nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Download of the day: Puppy Linux CD / ISO Images

Posted: 05 May 2008 05:45 PM CDT

Puppy Linux is a Live CD Linux distribution that is very small and focuses on ease of use and small size (50-90MB). Puppy Linux version 4.0 has been released and available for download from official project web site. From the announcement page:

Puppy has all drivers built-in for scanning, digital camera, printing (Gutenprint), audio recording/editing/conversion, making it a complete multimedia environment ...yet is only 87.1MB!!! Of course this is in addition to being a complete office environment, in addition to having a huge collection of useful utilities, in addition to anything else you can think of.

Download Puppy Linux CD / ISO Images

Download from official project page (87MB)

Linux / OSS Readers' Choice Awards 2008 Announced

Posted: 05 May 2008 05:08 PM CDT

Thousands of readers have voted and results are out now. Here are the tools you and me use every day in work and play. It is a good list and as expected FireFox is the best browser, Ubuntu Linux is the best distro and Thunderbird is the best mail client

See all the results online at Linux journals website.

Linux Desktop Compared - 7 Distribution Shootout

Posted: 05 May 2008 04:51 PM CDT

Informationweek tested openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.4, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. All performed well, and each had at least one truly outstanding feature. From the article:

In the last couple of years, desktop-friendly Linux distributions have taken enormous leaps -- they're easier to install, better maintained, and more powerful than ever before. There's also that many more of them -- which means that many more possibilities to sift through.

In this roundup I've looked at seven Linux distributions, all mainly aimed at desktop users. Some ought to be household names; some are less widely sung but still worth looking at. All are meant to be top-of-the-line, "throw-and-go" distros for general use, so I paid careful attention to how they behaved on a fairly broad range of hardware -- how display, networking, or other default configurations were set to behave both out of the box and after an update (if one was available).

Google Removed An Open Source Project After DMCA Complaint

Posted: 05 May 2008 01:49 PM CDT

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law. Google has removed an open-source project that enables the proprietary CoreAVC high-definition video decoder to run under Linux operating system.

CoreAVC is a Windows codec for H.264 video developed by CoreCodec, which sells the codec in two versions, one priced at US$7.95 and another at $14.95. A Linux version is not available.

CoreAVC-for-Linux was an open-source project led by Google that developed patches which allow Linux applications, such as mplayer, to use the CoreAVC codec. A cached version of the project's Web page said video performance was the main motivation for creating Linux support for CoreAVC.

=> Google Takes Down Open-source Project After DMCA Complaint

Update [ 11:29 pm IST ] : A CoreCodec worker using the screen name BetaBoy told an internal forum last night that "The DMCA removal request and the project reinstatement was been sent to Google."

OpenSolaris UNIX OS Officially Launched

Posted: 05 May 2008 01:12 PM CDT

OpenSolaris AKA project Indiana is here. Sun and the OpenSolaris community launched the official first version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system, which has only been available in pre-release versions for developers until now. New operating system includes:

=> Single CD installation (like many Linux distros)

=> New installer and package manager

=> DTrace, Containers, ZFS and other technologies

Amazon is offering selected developers the ability to run OpenSolaris applications on its EC2 "cloud computing" servers. Participation for now is by invitation only - the service has a beta tag while the company learns how to scale up.

Companies with OpenSolaris packages available for EC2 from Monday include Gigaspaces and Zamanda, with Sun also providing Glassfish and Ruby on Rails packages.

OpenSolaris upgrades are to be released every six months.

Download OpenSolaris

The Live CD makes it simple to boot to a fully functional desktop environment, including Firefox and Thunderbird. Try it without fear -- our instant rollback feature works like a giant undo button, so your system is always protected, and you'll never lose work. And, you can load OpenSolaris 2008.05 easily in a variety of virtualization technologies including the open source VirtualBox hypervisor:

Download OpenSolaris
Request a Free OpenSolaris 2008.05 CD

Linux Change Default User Home Directory While Adding A New User

Posted: 05 May 2008 04:22 PM CDT

By default user is added to /home directory. I'd like to add user to /iscsi/home/${user} directory instead of default /home. How do I force useradd to add user to /iscsi/home under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux?

Answer to "Linux Change Default User Home Directory While Adding A New User"