Monthly Archive for July, 2008

The Linux update

Published on 30 July, 2008 in Software releases. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

It`s been a busy month, and expect next month to be worse. Start reading and you`ll find out very quickly why.

The KDE (K Desktop Enviroment) version 4.1 for Linux has been released yesterday. The new desktop shell Plasma, introduced in KDE 4.0, has matured to the point where it can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users.
KDE 4.1 is the first KDE4 release to contain the Personal Information Management suite (KDE-PIM) with its E-Mail client KMail, the planner KOrganizer, Akregator (the RSS feed reader), KNode, the newsgroup reader and many more components integrated into the Kontact shell.
More info and the original announcement can be found at http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/

desktop The Linux update

KDE 4.1 desktop

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 has been released yesterday. It is based on the customised kernel-2.6.9-78.EL. RHEL 4.7 mostly features updates and improvements.
Release announcement can be found at https://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2008-July/msg00063.html.

Just a few days earlier Debian released the fourth update of Debian 4.0 – which now is 4.0r4. Release announcement can be found at http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080726.

Also IPCop 1.4.20 has been released. IPCop is a linux based firewall/router distribution for SOHO and home users.

The week before the CentOS team released the CentOS 5.2 LiveCD, which is a live CD based on CentOS version 5.2 (doh!)
Release announcement can be found here http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2008-July/015148.html

Belenix (a LiveCD based on OpenSolaris) has been updated to version 0.7.1. 
“This update brings in the latest development OpenSolaris build 93 and updates to KDE 3.5.9 among other changes, bugfixes. Since this release also includes the latest Caiman installer, upgrades from this release will become possible going forward. A complete list of changes is below: Based on ON Build 93 that has new drivers (like ATIgfx) among other stuff; Included the rum driver; Nvidia driver updated to 173.14.05; OSS updated to 4.0-1016; Updated Fully Open X bits; KDE updated to 3.5.9 and some upstream patches removed; Firefox 3.0.1; /sbin/sh is now ksh93; Sham’s RAM based Boot integrated – In Grub screen select more options to see that boot option…” Read the full release announcement for more.

Furthermore Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 3, openSUSE 11.1 Alpha 1, Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 and  Fedora 10 Alpha have been released in the last couple of days.

Using the Aptana Studio as IDE for your Web 2.0 site

Published on 29 July, 2008 in Projects. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Aptana Studio’s Community Edition is a free Web development environment which has been optimized for use with AJAX libraries and languages like PHP, JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. The engine has been based on Eclipse IDE.
The free version (Community Edition) includes the core pieces of Aptana Studio’s editing, debugging, synchronization, and project management capabilities, including pieces for scripting, customizing and extending Aptana Studio.

Aptana has built-in support and reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript and supports JavaScript libraries like jQuery, YUI, Adobe Spry, Prototype, MooTools and Dojo (and some others).
Support for Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone, PHP, and Ruby on Rails is available by using free plugins.

The Pro version (which currently costs $99) has some extra features like a JSON editor and professional support.

You can download the Community Edition here.

Five reasons to choose OpenSolaris for your webserver

Published on 29 July, 2008 in Projects. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

opensolaris logo Five reasons to choose OpenSolaris for your webserverOpenSolaris 2008.05 is the first official binary release. It was also called project Indiana.
The most important features are Dtrace monitoring, ZFS filesystem, VirtualBox for virtualization and the LiveCD function.
OpenSolaris uses the Gnome GUI which is the same GUI as Ubuntu and other Linux Distro`s.

The five reasons why i will choose OpenSolaris 2008.05 instead of Linux for my next webserver;

1. The price (free)

It`s free and its Open Source. Using the software on multiple servers doesn`t cost you a penny more!

It`s possible to order a free (bootable) DVD with OpenSolaris 2008.05 on it (click here to order the dvd)

2. Stability

Because OpenSolaris is based on Solaris (which is based on Unix System V, like IBM AIX and HP-UX) it`s reliable.
Solaris is the number 2 most reliable OS with uptimes over 99,98% (if you don`t believe me better check out these links; http://blog.linuxoss.com/2007/05/linux-versus-windows-os-impact-on-uptime-and-speed/ )

Sun contributes to a range of open source projects, including their productrange MySQLTM, NetBeansTM, GlassFishTM, OpenOffice.orgTM, OpenJDKTM, java.net, and many others which you might have heard of.

3. Performance

With the monitoring and analysis tool Dtrace (which stands for Dynamic Tracing)
DTrace provides the observability to accelerate application development and optimization of Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) and MySQL/Apache/Ruby/Solaris (MARS) stacks which run on the system.

4. Solaris ZFS Filesystem

ZFS stands for Zettabyte file system, which is Sun`s way of datastorage. Ever wanted a filesystem which doesn`t need maintenance or is 128 bit?

Unlike other filesystems it has been designed with the idea in mind that all disks will eventually fail. It has excellent data-loss detection mechanisms and can even detect silent data corruption (see the ZFS end-to-end data integrity post).

The thing that I like about ZFS the most is the freedom when assigning resources to different mount points. With other file systems I was always limited about how I structured my partition table (e.g. space for /usr, space for /home etc.). With ZFS there are so called pools and all the mount points share the same pool, so it is much harder to get out of space. (Quote from The Observatory, Sun Blog)

5. Virtualization

OpenSolaris is also Xen-hypervisor enabled as both a virtualization domain and guest.
As a separate free download, Sun also provides VirtualBox as host-based virtualization for Linux and Windows compatibility. I recommend you to try VirtualBox (version 1.6.2) if your going to experiment with virtualization since its totally free.

 

And if your going to switch to OpenSolaris I recommend checking out these sites;

Avatars enabled

Published on 28 July, 2008 in Website. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I`ve enabled the Avatars plugin for the website. If you haven`t set up a Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) or OpenAvatar the website will create an Identicon which is a random geometric shape to identify you.

Links are now XFN enabled

Published on 27 July, 2008 in Website. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Because WordPress has built-in support  for XFN the links in the menu are now XFN (Xhtml Friends Network) enabled.
Which means that searchengines know which sites belong to this website and it also makes styling easier.

More info about the XFN microformat here.