IMPORTANT: Kindly Update Blog Address

Request: WordPress Setup Assistance Needed

As many of my blog readers are aware of, I am slowly, very slowly indeed, moving to my own wordpress hosted domain. Till now I cannot find a ready theme that I think will suite my needs. Always thinking if it will be plug-ins friendly and SEO optimised. Also want the theme to have some sort of advertisement readiness, as I really want now to make at least few cents from the blog (don’t see anything wrong in doing so). I am looking for a theme with preferably 3 columns (two on the right side) with post area being fluid. So far I have found the free w2Black theme quite suitable, though not fluid and needs some modifications. Also I am looking into two non-free themes, the Solostream 3 column 1.0 and WP-Magazine 1.0 themes from solostream.com, wondering if they will fit.

The best option would be of course to buy a custom made theme, but then again I do not have resources for that as of now. Perhaps in future, once I have have made money from ads and sponsors, I can go and order one, which I will definitely do, unless I can find some one who can help me with this. There are few options: 1. A designer makes a wordpress theme, and in return he gets a lifetime ad space; 2. You simply help me, and get a lifetime link to a url of your choice; 3. Help design one now and get paid later, but I will pay a minimum amount in advance; 4. I try doing it myself, with minimal help; 5. You let me know how. Either ways, I and the blog readers, will be grateful.

Apart from that, do comment and let me know which theme you think will suite, what to consider and look for, other recommendations you can give and even what you would like to see. Any input in this regard will be very helpful, to a newbie like me :-p

Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta for Linux

Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code-named “Astro,” introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences.  These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.

This public prerelease is an opportunity for developers and consumers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content.  Once you’ve installed Flash Player 10 beta, you can view interactive demos.  You can also help make Flash Player better by visiting all of your favorite sites, making sure they work the same or better than with the current player.

Download 10 beta

Related:

• Adobe rolls out beta of Flash Player 10
• Flash Player 10: Dazzling Effects, Better Performance, Runs on Linux

Why Opt for WordPress?

If you are new to WordPress and looking for reasons to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system) in your new website, let me give you some.

Open Source Software

WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.

User Friendly

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Themes Support

You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog.

Plugins Extend Functionality

WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed in a jiffy. For example, you want to paginate your blog posts, just look on Google and you can easily find the relevant plugin that will easily do the job for you.

Standards Compliant

WordPress is one software that follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website.

SEO Friendly

Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

Large community Support

As per recent statistics, WordPress is used on more than 1% of the websites on the Internet in the world. There is a large user community backing the development of this software. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for all your questions.

Phoronix Test Suite 0.60 Released

The Phoronix Test Suite is the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for Linux and is designed to carry out qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner.

“For those of you interested in trying out new open-source software this weekend, Phoronix Test Suite 0.6.0 has been released with an arsenal of new features for this Linux benchmarking platform. There are new and updated profiles with this release, new test suites, support for backing up downloaded tests, and much more. Since Phoronix Test Suite 0.5.0 are 48 official changes in the past week, which reinforces our plans on having a 1.0 release ready by early June.”

More on PTS 0.60

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta - С Новым Пользовательским Интерфейсом и Множеством Других Возможностей

Сообщество OpenOffice.org начало открытое тестирование новой версии одноименного офисного пакета под номером 3.0. За довольно продолжительный срок существования, пакет вышел на более чем современный уровень, что позволяет его рекомендовать как бесплатную альтернативу Microsoft Office. До идеальной дружелюбности OpenOffice.org к пользователю и идеальной совместимости с решением от Microsoft осталось не так уже далеко. Содержит все необходимые компоненты, такие как текстовый процессор, электронные таблицы, программу создания презентаций, редактор математических формул и графический редактор. Поддерживается импорт/экспорт документов различных форматов, включая стандарт электронных книг PDF. С версии 2.0 добавлена возможность работы с дополнительными расширениями, что позволяет улучшать и без того немалую функциональность продукта.

Наиболее заметные нововведения коснулись пользовательского интерфейса. Так добавлен новый центр запуска, обновлены иконки приложения, а также улучшена функциональность панели управления. В электронных таблицах реализован новый компонент для вычисления формул, а также возможна группировка электронных таблиц. В текстовом редакторе улучшен режим отображения нескольких страниц при редактировании. В компоненте для рисования диаграмм сделаны косметические изменения, а также улучшена функция обрезки изображений.

Кроме того, в версии OpenOffice.org 3.0 реализована поддержка нового стандарта документов OpenDocument Format (ODF) версии 1.2. После открытия исходных кодов документов семейства MS Office, разработчики OpenOffice.org уже успели реализовать поддержку последних версий от MS-Office 2007 и MS-Office 2008 для Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). Вариант для Mac OS X теперь не требует третьих компонентов для отображения пользовательского интерфейса. В нагрузку представлена базовая поддержка VBA и множество других возможностей.

iPhone Wireless Sync with Linux

If you are an owner of an iPhone and would like to sync it wirelessly with Linux, here comes a nice piece of howto for you.

Apple may open up its iPhone and iPod touch devices to third-party apps next month, but the chances that Linux users will get invited to the party are slim at best. That hasn’t stopped some intrepid hackers from coming up with a better music-syncing solution than the one Mac and Windows users have—a two-way wireless transfer, from almost any music organizing app you like, no wait for iTunes or USB cable required. Linux users, let’s take a look at how to set up your iPhone or iPod touch for any-time wireless access after the jump.

Complete HowTo

Related: Using an iPhone or iPod Touch with Ubuntu

FlickrFS for Linux

Manish Rai Jain developed an interesting tool for Linux based upone the FUSE kernel module that allows you to mount your Flickr account and manage you photos and tag.

“Flickrfs makes uploading to, downloading from, and organizing a Flickr account just like handling files in a mounted file system. After installing and setting up the link to your account, you can see all your photos separated into tag folders, edit and back up the pics and their metadata, and crop and resize photos on the fly, all reflected in realtime in your online account.”

Flickrfs is a virtual filesystem which mounts on your linux machine like any other partition. Once mounted, it retrieves information about your photos hosted on your flickr account, and shows them as files. You can now easily copy photos from your local machine to this mount, and it will automatically upload them to your flickr account. Similary, you can copy the files from your mount to your local machine, and it will download your images from flickr.

All the files in the mount have a meta file attached to them, which provides access to title, description, tags, and license information. Modifying any of these fields and saving the meta file, will update them on the server as well.

You can easily specify what is the default resolution of photos that you wish to upload, and the fs will automatically resize (read downsize) the photo, and upload it.

That’s not all, the latest verion of flickrfs, provides a syncing mechanism. This mechanism automatically syncs any changes done online directly to flickr account (using flickr’s web interface or any other third party apps), to your mount. Thus, any addition/deletion/changes of sets/images is reflected back to your mount. No stale information! You just to mount it once, and it can be used forever!

Check out Mann’s blog for news and Sourceforge to download it.

Nagios - Host And Service Monitoring Tool

Nagios is a popular host and service monitoring tool used by many administrators to keep an eye on their systems. It watches hosts across the local area network (LAN) and/or across the Internet, services that you can specify, alerting you when things go bad.

Nagios is included in several OS distributions and security packages. As of lately, Nagios has been voted Monitoring Application of the Year for 2007 by LinuxQuestions.org!

Rainer Brunold has written a step-by-step guide for deplyoing Nagios monitoring system with Novel SUSE Linux:

“The installation guide will show you how to install Nagios as well as some interesting extensions and how they integrate into each other. During this installation you will make many modifications to the installation that will help to understand how it works, how you can integrate systems and different services. I will also provide some articles about monitoring special services where I describe what they do and what configuration changes are needed. All together should give you a very good overview and documentation on how you can enhance the Nagios installation yourself.”

Also, John C. Welch makes a brief mention of Nagios, and how to easily install it on Mac OSX in his February 7th, 2008 “Xcode: Apple’s not-so-secret weapon” article for Macworld.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.0

VirtualBox 1.6.0 (released 2008-04-30)

Sun xVM VirtualBox is an X86 virtualization software package originally developed by German software company Innotek GmbH, now a product of Sun’s xVM family, suitable for both enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). VirtualBox supports Intel’s hardware virtualization VT-x and has experimental support for AMD’s AMD-V, but does not use either of them by default.

(testing openSUSE 11 Beta 2 as guest on openSUSE 10.3 x86-64 host running on Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook)

Here are some key features of “VirtualBox”:

· Modularity - VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don’t have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.

· Virtual machine descriptions in XML - The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.

· Guest Additions for Windows and Linux - VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).

· Virtual USB Controllers - VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.

· Remote Desktop Protocol - Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to “run” the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

· USB over RDP - With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

· Shared folders - Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as “shared folders”, which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), OpenBSD and OS/2 Warp.

Currently, there is a proprietary version, VirtualBox, which is free only for personal or evaluation use, subject to the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) and an Open Source Edition(OSE), VirtualBox OSE, which is free for commercial and private use, subject to Copyleft and other requirements of the GPL license. Please see the Editions page for details.

AMD 780G Chipset based Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G Motherboard

Sapphire’s PURE-series PI-AM2RS780G motherboard features the 780G chipset. This chipset is capable of handling 125W Phenom processors—something of which other 780G motherboards are incapable. On-board is a Radeon HD3200 integrated graphics solution, which may not seem overly powerful on its own, but Hybrid Crossfire promises to raise the bar.

“The 780G chipset powering Sapphire’s PI-AM2RS780G motherboard blows nVidia’s GeForce 6150/nForce 430 chipset out of the water in Windows benchmarks. Although the GeForce 6150 is a few generations behind the 780G, it remains one of the popular chipsets for home theater PCs, as well as cheap Linux systems because of it’s Linux shupport.

Although the 780G came out the winner in Windows benchmarks, I wanted to guess that the GeForce 6150 would have a slight advantage in Linux judging by our previous reviews of nVidia and ATI products.”

Complete Review |   Linux Testing Part

Wine 1.0 Release Candiate 1 Announced

Here comes the long anticipated Wine 1.0 RC1:

This is release 1.0-rc1 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

This is the first release candidate for Wine 1.0. Please give it a
good testing to help us make 1.0 as good as possible. In particular
please help us look for apps that used to work, but don't now. See
http://wiki.winehq.org/PlatinumRegressionHunt for details.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
  - Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

Because of lags created by using mirrors, this message may reach you
before the release is available at the public sites. The sources will
be available from the following locations:

  http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.0-rc1.tar.bz2
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.0-rc1.tar.bz2

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

  http://www.winehq.org/site/download

Complete Announcement

Cool Way: Linux Filesystem Hierarchy

So you are still confused about the way Linux filesystem is categorised? Here is a very cool and beautiful representation of the hierarchy which I found @linuxconfig.org site. The diagram below represents (part of) a Linux file system.

Linux Distro Timeline v7.6

(587 KB, 2007-06-21)

Linux Kernel Growth: 0.01-to-2.6.18 (1991-2006)

Version	Date	Lines	MB
0.01	Sep 1991	10239	0.2
0.10	Dec 1991	17750	0.4
0.99	Dec 1992	81091	2.2
1.0.0	Mar 1994	176250	4.7
1.2.0	Mar 1995	310950	8.4
2.0.0	Jun 1996	777956	22
2.2.0	Jan 1999	1800847	52
2.4.0	Jan 2001	3377902	100
2.5.37	Sep 2002	5100081	152
2.6.0	Dec 2003	5929913	175
2.6.10	Dec 2004	6495542	191
2.6.12	Jun 2005	6777860	199
2.6.18	Sep 2006	7752846	224

The Linux kernel source grew superlinearly at first. Nowadays the growth of the code is roughly linear at about 60000 lines/month.

Quotes: Linux in 1991 - “… t probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks …”

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 :-(.

Even the creator didn’t know back in it’s early days that his creation will work on many more platforms and devices than any other OS does. This single message, albeit funny now, started an OS revolution that resulted in more than 100 “notable” linux distro and millions of user-base, both in personal life and corporate environment, in many languages all over the world for free. You can read his whole message and the rest of the thread here.

Once again thanks to Linus and a sheer number of developers, hackers, supporters, companies and community for bringing this OS to what it is today.

IDC Survey: The Linux Ecosystem to More than Double to $49 Billion

Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake. For years, Linux has been big business, and if projections made by the market researchers at IDC turn out to be correct, in a few short years the Linux server ecosystem spending on hardware, software, and services directly relating to the platform will hit $49 billion by 2011. That’s more than twice the $21 billion in Linux-related server spending that IDC reckons the companies of the world accounted for in 2007.

The Linux ecosystem study was sponsored by the Linux Foundation, the non-profit consortium of hardware and software vendors and other indy Linux luminaries that was the result of the merger of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group back in early 2007. The Linux Foundation, being open, is distributing the resulting report that it commissioned, called The Role of Linux Servers and Commercial Workloads, for free, and you can read it here for yourself, if you are so inclined.

SourceForge implements OpenID

It’s official - SourceForge.net has joined the OpenID bandwagon. SourceForge, the world’s largest open source software development website, is a little late to the party but nonetheless, it’s nice to see a leader of the open source community adopting OpenID and walking the walk.

OpenID is an open source, decentralized, digital identity user system which allows users to have one identity across the internet and alleviates the hassle of having multiple user names and passwords to log-in to different sites.

OpenID is gaining traction with big companies such as AOL, Sun, Microsoft, and Novell who are accepting and providing OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

Coming along strong: First Look at openSUSE 11 Beta 2

“There are a lot of things to like in openSUSE 11 and it will make a good choice for many users—it is already shaping up to provide better PulseAudio integration and stronger desktop search capabilities than Ubuntu, for instance. OpenSUSE also has excellent support for KDE 4, which is why we have used it as our reference platform for KDE testing and reviews.”

We tested the openSUSE 11 beta 2 LiveCD installers, which are available with either GNOME or KDE 4. We installed both flavors so that we could see both desktop environments in action. The LiveCD images booted without any problems and provided a reasonably functional desktop experience. In both the KDE and GNOME environments, an icon on the desktop provides easy access to the installer.

The installation process is relatively simple and intuitive. The graphical installer, which is built on SUSE’s YaST framework, takes the user through a series of configuration steps before the installation begins. The user simply needs to select a keyboard layout, specify their timezone, partition their disk, and provide basic login information. The GNOME-based installer uses GTK and the KDE-based installer uses Qt, so they largely share the look and feel of the underlying desktop environment. The GNOME LiveCD installation program crashed once during our tests and had to be restarted, but we encountered no problems with the KDE installer.

Complete Preview

IBM’s Pilot Program for Migrating to Macs

IBM is not only supporting and backing up Linux as an alternative to Windows, but also is actively pushing OS X.

“In line with IBM’s external strategy of offering a true ‘Open Client’ that may be Windows, Linux or a Mac,” the document noted, “Research IS is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other.”

The company’s internal “Mac@IBM” website, cited in the pilot program document, also references an official group for Mac users within IBM, with over 930 members in 26 countries. It is described as “one of the largest and fastest growing communities within IBM.”

IBM’s software strategy is also embracing the Mac platform, with a new version of Lotus Notes and an integrated package of office productivity software based on OpenOffice and branded as Lotus Symphony being slated for release for the Mac later this year. Support for Notes email and calendaring on the iPhone and iPod Touch is also reported to be in IBM’s plans.