Prakash Advani's Blog » Linux

98 percent use Open Source

Prakash — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:23:13 +0000

98 percent of people surveyed out of a total of 75,000 users, confirm that they use Open Source. If you still fall under the 2 percent that doesn’t, please do the honours of telling us why.

In fact 48 percent says there is no reason not to use Open Source.

Reason for using Open Source:

Flexibility
Lower Cost
Quality
Ease to Deploy
Source Code

Automated caching of your Ubuntu updates

Prakash — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:10:56 +0000

If you wish to automatically cache all you Ubuntu/Debian updates on one computer, you can use Squid-deb-proxy. This is useful if you have multiple Ubuntu/Debian clients in your network and they all download the updates. Instead of each system connecting to the internet to get the updates, it will get the updates from the caching server.

The advantage of caching:

Save on bandwidth
Get updates faster
Can be more secured, only the caching server needs to have direct internet connection.

The advantage of using this package is as follows.

No complicated configurations
No client configuration (just install the client)
Gets the updates from the caching server when available and automatically switches to direct connection when caching server is not available

To install this on Ubuntu, use the Ubuntu Software Center (or using your favourite package management tool) .

Install these two packages on the system that will act as a server.

squid-deb-proxy

squid-deb-proxy-client

Install this package on each of the client systems.

squid-deb-proxy-client

Bingo, you are now ready to go. Every file that is downloaded on the client system, will also be automatically cached on the server.

squid-deb-proxy is the server. squid-deb-proxy-client is the client, which you should also install on the server, so that it caches all the updates on the server as well.

Additional notes for customising your configuration/debugging.

This folder contains all your configuration information:

/etc/squid-deb-proxy

in this folder:

This is the file where you can add additional mirrors.

mirror-dstdomain.acl

The first few times, you should monitor your logs, to ensure it is working as desired.

This folder contains all the log files.

/var/log/squid-deb-proxy

Happy Hacking! Or Should I say happy caching?

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5 Linux powered e-book readers

Prakash — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 05:52:12 +0000

Linux powered devices are experiencing an exponential growth. E-book readers are gaining popularity because they can carry huge volumes of books, are environmental friendly and can do other things amongst being a book reader like listen to music or run apps.

I didn’t realise that so many of the popular e-book readers run Linux:

Amazon Kindle DX
Sony Reader PRS-900
Spring Design Alex
enTourage eDGe
PocketBook 302

I find the enTourage very interesting. which is a dual screen one is e-ink based (easy for reading) and another is a LCD.

HTC Android phones: Wildfire, Legend and Desire

Prakash — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:42:22 +0000

What happens when a Taiwan ODM (Original Device Manufacturer) starts making their own phone? Result is you get good value for money, it start selling well and as a result they also get sued!

For those who came in late, ODMs are the actual manufactures of the device sold by the likes of Apple. ODMs actually make the devices and these are branded and sold by the big MNC brands.

HTC is an ODM for many big brands. For example they manufactured the Google Nexus One for Google which is similar to HTC Desire. They have now been releasing their own phones.

They are so successful, that Apple sued them for patent infringement cause they enabled multi-touch on their phone and actually did a better job than Apple did on its iPhone.

HTC the number 1 brand as per GSMArena, has launched some nice phones to give customers a choice:

HTC Wildfire
HTCL Legend
HTC Desire

Here is whats common between them:

5 Megapixel Camera
LED Flash
3G with HSDPA for upto 7.2Mbps download speeds (network dependent)
Wi-Fi
Stereo Bluetooth
GPS receiver
FM Radio
Touch screen with Multi-touch support
Proximity sensor
Accelerometer
Optical Trackpad
Flash Player
3.5mm standard audio jack
Unlimited phonebook (limited by memory)
MicroUSB
Limitations: No front video camera for video conferencing. No Qwerty keyboard.

All of them Run the latest Linux based Android 2.1 and are expected to be upgradable to 2.2 this quarter.

Android 2.2 will add:

HTML 5
Flash 10.1 support
Faster speeds due to JIT compiler

Now here is the main difference between the three:

Features	HTC Wildfire	HTC Legend	HTC Desire

Display Type	TFT	AMOLED	AMOLED
Display Resolution	240×320	320 x 480	480 x 800
Display Size	3.2 Inches	3.2 Inches	3.7 Inches
Internal Memory	384 MB RAM	384 MB RAM	576 MB RAM
CPU	528 MHz Qualcomm	600 MHz Qualcomm	1GHz Qualcomm
Weight	118g	126g	135g
Price	$379/Rs. 15,000	$495/Rs. 21,000	$659/Rs. 26,000

The main difference between these phones are processor speeds, display quality and the price. The Legend and the Desire sports an AMOLED display which is the latest LED display, which is razor sharp. The Desire also sports a slight larger display of 3.7 inches with the highest resolution. It also bundles a 4 GB MicroSD Memory Card. The processor speed is not so important if the OS works well and you don’t need to run too many apps simultaneously.

Here is my suggestion:

If you want an Android phone but not willing to shell out a bomb, the Wildfire is your best bet. Since the Wildfire is the latest amongst these, it also has some newer features.

If you don’t have budget constrains and wants to show off to your iPhone friends, then go in for the Desire. Its will also do justice in video playback capabilities. The Legend is ofcourse for people who want the best of both worlds: Lower cost than desire but with better display than the Wildfire.

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Android crosses iPhone OS Market share

Prakash — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:29:11 +0000

Android has overtaken Apple OS (iPhone,itouch,iPad) to be number 2. Blackberry RIM is still Number one, however they are quickly loosing marketshare to Android.

RIM’s BlackBerry OS at 36 percent;
Android at 28 percent;
Apple iPhone OS at 21 percent.

WordPress scaling new heights

Prakash — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:36:50 +0000

WordPress is scaling new heights! For those who came in late, WordPress is the best blogging platform and it open source.

You can either use their free blog service at wordpress.com or download WordPress and setup your blog on your own domain.

WordPress Vital Stats:

WordPress 2.9: 10.3 Million Downloads

WordPress 3.0: The recently released version has already reached 3 Million downloads.

Number of WordPress Plugins: 10,000

WordPress Plugins downloaded: 100 Million

Google Search results: 202 Million results

Now those are huge numbers for a software which is primarily hosted and is not a client application.

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BtrFS to butter your files

Prakash — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:35:57 +0000

BtrFS is the newest filesystem for Linux. Its is likely to replace ext4 at some point of time. Ubuntu 10.10 will include this in October this year.

Here is what is interesting about it.

Compression on the fly. If you remember Stacker days when you could double your disk space without buying a new disk, you would know what I am talking about. BtrFS now brings on the fly compression to Linux file system.
Easy resizing: Today if you want to resize your partition, you have to take a backup, shutdown, use gparted and cross your fingers/prey everything works well. With BtrFS, you will be able to resize any time even when you are using the file system.
Snapshot backups, you can take snapshots of an existing file system when can be restored any time to go back to the same state.
Checksum support for protection against crashes.
Better performance, specially on SSD drives.

Phoronix has done a stress test by comparing Btrfs with ext4 with on this and published the results. Btrfs with compression gave best results in most tests.

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Building a media center with Ubuntu + XBMC + Zotac

Prakash — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:19:19 +0000

If you want to build a Media Center PC to play your movies, music and photos on a high definition TV. Here is a simple way to build so.

Step 1

First get the tiny Zotac Media Center PC.

Step 2

Install Ubuntu, which is very easy just download from Ubuntu.com and follow the simple instructions. You can install via CD or bootable USB pen drive which is faster.

Step 3

After you install Ubuntu, install XBMC. XBMC (XBox Media Center) is the coolest media center on Ubuntu.

Following these steps:

Go to Accessories – Terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc

It will ask for your password, once that is done, close the Window.

Then go to system-administration-synpatic

Search for “xbmc” (without quotes).

Check this package, select mark for installation and then click Apply. It will now install this package.

After that go to Applications-Sound and Video-XBMC.

If you want to try XBMC on a regular Ubuntu system follow step 3.

If you are a bit more adventurous, these are things you can try.

1. Buy a Zotac board and build your own box, here you can add blueray disk or a 3.5″ 2 TB hard drive. The Zotac PC supports only a 2.5″disk, so you are limited to lower capacities.

2. Add a remote control.

3. Made XBMC your default window manager.

Nice you tube video.

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Graphical Network Monitoring tool

Prakash — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:03:15 +0000

If you want to figure out where all your bandwidth is getting used, without bothering with Networking, protocols and IP addresses try Etherape.

Etherape provides an easy to understand graph of all your network traffic in real time. This is how it works.

It shows all your IPs/computers on your network.
The more the traffic the thicker the connection gets between the IPs.
It uses colour codes to denote the type of traffic on your network.

You can change to different network interfaces from capture interfaces. For best results run this on your internet gateway.

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Open Source is winning in mobile phones

Prakash — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:22:44 +0000

Not sure, how many people already know or realise that most of the cellphones sold today are based on Open Source.

Android is the fastest growing Operating System for phones is based on Linux.
Nokia’s N900 platform runs Linux too.
Palm’s (now acquired by HP) WebOS is based on Linux too.
Symbian the most popular phone operating system is now Open Source.
iPhone is based on a BSD kernel which is also Open Source.

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