Google Timeline says Linux from year 1910 !
Google Timeline is a snazzy experimental feature which generates timelines for search queries. That “experimental” part seems to be there for a reason, as the results for a Linux search claim that Linux has been around since the 1910ies. Then, after a brief reappearance in the 1920ies, it disappears from the
Hulu for Linux Users with Shiny New Tools
Just like the primetime television season, online TV website Hulu has been sleeping this summer, adding a few shows here or there while it waited for the fall primetime season. Behind the scenes though, the ABC/FOX/NBC joint venture has been building new features such as Hulu Desktop and its Facebook app.
5 Speedy Tips For Faster Browsing In Firefox
If you’ve ever used Firefox you’ll appreciate the fact that it’s incredibly easy to use and intuitive right out of the box. This is perhaps one of the key reasons why it now owns 21.5% of the worldwide browser market share, and Internet Explorer is having its worst month yet.
Frankly speaking, as Internet speeds continue to increase, the loading times of webpages are becoming increasingly less of an issue. The time saved simply by having a better, more user friendly and clear interface outweighs most gains garnered from a browser which simply loads faster.
Here are 5 excellent tips to make browsing even smoother and faster on Firefox.
1. How to save time by automatically loading the next page
Autopager is a Firefox extension which automatically loads up the next page of a series of web pages and displays it at the bottom of the screen, when you scroll to the end of the page.
For example, if you were to load up a Google Search, and you were unhappy with the page one results, you previously had to click on a link to take you to page 2 of the results. With Autopager, all you do is scroll down – saving you the extra click. Google’s page 2 results would now be appended at the bottom of the page 1 results. Keep scrolling downwards and you’d see page 3, 4 and so on.
By default AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including the New York Times, Digg, and, of course, Google. If you want to add your own custom autopaging to unsupported sites, the site wizard feature makes it easy to so. This extension is a true time saver.
2. How to use keyboard shortcuts to get instant results
Firefox comes with a whole range of keyboard shortcuts so you can really speed things up if you’re a power user. Mozilla lots of different shortcuts on their support page, and here are 5 cool keyboard tricks which would come in handy for all Firefox keyboard newbies:
- Back/Forward Navigation: Alt Left Arrow / Alt Right Arrow
- Complete .com Address : Ctrl+Enter (When you’re in the URL bar)
- Zoom In / Out: Ctrl + / Ctrl –
- Bookmark all tabs: Ctrl Shift D
- Undo closed tab: Ctrl Shift T
MakeUseOf now gives away a printable Firefox chet sheet nicely summarizing the “need to know” shortcuts. Apart from Firefox, there are cheat sheets for Gmail, Windows, Mac OS X and several other.
3. How to NOT get bogged down by 404s
Your favorite website down? Rather than visiting it later, or hitting the refresh button incessantly, you can try installing ErrorZilla, a firefox extension which will add Try Again, Google Cache, Coralize, Wayback, Ping, Trace, and Whois buttons, when a website isn’t found or a web server is down.
Think of it as a much more useful 404 error page where rather than just telling you the page doesn’t exist – it allows you to search and visit cached versions of the page.
4. How to load up web pages faster
Fasterfox is an extension which dips under the hood to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.
Previously, these were tweaks which you had to manually adjust – but now they work right out of the box once you use this handy extension.
5. How to download files faster
Originally skeptical when I first tried this out, I have been completely blown away by how effective this software is. DownloadThemAll is a free extension which acts as a download manager (meaning you can pause and resume downloads), and download files faster by having them simultaneously download. This is quite possibly my favorite extension out of all five.
So there you have it, 5 speedy tips which will helpfully make your browsing on Firefox an even faster, more powerful experience.
What time saving browsing tips for Firefox do you have? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
Photo credit: LaiHiu
10 important Linux developments everyone should know about
Celebrating 10 years of Linux accomplishments
The Linux® technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks’ first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.
Much too much has happened with Linux in the last 10 years to do anything like a complete job of listing the important events and technological advances surrounding this operating system. But nevertheless, in celebration of our 10th birthday, the Linux zone team looks back and presents to you some major milestones, why they matter, and what we wrote about them. Please to enjoy.
Be sure to check out the developerWorks 10th birthday page to see what else is going on across the site, including a timeline of developerWorks events over the last 10 years.
1. Linux Professional Institute certification
In 2000, LPI announced the availability of test 1a, the first exam in its new Linux administrator certification program, a program that now consists of seven tests across three certification levels. developerWorks published its first series of LPI exam-prep tutorials by Daniel Robbins in 2002, and we’ve kept up with it ever since.
Why it matters: You can argue about the value of certifications, but the fact that employers were looking for a consistent measure of Linux expertise was one of many signs that Linux had arrived.
Andrew Tridgell’s Samba on Linux predates developerWorks by a good five or six years, but his implementation of Microsoft’s Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is such an important component of mixed networks everywhere that we really didn’t feel right not including it here.
Why it matters: In many companies, Linux snuck in as a Web server, firewall, e-mail server, or other specialized appliance. Why not try hiding in plain sight as a Windows® file and print server? Linux plays well with others, and this is proof.
"One box, one operating system" no longer applied to Linux when it arrived on the S/390® mainframe in early 2000.
Why it matters: You can now run numerous virtual Linux instances at once, distributing your costs across multiple application sessions running on a single piece of hardware. Plus, your Linux expertise now scales as well as your applications.
Released under the GPL by the US National Security Agency in early 2001 and merged into the kernel since 2.6.0, Security Enhanced Linux provides support for a number of access control policy models, such as mandatory access control and role-based access control.
Why it matters: Although not the simplest thing to use, SELinux brings an additional level of security to Linux for installations for which discretionary access control is not enough. And there’s something sort of cool about the NSA giving technology away.
A LiveCD lets you boot Linux on a machine without actually installing anything on the hard drive—Linux boots from the CD or DVD and lives in RAM while running. Many distributions have LiveCD versions, and there are a number of LiveCD distributions created for specific tasks, such as system diagnosis and recovery.
Why it matters: Your favorite Linux distribution can generally be assumed not to be installed on any given machine, so for demos, trial software, the aforementioned diagnostic purposes, or just to show off Linux to a Windows user, having a self-contained disk that you can pop in and boot from is an invaluable tool.
Linux users early on started chaining multiple boxes together to provide more fault tolerance or better performance. Beowulf, for one, was an important early architecture for multi-machine parallel computations. There’s even a load-balancing cluster LiveCD, ClusterKnoppix.
Why it matters: Cluster computing is supercomputing (or fault tolerance) for everyone, using free software and commodity hardware to achieve what only specialized, expensive systems could do before.
Of course, tightly coupled, multi-core systems will always outperform networked boxes. Blue Gene®/L and the now Blue Gene/P running Linux are setting records in the most compute-intensive technical and scientific workload environments.
Why it matters: Besides the gee-whiz value of running the fastest computers on Earth, advanced techniques and standards for multiprocessing environments are flowing back to the rest of us for business computing.
Sony has allowed and even encouraged the installation of Linux on its game consoles, and for developers interested in exploring Cell/B.E. programming, the PS3 is an accessible option.
Why it matters: Linux on the Playstation makes a fine computer and all, but frankly, in the greater scheme of things, we’re not sure it changes the Linux landscape all that much. Consider this a subversive high-five to all the hackers out there who try things like this just because you can™.
Virtualization allows one or more guest operating systems to run on top of another operating system that acts as the host. The 2.6.20 kernel was the first to include the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), but Xen, User-Mode Linux, QEMU, VMware, and other virtualization technologies are important as well.
Why it matters: Virtualization is a necessary ingredient of many cloud architectures. For developers, virtualization can be a good way to create a nice, safe sandbox for testing.
Announced in 2005, the OLPC project was created to provide low-cost, durable, connected computers to underprivileged children around the world. As much about the user interface as the hardware, the Linux-based Sugar operating environment is designed to encourage exploring and expressing rather than focusing on traditional productivity tools.
Why it matters: It’s a nice idea. It also represents a shift away from exposing Linux’s traditional user interface(s), to instead employing purpose-driven UIs that overlie and conceal the gory details of the operating system. Linux might win on the desktop by simply hiding the fact that it’s there.
How GNOME and KDE spend their money
Quarterly reports are the stuff of business. In most people’s minds, they are as far from the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) as anyone can imagine. All the same, as non-profit organizations, many FOSS projects issue them. And while your first reaction may be to avoid quarterly reports, they can give some insights into projects, especially if you read between the lines.
For instance, if you have been assuming, as I have, that GNOME has more corporate support than KDE, and a larger budget, a look at the latest report for GNOME and KDE may surprise you. Together, the two reports give an entirely different impression than you might assume.
Neither quarterly report has much in common with the glossy publications offered by multi-national publications. Both are PDF files with undistinguished layouts and a minimum of graphics. Even head shots of people mentioned or reporting are absent. Compared to corporate reports, those of both GNOME and KDE are practical, unadorned publications.
Of the two, GNOME’s (its first, covering June, July, and August 2009) comes closest to the spirit of a corporate report. It includes not only the obligatory message from GNOME’s executive director, but also reports from the Release, Bugsquad, Marketing, Web, Usability, Accessibility, Documentation, Art and Localizations Teams. Although some of these reports were outdated by the time the report was released, their overall impression is of a multi-tiered multi-national’s executives reporting in. In general, the report fits in well with GNOME’s traditional tendency to favor the corporate side and with its recent interest in marketing. Like most quarterly reports, it is as much a public relations document as an effort to provide concrete information (although it does both). The one non-corporate note is at the beginning, when executive director Stormy Peters asks readers, "please let us know if you find it useful!"
In comparison, KDE’s report for March through June 2009 is less than one quarter the size of GNOME’s. Although it includes the usual redundant introduction — this time by Aaron Seigo — it contains far fewer individual summaries than GNOME’s report. These differences may reflect the greater experience that KDE e.V. — the German non-profit that manages KDE — has with the whole idea of reports, and has the advantage that it is more likely to be read completely. At the same time, because it is so short, the KDE report seems less corporate, an impression that is fitting for the project’s more community-based orientation.
Beyond these general impressions, what is most interesting is the financial accounting in the reports. The two reports are not strictly comparable, given that many FOSS activities occur in the northern hemisphere’s summer rather than spring. Nor is it always obvious in either report what falls under each line item. Still, some differences emerge.
For instance, GNOME lists an income of just over $102,000 for the quarter covered by its report. This income includes $65,000 from the Desktop Summit, $20,000 from "advisory board fees" (which I interpret mainly as donations from corporate sponsors), and $12,400 collected by the Friends of GNOME, a promotional and fund-raising project.
Omitting the Desktop Summit as a one-time source of income, these figures mean that GNOME has traditionally relied on corporate supporters. Corporate supporters continue to provide the bulk of GNOME’s income, but the total from Friends of GNOME suggests that GNOME may be switching to a more community-based source of income. However, given that GNOME reported an approximate income of $54,000 per quarter in 2008 (http://markmail.org/message/bsk4gush6hoq42ef), GNOME does appear to be suffering from reduced income this year; if you divide the one-time Desktop Summit income over all quarters, GNOME is apparently operating this year on about $47,000 per quarter.
By contrast, KDE’s income for the quarter covered by its report totaled just over $111,000 (if you convert the figures from Euros to approximate American dollars). This is actually an increase from the incomes of $93,000 and $102,000 in the fourth and second quarter of 2008. In other words, despite GNOME’s wooing of corporate support, KDE appears to have roughly twice the budget of GNOME in each quarter. And, just as importantly, KDE does not seem to have been affected by the recession.
What is not altogether clear is where KDE’s income is coming from. However, if you assume that the Camp KDE sponsorships and donations indicate corporate donations, then KDE is attracting more support from business than GNOME, Assuming that "supporting members" refers to individuals, KDE is also is collecting more than twice as much from indviduals.
To keep running, GNOME spends $34,401 on wages and $3300 on employee travel, while sponsoring the costs of developers traveling to the desktop summit with $10,300. No other travel expenses are listed, so, presumably, GNOME spends a comparable amount for travel each quarter.
In comparison, KDE spends $17,000 on wages, plus some $2000 for legal expenses and $3,000 for board meetings — presumably because a number of board members travel from North America to attend. Even so, its administrative costs are less than half GNOME’s, despite its larger income.
Moreover, KDE also provides some $27,000 in travel expenses to events ranging from developer meetings, conferences and Camp KDE, a total well over twice that of GNOME, even in a quarter without the Desktop Summit. From these figures, it appears that KDE places a far greater emphasis on face to face meetings than GNOME currently does.
Considering these figures, you should not be surprised that KDE was reporting a positive balance of over $288,000. GNOME’s total balance was not reported, but, considering that last year GNOME was expecting a short fall of some $40,000, the chances are that its bank balance is nowhere near KDE’s.
These suppositions might change if we knew exactly what each line item involved. Still, the differences are consistent enough to make clear that KDE is more than holding its own in the corporate world. What’s more, it appears to run more cheaply than GNOME, and to spend more of its money on its community.
These conclusions are no reflection on GNOME, nor on the current members of the GNOME Foundation. If nothing else, being centered in North America, GNOME might have been harder hit by the recent recession than KDE, which tends to be centered in Europe.
But these conclusions do show how your impressions can change when you get to the bottom line. KDE, from what I can see, is not the underdog that many imagine.
Use an Old Linux Computer to Put your Baby to Sleep
If you are not a geek, let me explain the logic of this very simple program.
The program will first auto-eject the CD-ROM drive of your computer and then it will close that open tray. This open-close loop will run forever unless you terminate the program manually.
while [1 = 1] do #eject cdrom eject #pull cdrom tray back in eject -t done
Now the interesting part — using just these four lines of code, a geek turned his old Linux* computer into a baby rocker.
He attached a string between the tray of the CD-ROM drive and the baby seat and as the tray would open and close repeatedly, the smooth movements were enough to put his baby to sleep. Awesome.
[*] you are not on on Linux, you can build a similar Baby rocker program for Windows using Autohotkey software.
SystemRescueCd 1.3.1 Includes Filesystem Benchmarking Tools
SystemRescueCd creator François Dupoux is committed to keeping his distribution running on the latest and greatest software, because yesterday he released SystemRescueCD 1.3.1 and, as everyone is expecting, it is powered by version 2.6.31.1 of the Linux kernel. Along with that you will find a 2.6.27.35 alternative kernel, a fresh NTFS-3G, 2009.4.4-AR19, and PartImage 0.6.8, which allows you to disable SSL at runtime.
The shiny and new Memtest86+ 4.0 boot image is twice as fast when running the first test pass on your RAM, brings added support for more processors and it also features better detection of Integrated Memory Controllers. Gdisk, the GPT partition editing tool, has been updated to version 0.5.0 and FSArchiver 0.6.1 has its cryptographic functions provided by libgcrypt.
SystemRescueCd 1.3.1 isn’t all about updates, though; some applications have been replaced, fixes to the distribution were made and, more importantly, a new feature was added. TigerVNC 1.0.0 took the place of TightVNC, and in support of this change the VNC server configuration was modified. From the fixes department comes a change to the initial RAM filesystem, which allows you to boot SystemRescueCd over the network when the source URL uses a hostname.
Newly added in this release is the support for filesystem speed testing, provided by the IOzone Filesystem Benchmark version 3.242. By using it you will be able to replicate those EXT4 versus ReiserFS tests that were all over the Internet a while ago, or just pick the best filesystem for your computer.
About SystemRescueCd
SystemRescueCd, a Linux-based Live CD, is a quick and easy way to repair systems and recover data after serious crashes. With tools ranging from partition managers and disk diagnostic mechanisms (like TestDisk and sfdisk) to basic day-to-day applications (text editors, Midnight Commander etc.), as well as support for all important filesystems, SystemRescueCd is a solution that anyone who is experiencing data loss or other system-related problems should consider using.
Download SystemRescueCd 1.3.1 right now from Softpedia.