October 27th, 2008
At this point I thought I’d take a moment to go over how this site is powered.
First off, there’s the VPS from Linode (Linode stands for Linux Node) which comes with the following specifications:
- 360MiB RAM
- 12GiB storage space
- 200GiB data transfers per month
- Full SSH access (root)
- Managed DNS
- (and more…)
- $19.95 per month (about 14€)
I’d say that that’s pretty good value for money… So far I’ve been extremely happy with the Linode VPS, no glitches or breakdowns and it’s fairly zippy (even though I’m in Europe and the server is in the US). Oh, and when you order a VPS you get to choose which data centre you want it to be in.
If you do decide to get a VPS from Linode, I’d appreciate it if you used my referral code:
632bae5e8fd45745396cd410c14d94771105bc6a
I’ll be honest about it: I get $20 credit if somebody gets a VPS with that code (and keeps it for 90 days)…
Well, that covers the hardware, so to speak.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: inside workings, vps
Posted in Internal news, Open Source, Software | 3 Comments »
October 24th, 2008
Andrew Bartlett from the Samba development team has published an article titled “A year since Microsoft’s EU appeal failed” describing Samba’s recent efforts for interoperability with Microsoft.
As JP puts it on Slashdot: “In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft’s engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way.”
Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team [via Slashdot]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 24th, 2008
As you might have read a recent post of mine, I’ve recently been getting acquiented with the Arduino platform. Indeed I got my hands on my very own Arduino Nano this afternoon when it arrived in the mail.
Now, quite handily, Wired has an interesting article on Arduino and Open Source Computing (titled ‘Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?‘).
Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.
The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.
Wired on Arduino [via Creative Commons Weblog]
Tags: arduino
Posted in Hardware, Media Coverage, Open | No Comments »
October 24th, 2008
Donald Townsend. CC BY-NC-SA
A recently released study conducted by the Linux Foundation place the value of the Linux Kernel at around 1.4 billion US dollars (~1.1 billion €) and the value of a the full Fedora 9 distrbution at just above 10 billion US dollars (~7.85 billion €).
The companies and individuals who work on Linux-related projects and build this value proft by sharing the development burden with their peers (and sometimes competitors.) Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering this research and development burden individually, as Microsoft has done, is an expensive approach to building software. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.
O’Reilly Radar
Tags: linux, study, value
Posted in Analysis, Media Coverage | No Comments »
October 23rd, 2008
This week I’ve been on a introductory course for Arduinos, so I thought I might share some of what I’ve learned. Arduino is an open source rapid prototyping platform based on easy to use hardware and software. It’s intended to be used by hobbyists, artists, designers, and anyone who’s interested in quickly and easily creating their own gadgets.
It is possible to connect almost anything to the Arduino board. I myself have successfully experimented with servos, ultrasound distance sensors, and the Wii Nunchuck, among others. What’s more, an Arduino can easily be connected up to a computer that can control the Arduino, and can receive data from it.
The Arduino can work with pretty much any computing platform, and the official IDE is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows.
I’ll soon post some of my projects here, and in the meanwhile you can get more information on Arduinos on the Arduino home page and on the Arduino Wikipedia article.
For an idea of some of the things that you can do with Arduinos, go to Arduino Playground.
If you understand Finnish, you can also go to Sulautetut.fi
Tags: arduino, phydgit, sulautetut.fi
Posted in Hardware, Open, Open Source | No Comments »
October 21st, 2008
Google has finally released the full source code of its Linux-based Android platform. The source files are available for download at:
http://source.android.com/posts/opensource
David Bort writes on the Android page:
Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.
[via Ars Technica]
Tags: android, code, google, Open Source, release
Posted in Open Source, Software | No Comments »
October 18th, 2008
If you’ve been wondering why this blog has been so quite of late (again), here comes the answer. I’ve just finished the migration from my firend’s VPS at Network Redux to a brand new VPS of my own at Linode.com (open inline). I also migrated from Apache to Lighttpd at the same time (boy, does Lighty use less resources!).
I still have to do some optimizations and some other minor setup, but by and large everything now works.
There’s a few more details about the setup on the About page.
No action is required by you, the user. We’re still available at the same address and all user accounts have been successfully migrated. If you do experience any problems, please leave a comment below or contact me at
webadmin ( a t ) proliferationoflinux ( d o t ) org.
Tags: internal, linode
Posted in Internal news | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008
Adobe has today released version 10 of their Flash Player. This new version comes with numerous improvements and is designed to compete with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, thankfully which is yet to gain a significant foothold on web sites…
“We’re providing unprecedented creative control for developers and designers,” with Flash Player 10, Barclay said. In addition, he said the new release is available immediately on Windows, Mac and Linux, including new support for Ubuntu 7 and 8. “Linux is a first-class citizen for us,” he said.
It might be available for Linux, but Adobe still hasn’t managed to produce a 64-bit build. Seriously speaking, this is getting ridiculous… I guess we’ll be getting 64-bit Flash support at around the same time that Sun releases a 64-bit browser plug-in for Java…
Adobe Flash Player [via eWEEK]
Tags: adobe, flash
Posted in Closed-Source, Software | No Comments »
October 14th, 2008
OpenOffice 3.0 is now available for download. I myself will be testing it out once there’s an Gentoo eBuild that isn’t hard masked.
OpenOffice.org
Tags: openoffice
Posted in Open Source, Software | No Comments »
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]
Tags: server, ubuntu, wikimedia, wikipedia
Posted in Distributions, Free, Software | No Comments »
