Linux Tricks

“This past week I have evaluated five Linux distributions to see if any of them would make suitable replacements for Windows XP so that I could avoid Vista. Sadly, Linux proved to be far more finicky and troublesome than I expected. Take it from me, if Windows XP is behaving itself, then don’t try to fix what ain’t broken; stick with what works!

“It all started out on Boxing Day when I installed Kubuntu 7.10, which I chose because I prefer KDE, but also because of name recognition; I’ve heard good things about Ubuntu so Kubuntu must be good, too. Right? Wrong…!”
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“Linux users in the UK could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open-source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft’s claim that open-source software infringes its patents.

“Microsoft has claimed that Linux and other open-source software infringes 235 of its patents. Although the company has refused to say which patents are involved, the risk must be lower in the UK than the US, because the company has far fewer patents in the UK, argued Andrew Katz, a solicitor at Moorcrofts, last week…”

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The main problem I had with the sound setup in linux was getting it to work so that i can use all my speakers. After a few hours of searching the web and trial and error I finally figured out how to do it. I have put together this tutorial hoping to help other people in a similar situation.
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“In highly sensitive operations such as banking, military or government - but also our certification authority** - source code of the operating system and programs which run on those servers and computers is essential. Because without being able to read, verify, control and modify the programs in its source form, one can’t know what’s under the hood.” Complete Story

“When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that’s able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it’s not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux…”

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“Most people in the free software world know two things about Apache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a ‘a patchy server,’ built out of patches to the earlier NCSA HTTPd Web server. The other is that in terms of market share, Apache knocks Microsoft’s IIS into a cocked hat. Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.

“Here’s what Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache project, and the person who came up with the name, told me a few years ago…”

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“A startup is readying an interesting new Linux-based device promising to deliver free domestic calls (in the U.S.) for life, with no ongoing charges. Ooma’s hub uses P2P networking, with each user’s landline serving as a potential local termination point for all other users.

“In a podcast interview with eWEEK’s Jim Rapoza, Ooma CEO Andrew Frame said the company has the same investors as Skype, and works like a hardware version of Skype that’s more suitable for mainstream consumers. ‘Skype is usable on the road. We’re serving the user’s home, not their laptop or PC,’ he said…”

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“A Mozilla-based web browser is available for Nokia’s Linux-based N800 Internet tablet. The ‘MicroB’ browser was released last night, by the Nokia-sponsored Maemo community that maintains open source software stacks for Nokia’s tablets.

“The MicroB browser is based on Gecko 1.9, the same fairly hefty rendering engine that will power Firefox 3.0, when it is released. Thus, MicroB could work with some complex web page features that the lightweight Opera browser does not support–Google maps, for example, according to the project’s website…”

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Canonical has released its first test version of Gobuntu, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux software that’s devoid of proprietary software. (more…)

Now we’re going to look at what may be a better way to do it. It’s certainly easier and from reports, NTFS-3G is a bit more stable as well. This Howto is written specifically for and from Ubuntu 6.10 - Edgy Eft but should work on any Debian based distro.

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