available in the default repositories. Add the following lines to: /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo [dag] name=DAG RPM Repository baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 Now you need to…
In some instances you may find that the default configuration of VIM has the backspace key disabled. Like many others I expect to be able to delete characters right-to-left like most other text editors. Unless you are doing some very minor editing, it quickly becomes a hassle to use the delete key. Luckily there is a quick fix. Add the following line to the .vimrc configuration file in your home directory: set backspace=indent,eol,start You can change for all users by placing this previous line in the /etc/vimrc configuration file.
Since 2004 and for what seems like forever in the technology world, the Linux kernel version has been holding steady at version 2.6.x. The first two numbers were unchanged for nearly 7 years and became largely irrelevant. The third number is the actual version of the kernel. The fourth number accounts for bug and security fixes. But this is all about to change as Linus Torvalds announced the first Release Candidate of the 3.0 code in one of his recent emails. What will be the shiny new feature in this monumental version? Torvalds announced that the big change was, “NOTHING.…