Software Free

Firefox is a great web browser, there is absolutely no argument about that. However those of us who are using linux long enough have went by quite well without it, and some still do. In the spirit of linux and open source (not so much for opera), it is only fair that we are aware of alternate options for linux browsers out there. Here is an attempt to list some of the linux browsers actively developed and updated. This list is not comprehensive, most of these browsers are not exclusive to linux OS; and because most modern browsers use gecko engine and evolved from mozilla/netscape some of them have familiar layouts. If I missed out any popular browser do let me know in your comments.

1) Epiphany:

For many like me IRC is the main chat medium to share information about things we love. Be it linux, Ubuntu, games, whatever; there are always channels with many like minded people to talk to. There are a huge number of IRC clients out there, listing them all for me would be an impossible task. However, I could list 10 IRC clients I have used over the years, which are also quite popular among IRC/Linux community.

So here is my list of 10 IRC clients I have used over the years and have enjoyed them, one way or another. This list is not a “Top 10″ list or “10 most used” list; and most of them are not exclusive to linux OS.

1) Centerim: Centerim is a fork of the centericq instant messaging client. Centerim is a text mode menu- and window-driven IM client program that supports the ICQ2000, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC and Jabber protocols.

Some time ago I wrote a howto on installing xcache for linux (here) from source. While xcache requires a certain amount of learning, tweaking and configuration to get it right. For instance, you will have to manually edit xcache config for number of processors/cores used in your system; which will reflects other aspects of the configurations, depending on the memory available to you. This is also true if you install it from repo. What we need is a quick solution to your php bytecode optimization with minimum configuration.

Enter APC- Alternate PHP Cache.

One of the arguments I often hear from people who are trying to use linux for the first time is that they are not sure if they can switch back to their original choice of OS (usually windows), if they are not satisfied with their experience with linux. These are usually the people who are not as tech savy or previously had bad experience while trying to install linux which resulted in destroying their windows installation. Which each iteration of windows OS Microsoft has made it less friendlier for linux to be installed along with windows.

Linux is all about choices, and I believe the users should have the choice to switch back and forth into whatever OS they want to. And in order to do so we have to make this experience for new users as friendly and as non-destructive to their experience as possible. And hopefully when they see the true power and the convenience they get from Linux experience, they will make the full switch themselves.

Converting these two major packages has never been easier. In this example we will use RPM package of virtualbox 1.60 (renamed it to test.rpm to make life easier), convert it to debian package and than convert that debian package back to RPM.

Converting rpm to deb: sudo alien test.rpm

Converting deb to rpm: sudo alien -r test deb

So simple, yet effective. You can download it from here.

Here are five popular ways to capture desktop screencast for Linux

Timevault is an automatic backup utility that takes a snapshot of your current filesystem or directory for pre-defined amount of time, which can be used later to retrieve damaged files or folders. Timevault is in beta stage of development and can be downloaded from https://launchpad.net/timevault. After installation you need to logout and log in back to finish installation and you will find timevault icon on the systray:

Now we will have to configure it, in order for it to make system snapshots. Under general tab, we will have to select “Enable Automatic Snapshot”, and “show snapshot notifications”, we also need to select the “snapshot root directory.”

This is how my conky setup looks like, nothing too fancy. But I have been thinking about dressing it up a little bit (make my windows-only friends jealous:). Would you guys share your conky setup with screenshots and configuration files? I would really appreciate.

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My conkyrc:

# Create own window
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

# Use double buffering
double_buffer yes

use_spacer yes
use_xft no

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 3.0

# Draw shades?
draw_shades no

# Text stuff
draw_outline no # amplifies text if yes
draw_borders no
font arial
uppercase no # set to yes if you want all text to be in uppercase

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Source: LinuxHaxor.net

1) There are quite a few applications in linux that has the ability to download torrent from the terminal. rtorrent is perhaps the most easiest to use and widely configurable out of all of them. To kick off with downloading any torrent file, you simply have to provide the link location of the torrent file, ie. rtorrent <torrent_address>

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rtorrent is highly customizable and and can be configured by editing the configuration file located in ~.rtorrent.rc by default. You can assign rtorrent to load your own custom configuration file using this command: rtorrent -n -o import=~/custom.rc

Some interesting entries you could use in your configuration file; by default rtorrent does not come with a config file.

My love for xkcd comics has influenced me to write this modified autoconfig “cracking” tool that cracks wifi WEP password from your neighbors, exactly the way shown in xkcd comic number 416:

(click for larger view)

Here is the tool in action:

As you can see there are some state of the art features added to this version. This tools is the result of weeks of sleepless night, yet I am not too sure whether I should release this version to the public. There are some sick people out there who can seriously abuse this tool. If you are still skeptical about the existence of this, you can watch it live in action:

Remember, hacking is serious business.

Disclaimer: No Children or neighbors were hurt (that I know of) during this demo.

From folding@home website:

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

Today we will show how to configure and run folding@home, and use a GUI frontend called Prothink to observe progress. I am sure there are others but we will focus on Prothink.

Most of us know Ubuntu by it’s default gnome desktop look, but very few have ever tried other forms of desktop environment that are available besides gnome for ubuntu. There are four other main desktop environments for Ubuntu:

kubuntu, based on K Desktop Environment.

Edubuntu, is based on both gnome and K desktop environment, but it’s designed for young users. Edubuntu also provides three different theme setups, ‘young’, for younger users, ‘plain’ for a clean desktop setup, and ‘default’, which is a general purpose theme setup.

Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment, arguably the lightest, fastest linux desktop environment out there.

Gobuntu, strictly follows Free Software Foundation’s four freedoms. Which means there will be no firmware, drivers, applications, or content included in Gobuntu that does not include the full source or whose license does not provide the right to use, study, modify, and redistribute the body of work.

Virtualbox 1.6, which was released in May 2, was the first major release since Sun took over virtualbox. All I can say is Wow!! This is perhaps the single biggest, most important open source release which will change the face of how computers are used for years to come. Hell this is even bigger than the release of hardy heron (IMO), and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was a very important release.

One single feature of virtualbox, seamless, will make some major software completely redundant in coming years. Don’t get me wrong, seamless was possible with virtualbox since the last release before 1.6; but it was buggy, not a part of the features and needed a decent amount of hack and workaround to even get it to work. So seamless was possible, but never like this. With virtualbox 1.6 seamless is truly effortless, and well integrated, and super fast.

In all seriousness of being a linux user we sometimes forget the fun side of it all, here is an attempt to capture some of it.

A history lesson

Who would think that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, himself never thought much about linux being so famous and powerful and in it’s current form as it is now? Linus, in his famous message at comp.os.minix wrote in August 26 1991:

PS. Yes - it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

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Source: LinuxHaxor.net

If you have 40-50 large clients running dynamic website on php on a single server, or you have a high-traffic php-based website serving thousands of pages a day. Performance will hit a serious speed bump. One of the many things you can do, apart from expanding your server, is to use php-opcode cacher like x-cache. There are alternatives to xcache, like apc, eaccelerator, phpa and mmcache to name a few; but according to most benchmark tests (benchmark1 Results, benchmark2) xcache is superior of them all in terms of performance and reliability. And of course it is actively developed and upgraded. However there are others who disagree, but I will not get into fanboy arguments on this.