nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta Released

Posted: 14 Mar 2008 11:18 AM CDT

RHEL 5.2 beta has been released. Red Hat engineers backport many of the new features from later kernels to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 kernel, such as support for new hardware and virtualization enhancements. This provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers with important new capabilities while maintaining stable application interfaces — so that applications continue to run after new updates are installed. And, of course, itâ€™s always worth repeating that updates, which are released about twice a year, are included with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.

This will give our you a chance to see what your systems will be running later this year. You can grab beta version from RHN.

=> Press Release : Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta

Philippine Weather Service Finds Forecasting Cheaper with Debian Linux Cluster

Posted: 14 Mar 2008 10:11 AM CDT

Yet another Linux success story; From the article:

The Philippine government’s official weather service, PAGASA, has replaced its SGI supercomputer with a clustered Debian Linux system that can process information vital to protection against typhoons, floods, droughts, tsunamis and other wild weather conditions at a fraction of the cost.

The cluster includes eight PCs running as a single node, connected via a gigabit switch, each with dual 64-bit Intel Xeon processors running the Debian Linux OS.

=> Debian Linux cluster beats supercomputer in tsunami warnings (via ./)

Create Encrypted System Partition Under Linux / Windows / Mac OS X

Posted: 14 Mar 2008 09:59 AM CDT

TrueCrypt is a software application used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It is free and open source software. TrueCrypt is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. This software can protect date. It encrypts data stored on a computer’s disk and transparently decrypts the information when a user requests it. No special action by the user is required. From the Linux.com article:

Last month the TrueCrypt Foundation released TrueCrypt 5.0, which finally introduces a Linux GUI for the cross-platform encryption application. TrueCrypt 5.0’s numerous other enhancements include a Mac OS X port, XTS operation mode, the ability to encrypt a system partition or drive under Windows, and the addition of the SHA-512 hash algorithm

=> Encrypt volumes through a cross-platform GUI with TrueCrypt 5.0

Dell 2707WFP 27 inch Ultrasharp Wid LCD Screen on Linux

Posted: 14 Mar 2008 07:05 AM CDT

My new Dell 2707 27″ arrived two days ago. I was using 19″ Viewsonic LCD. New screen was automatically detected by Ubuntu Linux. All I had to do was switch to 1920×1200 screen resolution from old 1440×900. LCD screen is absolutely beautiful and provides sharp clear images.