Lunch Hour Report: InstaLinux, AIR 1.5 for Linux and Linux Mint 6

So today I'll be covering InstaLinux, a really neat custom distro building site. Adobe's release of AIR 1.5 on the Linux platform. And a quick guide to setting up smartd I found on Linux Journal.

So, first on to InstaLinux.com. This little tool is probably the neatest thing I've seen in my course of using Linux since Mint started improving upon Ubuntu's already rock solid operating system. InstaLinux.com is a site that I found out about while reading through some magazines at the bookstore the other day while enjoying what will probably be one of my last Gingerbread lattes for the year. It's a site that allows you to pick what distro you want to use, then you can customize what packages you want to be included on the ISO. It's basically what you usually do when you get your distro installed, stripping unused packages and bloat, installing your usual packages and customizing your configuration files, but it does it BEFORE you download the ISO. I highly recommend you at least take a look at it as the concept behind it, if nothing else, is really innovative and if adopted by the distro's themselves could be a very useful tool to have on their sites.

Next I would like to highlight Adobe AIR 1.5. A platform that is going to sort of (or hopefully sort of) turn into the next JRE (but better). AIR allows developers to simplify their development process so that they only have to create one application for one "architecture" (AIR) and Adobe handles the rest of the leg work of making it work cross platform because as long as the host machine has AIR installed, the application will work and only need to be made once, not 2 or 3 times like is often the case today.

Finally I'll hit on Linux Mint 6 briefly. Now, not to say that I think it only deserves "briefly" it certainly is more deserving than that, however, it's about 2 minutes to 4PM and I want to get this article done (it's like a dead week for tech news so finding the articles took most of the time today). However, I digress. Linux Mint is basically a fork of Ubuntu that takes Ubuntu, adds all the nice little packages everyone usually puts in their system, strips out some of the bloatware, configures Gnome a new way and adds a new GUI theme plus a lot, lot more. They just released their next version, version 6 and I'm going to be downloading it today at some point and giving it a test drive, I'll write a review of what I think later today or tomorrow.

Lunch Hour Report: Windows 7, DOSbox and XBMC

First off, I'll start by apologizing for being late on the post. I got stuck in a meeting so I'm having to take my lunch hour later than normal. Now, on to the news.

Lets start off with Microsoft and Windows 7. If you're reading this post, you likely are away that Microsoft is planning to release Windows 7 sometime near the end of next year, but today I found some benchmarks for it, and they look promising. Supposedly the speed is "head and shoulders above Vista SP1." Even though I still hold that I'm a linux guy, this is kinda interesting because as much as I don't like some of the things Microsoft does, or some of it's policies, on the tier of things that I don't agree with the policies of, Microsoft falls below some other companies, namely Apple and their lock down on the iPhone apps.

Next, I want to show you something very cool that I found today on LinuxJournal.com. I found an article while browsing their collection on setting up DOSbox, a nifty little program that's similar to WINE, in the respect that it emulates a Microsoft environment for the purpose of running apps native to that other OS, but this one, unlike wine, is designed to run DOS programs. In the tutorial in the article, they show you how to install it and set it up to play the original Duke Nukem game. I have DOSbox installed on my laptop which is running Ubuntu 8.10, but I've never actually installed any useful applications on it. I saw it in the apt repositories one day and said, "Hey, that's neat, that might come in handy some day", so I installed it. Now I have an excuse, that game was one of my childhood favorites, within the ranks of Sonic 2 and Kirby's Dreamland in my book.

Finally, I'm going to take a look at Xbox Media Center (XBMC). This little program is something I stumbled upon back in the days when I was in the process of modding my Xbox, chipping it, new hard drive, Linux OS and XBMC. I loved the application on the Xbox and when I found out that they ported it to the x86 platform under Windows, Linux and Mac I was very happy. So, it's not really anything new really, but it's something worthy of mentioning if nothing else. I haven't yet installed it on my laptop, but it is running on my Desktop which right now runs Windows XP SP3 and it runs absolutely flawlessly. There are a few features that I can't use just because of my hardware setup on my desktop, but overall, the look and feel of application is great. Very professional looking and it makes a great alternate for anyone who wants a media center PC and has a Vista version such as Business that doesn't come with the media center built in or if you're running a flavor of linux and don't want to put up with some of the hassles of some of the other media center applications (even if some of them are a bit more feature rich when they run properly).

Linux Hits the iPhone

Gotta love this video. I still have personal issues with [Cr]apple and and their pricing and strict limitations on the iPhone and most of their products, but I will say that they come out with some really slick devices sometimes. I'm just glad to see that Linux finally made it to the iPhone...now, if someone could take this idea and try to drop android on it, we would be all set.(See boot video below)


iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

Steam Linux: Updates

So, I found some info on Arstechnica today that helps re-enforce my claim from the other day that Valve is on the way to porting the steam platform (and with it, the games) to the open source platform of Linux. This could be a huge boost for the popularity of Linux as a gaming OS, as the argument for many people not making the switch is poor game support on the operating system. Now, before I continue, I'm not making the claim that Microsoft should be shaking in their boots (but you know they are). However, I will say this, and that is that with this, comes Valve's virtual stamp of approval that the Linux platform is now a viable desktop operating system that has the potential to be a new market for them and considering the influence that Valve is in the gaming community, that could push some of the other gaming companies to start following suit and publishing more games on the Linux platform, and if nothing else, that should start giving Microsoft the chills and the hair stand on the back of their necks if not but just a little bit. So, to say the least I'm very happy about Valve's decision to do this and I wish the best of luck to them in this undertaking, it's not small task to port a game over to run on a new platform, let alone the mammoth empire of a gaming ecosystem that Steam has become, but I'm excited and can't wait to see what the future holds once this becomes official.

Server Updates

So, as I've been saying in recent posts, my server is finally setup and running. Still trying to work the bugs out of it here and there, but for the most part it's good to go from a functionality standpoint. The only thing I have left to do, and this is really just a nit-picky thing is get mail going on it. I've got the DNS working as well as Apache and ProFTP so that's all taken care of, but if I really want a good, functional server, in my opinion, there needs to be a way to receive mail to the website address as well.

Overall though, and yes I'm going to turn this into a Ubuntu Server Edition talk, I am generally impressed with Ubuntu Server 8.04.1. It's not necessarily as light weight as some other distros I could have chosen, but the trade off was extreme ease of setup and maintenance in the future. But as servers go, it's also not that hard on resources either, at least compared to something like Windows Server 2008 which requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and 10GB of hard disk space. No, Ubuntu server has been installed on less then 1GB of space and I have just 256MB of RAM, which only 100MB at most have ever been used of it at once so far.

So, if you're curious about the new server, you are free to check it out. The new server is hosting www.techmachine.net which is my old blog site but I am now going to be running my business off of it as soon as I get it stablely running using DDNS which is the only difficulty I've had thus far with it.

New Server, W00T

Alright, so I just got settled in my new condo, had Comcast come out and setup my internet and TV and my server has been live now again for about 16 hours....14 hours into it I managed to bork it up, however. I was messing around with my user groups and accidentally removed myself from the "admin" and "adm" groups which allow my user to use the "sudo" command to execute programs and commands with root privileges...So, right now, the web server is still up and running (no domain name yet, working on it) but until I can get back to my condo to reboot into the recover root console, I won't be able to fix my group settings so I've been locked out of it now for about 2 hours and will remain that way for the next hour, until I can get home. I also got webmin installed on the server, but forgot to set the router to forward the proper port to the server for it, so even though it's installed it's useless until I can get home and set that on the router (I don't have remote administration on the router setup for security reasons).

But bad news aside, I'm really excited for this project. I will be documenting my progress as it goes along, but the basic plan is to make a big combination server that will be a prototype for the beefier server I'm planning for later this year. Right now the mightly PIII processor it's running on currently will be a standard LAMP (Linux Apache2 MySQL PHP5) server with Webmin, web administration and Samba installed as well as FTPd, OpenSSH and Postfix. My hope with all this is mostly just for educational purposes so that once I have the beefier hardware I can set this up in a virtual server environment so that each of these services will be on their own virtual server instead of all running on the same computer and then I'll probably keep it that way as long as I can partly for the educational experience it will provide, but I'm also planning to make it a fully functional personal FTP and Mail server for myself and my roommate, so we will see how it goes, I'll keep the updates rolling.