Thursday, November 24, 2011

Download Now, Linux Mint 12 Has Been Released


There's no official announcement on the Linux Mint website, yet the ISO images for Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) are aready available on the official Linux Mint mirrors.

We've talked to Clement Lefebvre and he told us that these are the final ISO builds of Linux Mint 12. "Yes, but it's not official yet :) Regards, Clement Lefebvre".

Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) is based on the recently released Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and is powered by Linux kernel 3.0, X.Org 7.6 and GNOME 3.2.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

20 New User Misconceptions about Linux

1) Linux will behave like Windows.

The misconception that one OS acts just like another makes me crazy. It's like me going from a Toyota Prius to a sixteen wheeler "big rig" and expecting it to handle exactly the same.

The fact of the matter is that the Linux desktop has no singular way of presenting itself. That's the power behind Linux on the desktop. It can be customized for different needs and distributions, while relying on a variety of desktop and software packages to make it work a certain way.

Monday, February 14, 2011

When in doubt, reboot? Not Unix boxes

Last week, I wrote a little item titled "Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin." Had I known that a few hundred thousand people would read it in just a few days, I might have put on a clean shirt or something. Regardless, I'm sorry I stopped at nine. I had at least fifteen, but it was already a long post.

The most interesting aspect of the feedback I received was that the vast majority of readers agreed with me on just about every point -- with the exception of the first and last items: sudo and reboots. (There were also a few folks who hammered me for not including vi in favor of vim -- I did! And who thought that because I referenced Perl briefly, I hadn't ever used bash or some such nonsense?)

[ Also on InfoWorld: Read Paul Venezia's Deep Dive PDF on virtualization networking. | Check out Paul Venezia's five-year plan to tackle the 8 problems IT must solve. ]

I want to take a closer look at the reboot issue. It's a hot spot for all server admins, but to Unix geeks, it's a deeper issue -- probably because Windows admins use reboots as one of their first troubleshooting steps, while it's one of the last for the Unix team.

Here's the reality: Server reboots should be rare -- very rare. I cited kernel updates and hardware replacement as the two leading causes of reboots in the Unix world. Some have mentioned significant security risks in not rebooting servers, but that's nonsense. If there's a security risk present in a service or application, a patch can be applied without requiring a reboot. If the security risk is present in a kernel module, it's generally possible to unload the module, apply a patch, and reload the module. Yes, as I said, you need to reboot if there's a security risk in the kernel. Otherwise, there's no real reason to reboot a Unix box.

Some argued that other risks arise if you don't reboot, such as the possibility certain critical services aren't set to start at boot, which can cause problems. This is true, but it shouldn't be an issue if you're a good admin. Forgetting to set service startup parameters is a rookie mistake. Naturally, if you're building the box and it's not in production, you can do all the reboot tests you want without adverse effects. That's just good practice.

But there's another side: Those who consider reboots to be a worthy troubleshooting step are going to get themselves in trouble sooner rather than later. Let's say a Unix box has gone wonky. A few services that were running will no longer start, maybe with a segfault, and other oddities abound.

If you shrug and reboot the box after looking around for a few minutes, you may have missed the fact that a junior admin inadvertently deleted /boot and some portions of /etc and /usr/lib64 due to a runaway script they were writing. That's what was causing the segfaults and the wonky behavior. But since you rebooted the server without digging into the problem, you've made it much worse, and you'll soon boot a rescue image -- with all kinds of ponderous work awaiting you -- while a production server is down.

This is but one significant reason reboots in the Unix world should be extremely rare. Rather than a troubleshooting step, they're a Hail Mary approach to server administration. In short, nobody ever fixed a problem caused by a full /var partition by rebooting the box. (And don't give me any pedantic nonsense about open filehandles -- you know what I mean.)

In many cases, it's extremely important not to reboot, because the key to fixing the problem is present on the system before the reboot, but will not be immediately available after. The problem will recur, and if the only known solution is to reboot, then the problem will never be fixed unless or until someone decides not to reboot and instead tries to find the root of the problem. Unfortunately, that's not as common as it should be. Face it -- a bad stick of RAM cares not a whit about system uptime or when the box was last booted. It'll cause problems no matter what.

The next time you're looking at a problem and someone says, "Hey, let's just reboot the thing," make sure you've exhausted every other possibility before you send it to init 6. The time and pain you save will definitely be your own.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Qt implementation for Android introduced

The Romanian software developer Bogdan Vatra has announced a first alpha version of his Qt implementation for the Android mobile operating system. The release might be timed just right for many developers, since Nokia has, in the context of its cooperation with Microsoft, announced that it does not intend to develop a Windows Phone variant of the GUI framework. On the other hand, more than a few Qt users are probably interested in developing software for Android devices rather than using Silverlight or the XNA framework to develop software for Microsoft's mobile platform.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

The new implementation of the Open NFC API to be available soon

The new implementation of the Open NFC (Near Field Communications) API will be available for download in a few weeks, with Inside Secure claiming that its abstraction layer makes the stack more hardware independent than its competition.

Debian 6.0 Squeeze is finally released

After more than two long years of constant developement, changes, last-minute modifications and many improvements, Debian Squeeze version 6.0 has finally been released today. This new kernel release comes with many updates and new features, and it includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the Debian GNOME, Xfce and the LXDE desktop environment.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

When Ubuntu first appeared, the free and open source software (FOSS) community was delighted. Suddenly, here was a distribution with the definite goal of usability, headed by a former space tourist who not only understood computer programming but had the money to throw at problems.

The only objections were that Ubuntu was ripping off Debian, the source of most of its packages. For everyone else, Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical seemed everything FOSS had been waiting for.