Linux Solutions

The upcoming Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft is to feature a user-created list of websites that aren’t “compatible” with the browser, after trials found that some major websites don’t display properly.

The browser is to aim its list at users that the company feel are not net experts. By agreeing to use the list with IE8 users will be able to view their chosen sites without IE8 breaking them.

Microsoft will compile the list, which is to be based on customer feedback data. To make the list, the website must be “global high-volume sites”, which means ones like bbc.co.uk, Facebook and Myspace. Microsoft’s program manager Scott Dickens wrote on his blog that the company will determine high volume sites on a “market-by-market basis”.

Microsoft said it will contact sites on the list to let the webmasters know that because of IE8’s awful faults – their website experience will be ruined. That’s nice of them. The company will however, tell the webmaster how to do his job and instruct him on making his site compatible. When this happens, the site can be removed from the faulty list.

IE8 Beta has rendered millions of web pages and sites un-viewable because the company has made the first browser that is “standards-compliant”. Much of the Web 2.0 phenomenon will be left in tatters, as IE users perform the upgrade.

But fear not, Microsoft have attempted to soften the blow by allowing users to view a website in two different ways: Default and ‘Compatibility view’. Default uses standards such as CSS 2.1 and HTML 5.0, whereas compatibility view lets users switch to the old standards mode.

The browser comes equipped with a ‘broken website’ button that should be pressed if compatibility issues arise. The problem for Microsoft is that users testing the beta just want to open the browser and view the website. The company noticed that the majority of those non-web-savvy people were not clicking the button like they had hoped, although defended itself with the comforting thought that technologically minded users were happy to use the button.

To add to the chaos that will no doubt ensue, a number of sites have ignored Microsoft’s request to pour man-hours and effort in to making their sites IE8 compatible. And quite right.

Microsoft want hundreds of high traffic sites to test everything with the default standards mode, or to add an HTTP header on the site to instruct IE8 to view the site in compatible mode. Dickens said that the BBC, CNN, Facebook and Myspace still don’t work, and don’t look willing to budge.

What do Microsoft insist on the world revolving around them, and What will be the implications if some of the big sites stand their ground? I for one can’t wait to see what happens.

Phoronix have posted an update on the development of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 – codenamed “Malvik”.

They say that Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 (PTS1.2) will be released in September under the GNU GPLv3 licence, with full support for a module/plug-in architecture, advanced analytical features, enhanced hardware/software detection support, and support for other UNIX operating systems.

Work on the modules support for v1.2 began almost immediately after Test Suite 1.0 “Trondheim” made an appearance, with the idea that third-parties can extend the functionality of the Test Suite without having to delve in to the inner workings of the PTS-core.

Phoronix said in a statement:

“The PTS modules support also provides some other features for the Phoronix Test Suite that are needed but don’t necessarily belong within PTS-core. For example, the screensaver toggling support has been moved into a module as well as the entire sensor monitoring support. Modules are easy to build by either writing a simple PHP class or a shell (SH) script.

“The modules framework has also been engineered to support multi-threading processes. This will be hugely beneficial in areas such as with the sensor monitoring module, so that sensors can be polled on a set interval even while tests are running or the pts-core performing other tasks. In addition, this framework provides a number of other functions for making it very easy for independent users and companies to write their own modules to serve their own purposes. For those interested in writing their own modules with Phoronix Test Suite 1.2, a good area to start is by looking at the dummy_module and dummy_script_module files as well as the other modules that will ship with the Phoronix Test Suite.

“In addition to the system_monitor module for sensor monitoring and toggle_screensaver for controlling the automatic enabling/disabling of the screensaver, there is also a email_results module that will automatically email the test results to a specified email address as well as graphics_override for forcing new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering levels for the ATI and NVIDIA binary drivers. The FORCE_AA amd FORCE_AF environmental variables can be set, and then this graphics_override module will read the new values and communicate them to the respective ATI/NVIDIA binary driver.

“Once the tests are then completed, their previous over-ride state will be restored (or turning off AA/AF if that’s what was set before). We expect many other modules will also be developed in the near future. To see which modules are available, run phoronix-test-suite list-modules and there is now a module-info argument for obtaining information on a specific module (i.e. phoronix-test-suite module-info system_monitor).”

LCD televisions are one of the most popular styles of TVs on the market. They have a very high resolution and a clear picture that you cannot find with another style. At the same time, the design is very sleek and stylish. For this reason, it is important that you do not buy a cheap stand that will take away from the overall trendy look of the LCD TV. There are numerous styles of stands on the market that come in all shapes and sizes. When shopping, you will see them in metal, wood, plastic, laminate, or fiberglass. Sometimes, it is a mixture of all materials for a very modern look. There are also different types of finishes or lacquers.
While the look of the stand is important, it is also crucial to consider the quality of the stand. It the model cannot support the weight of the television, then you will have some serious issues. Most stands will have the weight capacity listed with the description, and your televisions should have the total weight of the product printed. Do not be fooled by the size of the stand. Just because it is bigger does not mean that is will hold the weight of your TV. The depending factor is what the stand is made of, and how well the manufacturer put the product together. When you are shopping, examine the joints and legs thoroughly. Even if the sales person says that it is the highest grade, it does not mean that you should not look.
Another consideration is the floor space that you have in your home. If your living room is quite large, then you should opt for a stand that swivels. A swivel TV stand will allow your TV to be turned in all different directions so that you can see it from all angles of the room. There should also be enough space between the wall and the stand so that you can turn the TV. You can purchase stands with wheels, which will help if you like to watch the TV in other rooms of the house. Portable TV stands are ideal if your kitchen is open to the living room and you want to watch it in the kitchen.
As mentioned earlier, the quality of the product is more important than the design, but you should still consider what type of design will work in your home. If you have all black wooden furniture in the room presently, then a cherry oak stand might clash with the rest of the room. You should also make sure that the finish that you choose will not stand out so much that it is the focal point. This will distract the eye from the TV.
Television stands for LCD TVs can be quite expensive. They vary in price from several hundred dollars all the way up to a few thousand dollars. If you have the money, then a custom-made stand is a great option. The best way to go about having one made is to listen to recommendations around town about the best carpenter and have it made to your specific requirements. The benefit is that you will know who made it, the quality of the product, and that no one else will have the same model.
With the cost of living going up, your budget is probably much smaller, and you will have to settle for a model from the furniture store. Either way, do not settle for an expensive price. Compare prices at each place to ensure that you are receiving the best price possible.

Map Your Number has become one of the leading companies in the international calls industry, offering the cheapest calls to places such as Pakistan, India, Australia and many more places around the world. We are that confident that you will be happy with the service we offer that we will allow people to register for £0 until September this year, making a saving of £10 for giving us a try.

We can give you calls to India and other countries in our program for just 4p per minute so you can see how much you will save on your phone bill. You don’t have to worry about using a card or pin number every time you make a call, we concentrate on giving our customer a simple, quick service that they will use over and over again.

It’s a hassle free service so you can sign up directly over the internet and get started within minutes, without seeing any disturbance with your current telephone line - guaranteed. There is no need to be keeping up to date on the companies offering the cheapest international calls as we give you the best rates based on our competition.

If you have any questions or queries, we have a frequently asked questions page on the website where you can get all of the common questions resolved instantly. Failing that, don’t hesitate to give us a call or send a letter and we will get back to you as fast as possible.

Just make sure you sign up before September 2008 as the promotional offer will have ran out and you will have to pay the £10 registration fee. What have you got to lose if you have the ability to sign up for free and use us for a month until you get your next phone bill – we guarantee you won’t regret it.

Ever wanted one of those 08X numbers for your company that you will have seen but not known where to start? The wait is over, visit 08direct.co.uk for a chance to claim one of many 0872 numbers completely free of charge. With no setup fees, monthly of hidden costs you can benefit from having a 08X number without any expense.

They simply point to your existing telephone line so that you will not have any interruption in the setup process and it can be completed in a matter of minutes. You also can choose from a 0871 number which may suit your business better, again, these are free of charge and incur no hidden costs to yourself.

You will get free voicemail setup on both lines so all of the calls you cannot get to will be handled with care improving your professionalism amongst potential customers. It is a fact that a 08X number will make your company appear more professional and national opposed to a one man shop in the local high street.

If you cannot find the perfect 0872 or 0871 phone numbers then you do have the chance to purchase the premium numbers which are often remembered easier and may suit your company better. Always ensure you check the bronze package which is free of charge just in case you find one that will save you that extra bit of money.

Once you have the number it’s yours to keep, even if you move offices or change the landline, you can point it to your new number and have it working again in minutes.

There are different variations of the 08X numbers which are free of charge so if you can’t find the desired number make sure you check those out before you make the decision and buy one.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, has urged the development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple Inc. has achieved.

Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, yesterday, he also pressed for the development of a new revenue model to fund free software, and set his sights on a services-based mechanism. He also stressed the importance of interoperability with Windows.

Shuttleworth, who is the CEO of Canonical Ltd, emphasised the development of the Linux Desktop as well as mobile development.

“Can we go right past Apple in the user experience we deliver?” Shuttleworth asked the audience. “Certainly, on the desktop experience, we need to shoot beyond the Mac, but I think it’s equally relevant [in] the mobile space. The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean” without sacrificing the community process,” he said.

“It would be hard to do from a free software point of view, I think, because so many people have so many different opinions,” said Brad Cavanagh, data reduction software engineer at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii.

“That’s not to say you can’t get good things out of open source. Obviously, you can, but it’s going to be tough,” Cavanagh said.

Shuttleworth went on to emphasise the need for new business models beyond advertising for free software. “We had the Web for quite a long time before we figured out how [to do] ad-funded Web businesses,” Shuttleworth said.

But Shuttleworth said he didn’t know how advertising could fund Web-based and free applications. He instead noted an emerging emphasis on services, calling them the engine for funding investments in free software.

“I think advertising works very well in the search case, but I don’t think it’s the sort of final solution in terms of business models to drive investment in free software,” Shuttleworth said. “A more general view of services is required.”

“The free software world is in a quest for a complementary economic model. When we look back at this era, we’ll be looking at economics as much as factors such as technology,” Shuttleworth said.

“Technology,” he said, “provides the opportunities to drive economic change, create wealth and change society. The way we run our lives today, software determines more and more of it,” Shuttleworth said.

“In a very real sense, everything is becoming software,” he continued. “There have never been better opportunities to create wealth, better opportunities to change the world. Recent wealth creators such as Google Inc. have been built on free software. Free software, meanwhile, is the ultimate form of disclosure and serves as an engine for innovation,” he noted.

“The question we should be asking the free software world is how can we stimulate that? How can we drive innovation faster?” Shuttleworth said.

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, has said that his company’s new operating system of the future will centre on the internet, and will be distinct from the current Palm OS that’s available at the moment.

In a recent interview, Colligan described the Nova OS (or Web 2.0 – possibly) as a “next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications.” Scheduled for release next year, Nova will be based on a Linux core.

Talk of new capabilities sounds good but with Apple’s dominance amongst others, how will Palm compete in an already crowded market?

“Palm’s got maybe 15 million customers and 50 million devices around the world, it’s brand that’s globally recognised. We sold a million Centros in the first five months of it going on sale with one carrier in the US, so to say were not an active player in the market is not really accurate.”

“There will be 1.2 billion new handsets sold this year, there’s billions of users around the world, so there’s a huge opportunity. And it seems to me that when there’s a billion of anything sold per year – well, we don’t have to have Apple, RIM or Nokia be unsuccessful for us to be enormously successful,” said Colligan.

Palm are focused on executing their own system, “mostly because we really believe that to create the most compelling solution it should be an integrated package much like we started with the Palm OS and doing the original Palm Pilots: we did the operating system, we did the hardware and we did the whole synching architecture and the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days.”

Colligan claimed one of the things Palm wanted to do is to make sure that they had an “end-to-end solution we really controlled and could deliver the end-user experience we want to deliver. We think it’s going to be stunning and breakthrough in its execution, and we’re working on some very exciting new devices to go with it”.

That ‘next generation’ Palm OS will slot in between the Centro and Treo lines under a new ‘prosumer’ brand that’s yet to be decided, Colligan explains. “We’re going to continue to look at those three line areas – consumer, prosumer and enterprise. Treo is today more of our mainstream prosumer product which is extended into the enterprise, but over time you’ll see some branding work done on the top two to make sure they’re really well delineated.”

While we hear so much about Linux and the Linux Kernel, what exactly is the Kernel and what does it do?

In summary the Linux Kernel is the interface between the operating system and your computer hardware. It is the core of any computer allowing the operating system to control a number of different functions and is the most vital part of any operating system - without which your computer would not operate.

So what are the basic functions of the Linux Kernel?

The most basic responsibilities of the Kernel include :-

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

The Kernel will control which operations and tasks have access to the processing power of the CPU at any one time. The vast majority of CPUs can only handle one instruction at a time and therefore the Kernel will allocate a time slot for each function, which is why you will see your system slowing down the more functions you have running at the same time.

Memory

The vast majority of computer functions will require access to different areas of the internal memory at some time. Again it is the responsibility of the Kernel to decide when each process can access the memory and specify which area should be used. In the event of a lack of available memory it is also the responsibility of the Kernel to make other arrangements.

Input / Output

This is where the skill of an operating system is perhaps at its best, controlling the vast array of input and output devices available today. We are talking about monitors, keyboards, the mouse and any other devices which can communicate with your computer system.

The Linux Kernel is the key to the success of the operating system and while we have not mentioned it above, security is also a vital component of the whole package. Access to and from the Kernel needs to be water tight and this was the area where Microsoft were deemed rather unhelpful when the array of software security firms requested access to the inner workings in order to improve security for users.

Managing or restricting the amount of disks on each partition by every user or group of users is very important. This could be enabled using disk quota feature in Linux Redhat/Fedora and it is very simple and easy to implement.

Setting Up Quotas

Filesystem in Linux server plays a role in setting up disk quotas. Here are some steps how to set up disk quotas in single user mode.
Enter Single User Mode:
First of all you should remount /home filesystem and it needs to make sure that no user or processes are using it or accessing from console. After making sure that you are the only user on the system then you can skip entering single user mode setup. When you will enter single user mode, it will automatically logs off all users and stop cron jobs. Here are the steps of entering single user mode.
1) First of all use who command to view all users currently logged in, you can inform network users message that system is going to shutdown. Send this message to currently logged in user using wall command.
[root@linux-server tmp]# who
root pts/0 Nov 6 14:46 (192-168-1-242.my-website.com)
bob pts/0 Nov 6 12:01 (192-168-1-248.my-website.com)
bunny pts/0 Nov 6 16:25 (192-168-1-250.my-website.com)
[root@linux-server tmp]# wall The system is shutting down now!

Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sun Nov 21 15:04:27 2007):

The system is shutting down now!

[root@linux-server tmp]#

2) Log into the VGA prompt and enter single user command init 1

[root@linux-server tmp]# init 1

Simple eh?

Edititing /etc/fstab Configuration File

You can use /etc/fstab configuration file is used to list all disk partitions which are required to be mounted automatically whenever the system boots. Disk quotas are however enabled on Linux system file system by making some editing in /etc/fstab file and modifying options for home directory. You can add usrquota option and this option is mentioned in fstab main pages.
The file /etc/fstab looked like

LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

After editing /etc/fstab it should be
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults,usrquota 1 2

After editing /etc/fstab it should be
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults,usrquota 1 2

Remounting The File system

After editing /etc/fstab file it needs to view the file for /home. This could be done using this command.
# mount –o remount /home
user exit command to get out from single user mode.
# exit
Creating Quota Configuration Files:

Aquota user file contains the quotas information for users and aquota.group file contains quotas by group. This information is stored on uppermost directory. Per user quotas could be enabled on /home file system.
[root@linux-server tmp]# touch /home/aquota.user
[root@linux-server tmp]# chmod 600 /home/aquota.user
[root@linuxserver tmp]#
Initializing Quota Table
While editing /etc/fstab file and remounting file system shows that Linux filesystem has disk quota capabilities. Linux quota is initialized by the following command.
[root@linux-server tmp]# quotacheck -vagum
quotacheck: WARNING - Quotafile /home/aquota.user was probably truncated. Can’t save quota settings…
.
.
quotacheck: Scanning /dev/hda3 [/home] done
quotacheck: Checked 191 directories and 930 files
[root@bigboy tmp]#

We have a few products which will allow Windows requests to run on GNU/Linux, everything with changeable degrees of accomplishment. In spite of which products are on market, they will fall in to 2 groups: those which need you to possess a licensed replica of Windows, and those which do not require them. Win4Lin & VMware shape into first group, which I lovingly give it a name “virtual machine-type” functions. A second group is where products like Cross over Office, Wine and Cedega fall. These do not need Windows; somewhat they effort to trick Windows applications into thinking they’re running on Windows by performing varying forms of tricks at a twofold level. I name this class of function “windows emulators” (quite incorrectly, I confess).

It is good to evaluate apples and apples &so this editorial is a judgment of the two fundamental machine-type functions Win4Lin 2.7 and VMware Workstation 5.5.1. A test stresses desktop GNU/Linux and test platform is rightfully influential Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop having 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, 2.2GHz processor which runs Kubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 which has kernel 2.6.12-10-386.

Overview

While it is necessary to make a note of that the two VMware and Win4lin are both practical machine-kind functions able of running Windows on GNU/Linux box, they vary in the degree of their purpose. Win4Lin Pro is exclusively intended to run  mono duplicate of Windows while VMware Workstation is intended to give many practical machines, every of which know how to run a duplicate of Windows, Solaris x86, NetWare and Linux. This comprehensive purpose is imitated in value & downloads extent. There are few products which will allow Windows functions to work on GNU/Linux, all with diverging degrees of achievements. Despite of which products are on advertise, they will drop into 2 groups: those which need you to have an approved facsimile of Windows, and those which do not need one. VMware and Win4Lin fit into primary group, which I demonstratively name it “virtual machine-type” functions. 2nd group is where products like CrossOver Office, Wine and Cedega fall. These products do not need Windows, somewhat they effort to trick Windows applications into ideas they are working on Windows by presenting different  types of actions at priary level. I name this class of function “windows emulators” .

Functionality

I was really astonished  and surprised to know that none of the products prop up 2 USB memory sticks which I frequently utilize on both of my Linux and Windows sytems. None of my 256MB Sony Micro Vault  and my Kasercorp 2.2GB Jumbo Drive are noticed by either of my VMware and  Win4Lin in spite of the truth that both of the devices are USB 2.0-compliant. I tried to hot plug the drives as the Windows visitor was working plus inserting the drives earlier than initiating the guest computers. The drives remained silent. Win4Lin mechanically generates a “HOME on host” split folder on guest Windows’ desktop which shows the present user’s home address list.