Tag: ubuntu

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Ubuntu (IPA pronunciation /ùbúntú/) is a predominantly desktop-oriented Linux distribution, based on Debian GNU/Linux but with a stronger focus on usability, regular releases, and ease of installation. Ubuntu is sponsored by Canonical Ltd, owned by South African Mark Shuttleworth; the name of the distribution comes from the African concept of ubuntu which may be rendered roughly as "humanity toward others", though other meanings have been suggested.

The most recent version, Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), was released on April 19, 2007. Version 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is scheduled for release on October 18, 2007. Ubuntu aims to use only free software to provide an up-to-date yet stable operating system for the average user.

Kubuntu and Xubuntu are official subprojects of the Ubuntu project, aiming to bring the KDE and Xfce desktop environments to the Ubuntu core, respectively. Edubuntu is an official subproject "designed for school environments, and should be equally suitable for kids to use at home."

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution)

When I started this techblog in 2007 and got my first 500 visitors, I was in the clouds. If you told me then I'd hit the 5,000,000 visitor milestone 3 years later, I would have probably slapped some sense into you.
Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine my little side-project would take off like this.

Yet here we are.

To celebrate I wanted to give a prize to the exact 5th milion visitor, but all I know is that he/she is from Swit...

If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspect, or are a bit outdated. On top of that, getting it right can be hard as there are a number of issues related to Ruby and Debian/Ubuntu. This is an attempt to put all the sweet info in 1 place.

At transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port. For instance, depending on the hostname, a requests to port 80 can be routed to either nodejs (in case of api.transloadit.com), or nginx (in case of www.transloadit.com). HAProxy has been good to us and setting it up was a breeze. But getting HAProxy to log on Ubuntu Lucid was harder than I thought. All of the tutorials I found either didn't cover logging, or had deprecated information on it. Google suddenly stopped being my friend.

The core of our new project runs on Node.js. With Node you can write very fast JavaScript programs serverside. It's pretty easy to install Node, code your program, and run it. But how do you make it run nicely in the background like a true server?

If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.

I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything. The following solved my Flash issues on Ubuntu.

Following Alan Pope and Christer Edwards, I too felt the need to log everything I that I setup right after an Ubuntu Desktop install. It ranges from customizing the user interface to setting up a programmers IDE. It's mainly for future reference by myself, but may bring you on a couple of ideas as well.

Recently I needed ogg123 on an Ubuntu server to convert some media. Naturally, I wanted to use aptitude to install it, but I didn't know what package it was in. Now, you can always google of course, but you can also use system commands to find the package you need.

Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do with: patience, creativity flow, will, and of course time. Constantly being interrupted breaks concentration. If there's one thing I've really learned, it's invest in a good testing environment. Rapid review of code results will pay off (I promise).
So it's OK to spend some time on learning a good IDE, and another trick to improve the speed & quality of development, is to virtualize your production platform ...

Running compiz-fusion for some time, one thing started to annoy me. Snapping windows. The first thing I obviously looked for was the Snapping Windows Plugin. But that was already disabled. I'm blogging the setting that controls this behavior because it took me some time to find it, I think other people may find it contra productive as well.

It's no secret I like Ubuntu the best. But what strikes me as odd, is that it does not come standard with a good tool to change the display settings. Sure, you can change the Screen Resolution, but what about cloning to another device, extending the desktop to a second screen, changing the driver, or adjusting the refresh rates to enable more resolutions? There currently is no graphical way to do this in GNOME, so for this you had to manually change the X config file, or run a third party tool like nvidia-settings. But now I found a great GTK tool that can do it for you.

Recently I've seen a lot of screencasts in the Planet Ubuntu RSS feed. A screencast is an embeded flash video of your desktop, often used in tutorials instead of screenshots. I wondered if I could make these online flash videos myself; turns out, it's pretty easy! So in this article I will cover how to install the video capturing tool, how to use it, how to convert the video to a flash video (flv) file, and finally how to embed a flash player in your site just like YouTube. Create your own screencasts in 5 easy steps!

A couple of years ago when everyone still had giant CRT monitors, resolutions of 1600x1200 were pretty common. Nowadays however 19" TFT monitors often cannot scale higher than 1280x1024. So how can we still fit more on one screen? DPI can help!

It's always a good idea to backup important data. Your files and settings can easily be archived. But how can you backup & restore all applications that you've installed over the last couple of years? Here's an easy trick that works for both desktops & servers, and that can also be used to synchronize installed packages in a web cluster, making all the servers run the same software.

Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to it's security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stability and features. You could run updated manually, but why not schedule the updates in the background to make sure you are always running the latest stable versions, without ever having to worry about it.

Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords. Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

According to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, Dell is pleased with the demand for Ubuntu computers. The company has been distributing computers with Ubuntu since May this year and is planning to expand the Linux offerings.

Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practicle or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.

The stable version of the newest Ubuntu version Gutsy Gibbon will be released in October 2007. I could not wait that long however. And since the third alpha of Ubuntu 7.10 was recently released, I figured let's give it a shot. Testing alpha releases (especially from Ubuntu ) is like looking into the crystal ball of technology. This is how I upgraded and got compiz working again.

Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a current SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, current RAM can do a mind blowing 12,500 MB/s! Normally only the system itself makes use of this ultra fast storage, but we can also access this space directly. And that opens a great window of opportunity.

Let's say your site is becoming a big success and as a result it's becoming slower and slower. There are several things you do without buying additional hardware.