Archive for the ‘Free’ Category

Wikimedia moves to Ubuntu servers

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Wikimedia, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia and its related sites (Wiktionary, etc.), has moved its entire server infrastructure to Ubuntu Server. In the pas Wikimedia has run a mixture of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Fedora.

“It definitely has gotten a lot simpler,” Vibber said. Mass upgrades can be done more easily, and the data center can be managed as a unit, he said.

“We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing” and runs the same software, Vibber said. “Everything is a million times easier.”

The move has been seen in the industry as a major victory for Ubuntu Server, and other community based distributions, such as CentOS.

ComputerWorld [via Slashdot]

A Quick VirtualBox Tutorial

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
VirtualBox Seamless Mode

VirtualBox Seamless Mode

Do you feel like trying lots of different distributions?  Do you absolutely have to run some Windows application (for example, Visual Studio)?  Then maybe virtualization is the answer for you.

Here’s an article I’ve written for the HAAGA-HELIA Linux Club.  This is just the beginning, you’ll find the rest at: http://hhlinuxclub.org/articles/virtualization

Introduction

What is virtualization?  Well, in it’s most basic terms it means running an operating system (or part of an operating system) on top of another.  Virtualization is typically divided into five different types, which are:

  • Full virtualization
  • Hardware-assisted virtualization
  • Partial virtualization
  • Paravirtualization
  • Operating System-level virtualization

We’re going to focus on full virtualization in this article.  If you really want to learn about the others, please read the Wikipedia page on Platform Virtualization .  Something that may interest you is that the server that runs this web-site uses operating system-level virtualization, namely Open VZ.

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10 alternative operating systems

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Royal Pingdom has a post covering some of the more obscure operating systems out there.  On the list you’ll find SyllableOS, Haiku, AmigaOS 4.1, and seven others.  How big a role these niche OSes will play in tomorrow’s computing is debatable, but they are options for the chronically OS curious.

Royal Pingdom [via Tectonic]

Freedom Fry

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

In honour of GNU’s 25th birthday, Stephen Fry has posted a video on the gnu.org explaining Free Software in layman’s terms. Have a look above, or get the original (high-quality) OGG file from http://www.gnu.org/fry.

84 of the Best Free Linux Games

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

LinuxLinks.com has a fairly substantial list of free games available for Linux.  In a two part series they cover a total of 84 games that meet their requirements, which are:

  • Free to play (no download charge, no monthly charge)
  • Does not require Wine to run. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows software.
  • Not in the early stages of development

The games range from action titles such as Nexuiz and Warsow, to game engines such as Sauerbraten and ScummVM.  Surely this is a list from which any Linux user can find a game they like, but if it isn’t you can also check out the list of the 42 best commercial games available on Linux.

Update: LinuxLinks seems to be experiencing some problems and so it might be difficult to access the articles.  The first of the articles can be seen through a Coral CDN mirror, but I’ve had no luck with the other.


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