I'm a Linux-user, 14 years old and I come from Sweden. I've been using Linux since October 2008. Currently I'm using Debian on my servers, Ubuntu on my desktop and Arch in my school. I joined this forum because of its name.
After a long time of using Kubuntu on this particular machine, that particular Kubuntu installation got abandoned as I tended to use other machines (simply due to issues with physical space on my desk). I now have a new desk and this machine could come back into more regular service again.
Of course, having been abandoned for several months, the Kubuntu release was out of date, needed many software updates and was generally pretty poorly configured with lots of stuff I didn't want. I also never really got into KDE 4 -- on this machine it felt sluggish and not at all a better experience that KDE 3.5 was.
I was thinking of going to straight Ubuntu as a clean install, but actually settled on Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, but the 'Main' version ships with a lot of proprietary drivers, codecs and other software that I would otherwise want to add post-install anyway, so it seemed to be a good idea to save time configuring.
It automatically detected and enabled the 3D drivers for my ATI Radeon HD 3650 card, drives the 23" monitor at its native 1920x1080, ships with Flash and Sun Java and the codecs for H.264/AAC playback too. Nice! Pretty much the only thing I post-added were msttcorefonts for prettier web browsing.
So, enough talk, here are the screenshots of my new Linux Mint 8 "Helena" setup.
Used instead of Ubuntu's Applications / Places / System menu at the top, I think similar to that used in SUSE? A bit Windows-like, but actually I like this menu.
Let me know if you want to see anything else part of Linux Mint. Not sure of anything else that is particularly unique to this distro, but, again, let me know and I'll take another screenshot.
Well, this is a welcome surprise for those of us waiting for Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx. Several users are reporting that their iPod Touches and iPhones (including the 3GS) work in alpha 3 - without tweaking, without jailbreaking, without patching - with Nautilus and Rythmbox.
Several users have reported that upon installing the third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, their iPod Touches and iPhones are recognised by the operating system. You can browse your iPhone/iPod with the file manager, and Rythmbox can work with them as well.
It appears - please correct me if I'm wrong - that this support comes courtesy of GVFS supporting libiphone, combined with iFuse. iFuse is a FUSE file system driver that connects to your iPod Touch/iPhone through libiphone, using Apple's native AFC protocol (so no ssh or other complicated nonsense). No jailbreaking needed, no patching, no nothing.
Posted by: anyweb - 2010-02-26, 06:17 AM - Forum: Linux News
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GNOME Shell is the new core user interface for GNOME 3. GNOME Shell 2.29.0 brings a lot of new features and improvements, the most noticeable being a new message tray showing notifications sliding into the bottom of the screen, a status area for past notifications, the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, switching the overview between a grid and linear view of workspaces.
Posted by: anyweb - 2010-02-26, 06:14 AM - Forum: Linux News
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Linux 2.6.33 has been released. This version features Nouveau, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), TCP "cookie transactions", a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), support for cache compression and other improvements. See the full changelog here.
Posted by: anyweb - 2010-02-25, 06:57 PM - Forum: Linux News
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Henne Vogelsang has announced the second milestone release on openSUSE's journey to version 11.3: "Milestone 2 is part of the milestones where we track new releases in the open source universe and test the building of our various distribution images with them. While milestone 1 introduced various pre-release versions of free and open source projects (KDE 4.4 RC1, OpenOffice.org 3.2 Beta 4 or VirtualBox 3.1 beta 1) into our development distribution openSUSE Factory, this milestone is characterized by final releases of those projects. We are also preparing everything to switch to GCC 4.5.0 as the default compiler." Check the release announcement to read about the detailed changes that happened in the various areas. Download the installable live CD images from the mirrors:
Posted by: anyweb - 2010-02-25, 06:50 PM - Forum: Linux News
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Broadcom demonstrated an Android-ready tablet design that offers video-conferencing and DLNA streaming to IP set-top boxes and HDTVs. The Persona Tablet is equipped with a BCM11211 VoIP processor, coprocessors including one or two BCM11181 chips, and can process simultaneous 720p video streams, says the company....
A while back, an upgrade to the firmware of the router on my local network (which I wanted to apply to enable WPA2 encryption for the wireless connection) starting causing some strange issues with clients connecting to the network with DHCP. They would get addresses which would work, but when the addresses were attempted to be renewed, the DHCP server in the router would refuse and the client would effectively be booted off the network and unable to access anything.
So I decided to set up a DHCP server on my web server machine and switch off the built-in DHCP server on the router. My server would now handle the assignment of addresses, and hopefully not suffer from this annoying bug!
So, here's how to configure a basic DHCP server for a local network with dhcpd on CentOS 5.3. This guide should work for pretty much any distribution, though, just the way you install the dhcpd package may be different and start and stop the server may differ somewhat.
Install dhcpd
First, you need to install the DHCP server package. As root, run:
Code:
yum install dhcp
Just one more thing before we get cracking -- make sure that the server where you are installing this DHCP server uses a static IP address. It obviously doesn't make any sense for it to get its IP address from itself. I'm assuming you have a machine here that is designated as a server that is already set up manually to connect to your local network with a static IP address.
Set up the configuration file
You will need to know the local IP address range of your local network and which addresses you want to be assigned via DHCP. If you have some machines that are assigned static IP addresses, make sure these addresses fall outside the scope of your DHCP address range, or you could create conflicts.
In this example, I am going to assign IP addresses from 192.168.1.64 through 192.168.1.250 as DHCP addresses. When a machine comes on to the network, it will be assigned an address in this range by my new DHCP server. The router IP address on this network is 192.168.1.1.
Open the /etc/dhcpd.conf file in your favourite editor, while running as root. Make your file look something like this:
Code:
#
# DHCP Server Configuration file.
# see /usr/share/doc/dhcp*/dhcpd.conf.sample
#
ddns-update-style none;
ignore client-updates;
# these two options are for allowing clients to tell
# update a DNS server when DHCP clients want a DNS hostname.
# I'm switching this off -- I don't need it and it's out of
# the scope of this tutorial!
option domain-name-servers 216.146.35.35, 216.146.36.36;
# place your DNS servers here -- you will probably want to retrieve
# the addresses of the DNS servers you currently use from your router.
# Here I'm using the public DNS servers of the Dyn Internet Guide public
# DNS service. You may prefer your ISP's servers, or OpenDNS or Google Public
# DNS or another service.
default-lease-time 172800; # one day
max-lease-time 604800; # seven days
# you should be fine with these, unless you specifically want to change them!
authoritative;
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
# place your network's IP information here, you should be able to retrieve from
# your router.
range 192.168.1.64 192.168.1.250;
# the range of addresses to be used by DHCP clients
option routers 192.168.1.1;
# the IP of your router, in order to get traffic out to the internet!
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0
# again, retrieve from your current settings
option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255
# usually the last address on your network, again look at your current settings
}
You will obviously need to substitute into that example file the IP addresses on your network, including the subnet, your desired IP address range for DHCP users, the router and your preferred DNS servers. As the comments say, you should be able to retrieve most of this information from your current network setup; so it will probably be on the pages of your router's configuration web page.
When you have customised that file with your information, save the file and quit your editor. The DHCP server should now be ready for action.
Start the DHCP server and set to run on reboot
Now, stop any existing DHCP server you might have enabled on your router. You will probably have to go to the configuration web page of your router and disable the DHCP server option. Two DHCP servers on the same network will likely conflict unless set up properly to coexist!
Note that while there is no DHCP server on your network, any machine that joins won't be able to get an IP address and therefore will have trouble doing anything. Best do this at a quiet time when no-one is likely to be switching on or restarting their computer or otherwise reconnecting to your network.
Now switch on your new DHCP server if it isn't already. As root:
Code:
/etc/init.d/dhcpd start
You may want to use something 'Repair Connection' or a forced network refresh on one of your client computers to test that the new DHCP server is giving out addresses properly. Check the network properties on that machine and you should notice it has an address in the right range. To make sure that your router and DNS server addresses are right, connect to the internet and verify you can access your favourite websites.
If something goes wrong, use:
Code:
/etc/init.d/dhcpd stop
chkconfig dhcpd off
to turn off your DHCP server (and prevent it from running again on reboot) and then you can re-enable the router's DHCP server option and be back at square one.
If all seems good and your new DHCP server is giving out the right addresses, you can set dhcpd to run at startup:
Code:
chkconfig dhcpd on
From now on, your new DHCP server on Linux will be responsible for dishing out network addresses to clients.
Just remember that this machine where the DHCP server is installed must be switched on in order for the network to function properly. This machine ideally should be left on all the time (or at least all the time that your router is switched on), so that computers on the network can get access to the network properly.
It is also a good idea to know how to configure one of your machines with a static IP address, so that if all else fails, you can log back into the router and switch on its DHCP server option again.