VMware and Novell have announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware, building on the companies’ expanded partnership announced earlier in June of this year
Read more at The H
Who Contributed The Most During X Server 1.9?
Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There’s also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too…
Read more at Phoronix
WebOS 2.0 Pushed to Developers
The latest version of Palm’s mobile OS comes with a host of application development features.
Read more at DevX
Tutorial: Best Practices with sudo on Linux
Ubuntu’s use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo.
Read more at LinuxPlanet
The People Who Support Linux: At Work and at Home
This is an ongoing Linux.com series that profiles The Linux Foundation’s individual members and begins to collectively illustrate a very important part of the Linux community. Individual members help support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and other important activities that advance Linux, while getting a variety of other fun and valuable benefits. It is this collective support from thousands of individual members that enables The Linux Foundation to provide important services for industry and community.
Chase Crum is a U.S. Army veteran, a Shriner, an IT infrastructure manager, and a member of The Linux Foundation. This certainly does not capture all that defines Chase, but it begins to illustrate where he derives his ideas about Linux, community and giving back. Chase also represents a growing majority of systems administrators and IT managers who are using Linux both at work and at home.
“I consider myself a Linux FANATIC. I’m one of the mythical people you always hear about when others are dispensing advice about doing what you love and never working a day in your life. I use Linux at work, at home and on my laptop. I love it because I’m never confined to what a manufacturer thinks I need or should have. There are so many distributions and applications to choose from that it is almost impossible to find one that doesn’t suit your needs.”
By day, Chase administers networks, servers and desktop computers at a major telecom service provider in Atlanta. He says that Linux is an “integral’ part of his operations. “Our servers run primarily on CentOS, while our desktops are centered around Ubuntu. We maintain various firewalls and appliances, each with their own purpose and selected variant of Linux. Our communications servers rely heavily on open source projects like Asterisk and MySQL.”
Chase lives by three words in his day job as an IT infrastructure manager: “Backup, backup, and backup.” He told Linux.com that his advice for others includes periodically reviewing the process and starting over again. “It’s entirely too easy to get comfortable with routinely backed up data. Nothing is worse than being in a recovery scenario and discovering that all of your critical data is useless without the various cron jobs and shell scripts scattered throughout the filesystem.”
Chase’s experience with Linux began in 2001 when he was a demolitions engineer in the Army where he was tasked out to automation. “While we used Windows for all of our systems then, my new circle of SysAdmin friends were playing around with a new ‘elite’ operating system called Linux. I was given a set of Red Hat floppies and was told that no one was going to take me seriously as long as I was still using Windows.”
Fast forward nearly 10 years and Chase doesn’t use anything but Linux. But he did recently change his personal desktop distro. “I had Ubuntu on my laptop when I arrived at LinuxCon in Boston. While I was there, I had the opportunity to talk with Markus Rex from Novell. He had a genuine excitement about what his company was doing in the Linux community and that goes a long way with me. I was given an evaluation copy of SLED 11 and installed it while I was there. I was instantly hooked, and for the first time I paid for a licensed copy of an Enterprise Linux distribution for personal use.”
What else gets him excited? Asterisk. Which is not a big surprise given his daily work in telecom. What is interesting is how he sees it liberating every one of us. Chase says, “Asterisk is the best example of what open source was meant to do. It allows anyone who’s willing to spend the time installing and configuring it to build their own telephony infrastructure. It wasn’t that long ago that this kind of technology was limited to the telephone giants of the industry. For me, it’s what gives all of this purpose. We’re not just building a better, faster operating system. We’re creating a community that can provide everyday people with the tools and technology to do more for themselves.”
Chase told us that this year has been particularly amazing for him and his ongoing education with Linux, which is one of the reasons he was compelled to join The Linux Foundation over the summer. “I took the position I have now in January of this year. It’s the first time I’ve worked in an environment that was centered around and dedicated almost exclusively to open source technology. I never could have made it as far in life as I have without the long list of people who reached out and helped me along the way. I spend as much time as I am able giving back where I can. For me, joining The Linux Foundation is my way of committing to the open source community and showing as much support for it as it has shown for me.”
Giving back is a mantra Chase uses in his personal life as well and hopes that it will expose his children to the importance of contribution. He and his children volunteer with the local homeless shelter and, as a Shriner, Chase supports and helps out the children at the Shriner’s Hospitals.
If you’re interested in being profiled for this Linux.com series, please email
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. To learn more about becoming an individual member of The Linux Foundation, please visit the Linux Foundation member website.
Using a Bamboo Tablet with Ubuntu 10.04
Are you a budding artist? Or are you already a professional graphic artist looking to expand the hardware you have to use? And are you hoping to shed the last remnants of either the Windows or Mac operating system? If any of these are true you might be looking at one of the many drawing tablets that can be connected, via USB, to your laptop or PC. These tablets make for a far superior graphic experience, giving the artist much more control over the cursor than with a standard mouse. Unfortunately tablets can quickly become a hurdle for Linux users. In some cases the installation is a snap; just plug in the tablet, install a simple application, and go. In other cases, the process can be a real nightmare.
I experienced such a nightmare recently with a Wacom Bamboo CTL 640 tablet. My youngest daughter is showing some amazing skill with pencil and paper, and is looking at a career in graphic arts. It only seemed natural that she use a tablet with her Ubuntu 10.04 laptop. Little did I know this tablet would be so difficult to get working. Eventually I did get the tablet working and the daughter is now creating some amazing pieces of work. In this article, I will show you how I managed to get that tablet from out of the box and into her hands.
A little preface
I want to preface this article by saying the very same tablet was very well known for working out of the box with earlier iterations of Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions). Unfortunately the recent updates to various sub-systems (X Windows, the kernel, and the USB sub-system in particular) caused issues that broke the software used for the tablets.
I will also say this tablet is a Wacom tablet and Wacom has an outstanding reputation for supporting Linux. There is a Wacom Linux Project Page on Sourceforge for more information.
What you will need
This is simple. You will need a PC or Laptop running the latest version of Ubuntu 10.04 (make sure all updates are installed), the Wacom drivers for the tablet, the tablet, and some patience. Although this process isn’t terribly difficult, if the tablet does not work right away you will find yourself having to do a lot of troubleshooting. Unfortunately there is no longer a Wacom-tools package in the repositories, so the necessary drivers will have to be installed from source.
Please note: It’s very important that you download the latest drivers for the wacom tablet. You will find a download link on the Linux Wacom Project home page. Make sure you download the PRODUCTION driver. As of this writing the date on that driver is July 27, 2010 and the version is 0.8.8-8. You may be tempted to download the 0.10.8 version if you have an X server >= 1.7. I tried this, but it did not work. Stick with the production driver, it will work.
Detecting the tablet
Once you have the driver downloaded (I will assume it is saved in ~/Downloads) you are ready to begin. Before you actually plug in your tablet, open up a terminal. Once you have that terminal open plug in your tablet and issue the command:
lsusb
You should see your tablet detected by a line similar to:
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 056a:00d4 Wacom Co., Ltd
That indicates your system recognizes the hardware. Now the fun really begins. Unplug your tablet at this point.
Pre-requisites
You are going to first have to install some dependencies. To do this issue these commands:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxi-dev x11proto-input-dev xserver-xorg-dev tk8.4-dev tcl8.4-dev libncurses5-dev
You may already have some of those packages installed…that depends upon what you have done before and the state of your system. After those packages have installed, it’s time to build and install the drivers.
Installing the drivers
In your terminal, change to the ~/Downloads directory with the command cd ~/Downloads. Once in there unpack the driver archive with the command:
tar xvfj linuxwacom-XXX.tar.bz2
Where XXX is the release number.
The above command will create a new directory ~/Downloads/linuxwacom-XXX (where XXX is the release number). Change into that directory with the command cd ~/Downloads/linuxwacom-XXX (Again, where XXX is the release number). It’s time to build the drivers.
The steps for building and installing the Wacom drivers are as follows:
-
Issue the command
./configure --enable-wacom(NOTE the “–” before “enable” is a double dash). -
Change into the source directory with the command
cd src/2.6.30. - Issue the command make to build the drivers for your system.
-
Copy the newly build driver with the command
sudo cp wacom.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/tablet. - Now probe all of your current running kernel moduels with the command sudo depmod -a
- Remove any old Wacom kernel drivers with the command sudo rmmod wacom.
- Add the new Wacom driver to the kernel with the command sudo modprobe wacom.
Now, plug in your tablet. It SHOULD be recognized and immediately function as a mouse. Congratulations! You now have a functioning tablet on your PC! But now, what tool is best used to begin creating your masterpieces?
MyPaint
The MyPaint tool was actually created for pieces of hardware like the Bamboo Tablet. Although you may be partial to The GIMP (as am I), you will find this tool to be perfectly suited for drawing with your tablet. It supports pressure sensitivity, brush creation, includes quite a few pre-made brushes, has an unlimited canvas, and includes basic layer support.
You can install My Paint from the Ubuntu Software Center by following these instructions:
- Open up the Ubuntu Software Center
- Search for “paint” (no quotes).
- Mark MyPaint for isntallation.
That’s it. Once installed MyPaint will immediately recognize your tablet and allow you to begin working.
Final thoughts
You are now ready to begin the long journey of being a master graphic artist. I will give you one piece of advice at this point. Every time you update your kernel you will most likely see that your tablet doesn’t work again. For this very reason, keep the software you have downloaded nicely tucked away in your ~/Downloads directory. When an update does break your Wacom support, simply walk through these instructions again and it will work. Eventually Wacom support will once again work out of the box. Until then, bookmark this page so you can quickly get your tablet back up and running.
Easy backup with RSync, windows client configuration
Now for the latest article of this first rsync saga I’d like to share with you my current Windows clients configuration, as I’ve already explained, rsync is quite easy to understand and configure; in your windows client you only need these files:
- rsync.exe
- cygpopt-0.dll
- cygwin1.dll
- Copying.txt
Copying.txt is the GPL public license, it’s needed only for license purpouses, the other files: 2 DLLs (cygpopt-0.dll, cygwin1.dll) and 1 EXE file (rsync.exe) are part of your solution. As you imagine these files are taken from a working cygwin installation: you can download them from the net, from a working cygwin environment or directly from [this link where I’ve provided them for you]. These files allows rsync to work properly and syncing your local disk with a remote RSync server.
Rsync has an excellent manual and configuration page, a ton of options ready for you, here’s just what I’m using for my backups:
rsync --verbose --recursive --compress --delete --perms --owner --group --specials --stats --devices
--links --times --exclude=”system*” “/cygdrive/c/backuphomedir/”
“array1_backup@myfavoritenas::array1_backup/ComputerID/” 1> “errorlog.txt” 2>&1
This is the raw command used for tests, of course you need to script it in a batch file or wherever you want. I don’t want to enter into rsync syntax flags deeply when you’ve an excellent man page (like this one [http://www.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync.html]), but briefly:
--verbose be verbose on operations, useful for generated log file
--recursive copy directory specified and go recursively into subdirs
--compress compress file data during transfer
--delete delete file from remote host if local files doesn't exists anymore
--group --specials preserve group and special files
--stats give some transfer statistics (again, useful for logging)
--devices preserve device files
--links preserve links
--times preserve modification times
This command works with previous samples from past episodes, now pay attention to parameters related to your own machine settings like:
/cygdrive/c/backuphomedir/ it’s the home dir where you want to start from copying your data, for Windows users the translated path is “C:ackuphomedir“, I’ve reported “/cygdrive/c/backuphomedir/” because cygwin environment starts with “/” (as UNIX), then it appends “cygdrive” (all local drives) then the name of the Windows drive “c”, then your backup sourcedir; (backuphomedir).
–exclude flag: directories to exclude from your backup path (inside c:ackuphomedir), so directories starting with “system” (like: c:ackuphomedirsystem, c:backuphomedirsystem32, …) will be excluded from your copy. Why ? Because I store rsync, DLLs and my batch file inside this dir
array1_backup@myfavoritenas::array1_backup/ComputerID is the rsync path where you want to sync your data, “myfavoritenas” is the machine name, “array1_backup” are username and “rsync share point”. ComputerID is just a directory inside your rsync share point, use different directories for different PCs so you’ve a dir for each pc of your net (use MachineID, username or whatever you want).
errorlog.txt is my log file where rsync operations are stored, very useful for further readings
If your rsync share point has a password as mine you need to type it on command line if you’re executing this command as it is; if you’re scripting it into your own program you need to export a Windows variable called RSYNC_PASSWORD (set RSYNC_PASSWORD=”your pass”) to have it running, read rsync manual page for details.
Be careful about locked files, rsync and every windows program will fail the backup if the file you want to copy is locked by someone else, an example ? Take a look at Outlook .PST files, you cannot copy them when Outlook is opened
Here are few considerations for applying this solution in a real environment, here’s my experience:
-
I’ve set a “resume time” in BIOS for every PC I’ve in my net (example: wakeup at 00:01 am)
- I’ve inserted a scheduled job (windows scheduler is fine for me even if it’s nothing fancy) which runs a C++ application created by me (example: start app at 00:30 am)
- My applications acts as a wrapper to rsync, makes its own copies and so on
- When copy is finished to powers off the PC again, if the PC was already on (user leaved the computer on from yesterday) I leave it on by checking computer uptime
That’s it !
Why using this kind of solution against others ?
-
GPL, no license fees, easy configuration, easy customization
- Easy server installation, no custom packages or services, rsync is well known for its simplicity and configuration
- RSync support and documentation is HUGE across internet, there’re a lot of things done with it
- Multiplatform: linux/OS-X/Windows/… you don’t care about the operating system, you just need to have rsync compiled (cygwin for windows is ok) but you can also have your XYZ operating system or whatever you want. Not so many backup solutions have a port for nearly every existing platform like rsync has
-
No installation on Windows platform, I know, this is a rude solution but it works fine and flawlessly; I’ve just paired windows scheduler with rsync. No setup, no install, no virtual machines/.NET/… just copy the files
This episode concludes my first RSync saga, nothing strange or complex, just a common use of rsync in a real environment for handling daily operations in a network.
Previous Steps:
Easy backup with RSync, introduction
RSync server side config on linux platform
Linux RSync client side configuration
Windows RSync client side configuration
Hope it helps you to save time
Glad to read your comments here if you find it useful
Andrea (Ben) Benini
Dell Studio 1747 Laptop: One Fatal Flaw Away from Linux Perfection
Dell’s 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw.
Read more at Linux Magazine
You can make money with open source. Literally.
This is an old story–two years old, to be specific. But it was new to me when I heard it at LinuxCon, and it was new to a lot of others in the room too. And it was a great story, so I wanted to share it further.
In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Finance held a competition to design a coin that would honor the country’s architecture.
Read more at OpenSource.com
ApacheCon NA 2010 registration opens
The Apache Software Foundation has announced that registration is now open for this year’s ApacheCon North America conference taking place from the 1st to the 5th of November in Atlanta, Georgia
Read more at The H