Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

The Netbook VS The iPhone

By now, everyone knows what an Apple iPhone is. In fact, with the new drop in price, everybody probably has an iPhone. The iPhone combines a phone, a music device, and a internet browsing device.

The iPhone definitely has some similarities to the family of netbooks. The question is, which is a better device? We will look at a few functions of each device.

Turning On

Both the netbook and the iPhone have simple power switches to turn on the devices. Each device takes different load times. If your netbook is running Linux, the boot up time is around 15 seconds. However, Windows XP will take about twice as long. The iPhone on the other hand takes around 25-30 seconds until it is ready to use. The winner is: Netbook

Typing

Either way you look at it, typing on the iPhone and on the netbook is not the same as typing on a desktop computer. However, the netbook is the closest thing to comfortable typing. Both have a full qwerty keyboard, but the netbooks keyboard is around 80% of the size of a full keyboard. Typing on the touch screen iPhone takes a lot of time and practice. It gets even more difficult if you have a protective case over the phone. The winner is: Netbook

Browsing The Net

The iPhone is limited in its browsing functions simply because of the Safari browser. Netbooks are capable of running Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari. You can surf the internet much easier with a netbook than an iPhone. Winner: Netbook

Portability

The iPhone is easily small enough to fit in a pocket, so perhaps is an easy winner here. Still, most of us carry a bag or something similar around with us, which a netbook can easily slip into. One of the new Sony VAIO netbooks can easily slip into a jacket pocket. Winner is this category: iPhone

Cost

A netbook is going to cost you around $200 – $300. An unlocked iPhone will typically cost around $300 – $400 on eBay. If you are going to run the iPhone on AT&T’s mobile network, you can pick up an iPhone for $99. Since the majority of the world is not running AT&T, your best bet is the unlocked version of the iPhone. The winner: Netbook & iPhone

Overall: Netbook wins

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Ubuntu 9.04 – A Giant Leap Forward for Linux

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope ” a unique distribution of Linux ” has finally been released. It offers a huge pile of improvements over the last version, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Most noticeable for someone used to Ubuntu 8.10 would be the new notification pop-up effects. These now more closely resemble the appearance of the Growl notification plugin for Mac OS X. This notification system alerts the user to system events in a simple, attractive fashion. For example, it will notify the user when his battery is low, when he has a new message (if using Pidgin for internet messaging), when new email arrives, and the like.

Ubuntu 9.04 also includes a new and beefed up Xorg server. Xorg is what powers the display and GUI. This improvement features better stability and powerful new options on the back end. By default, the familiar control-alt-backspace command to restart the Xorg system has been turned off. The developers made this change because too many people were hitting control-alt-backspace during normal use – causing the user to lose what he was working on.

Version 9.04 also includes a vastly improved version of the GNOME desktop system. This new desktop environment is mainly a bugfix release but also includes a few new features. My personal favorite its enhanced integration with GNOME-Do. GNOME-Do is like QuickSilver for the Mac. It gives the user easy access to all his files and programs and the push of a couple of keys. Jaunty supports the “Docky” function of GNOME-Do which creates a very-capable and powerful dock at the bottom of your screen. On this dock one can place quick launchers for his favorite programs or shortcuts to his files.

A sad omission from Ubuntu Hardy was Open Office 3.0. OO3 was, for some odd reason, not installed in the final release of 8.10. Of course, you could add it easily, but that can be a hassle for users without experience with installing software in Linux. Fortunately, Ubuntu 9.04 includes the newest version with many many new features.

As with previous distributions, Ubuntu 9.04 includes all the basics.

It comes with an office package, Open Office 3, which is just as powerful as Microsoft’s MS Office. You can play all of your music and videos in a breeze with the built in music player ” or install your own easily.

Ubuntu’s default browser is Firefox 3, the famous internet browser from the Mozilla foundation. Ubuntu also includes advanced photo management (tags, sharing, uploading, sorting, etc) with F-Spot Photo Manager. You even get professional support for business activities like email, file sharing, video conferencing, and the like.

Of course, you are also able to install programs at will. You are not limited to what software is installed on your computer.

While no computer system is flawless, you can’t beat the price: $0.00

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Introduction of Cheap Linux dedicated server web hosting

There are lots of people suggest Linux server for the reliable web hosting solution, because of its fully security, genuine functionality, very affordable and reliability. You can get it all in the one package.

What are the advantages of Linux Dedicated Servers? A Linux server doesn’t have so much technical problems comparing other servers, has ability to run for long term without disconnecting programs. They don’t take high bandwidth.

Linux is power full operation system that installations have no known exposure in their OS. However, it’s measured for the concern of Linux to stay their running systems with the good security.

Cheap Linux based web hosting is additional advantage of Linux hosting consumers. It’s widely due to open source, hosts generally pass these savings onto their clients. Really make a Linux solution extremely inexpensive.

What are the disadvantages of linux dedicated servers? Every product has its both advantages and disadvantages. Linux based applications could not convert coding and not able to run windows applications. It can spell tragedy for websites that have been coded particularly for windows based applications.

Be sure that they offer all basic services including firewall, security, servers load balance, virus protection, Cpanel details when you are going to choose Linux web hosting services. There are also other services available like MYSQL database, additional FTP creation, Sub domains services, add on domains and many more services. Most important is online chat support supposed if you are new in this field so you can discuss any problems any time with their executive and easily solved it. You could not get benefits of .NET application, Microsoft application if you are Linux web user. Nowadays, they are providing readymade scripts like ruby n rails, PHP 5.0 (latest version) and so on.

Reseller Hosting : Best Way To Setup Web Hosting Business

Web hosting is a growing market today with having tons of new websites launched every night. While things to setup your new web hosting company is a little bit work along with a few dollars to be invested too with your service provider.One of the major issue which every webmaster faces is that most of the generic domain name are been taken already by some others thus choosing a best fit domain might be one of the issue you are going to face while planning to host a new website. Also you need to find out a better hosting company which can serve you the top notch of quality support and service for your website needs.

If you are a web developer or a web professional who is going to start web hosting business then reseller hosting can be treated as a best option for you to get white label web hosting service to be resold to your clients as per your own prices and plan structures. There are a lot of providers over the internet for the same. You can check with your provider that they only provides reseller hosting or they do also provide domain name reseller account, as some of companies on web market only offers reseller hosting they don’t offer domain reseller account while it will be better for you to go with one door service provider who can take care of your both needs domain name and resalable web space.

Many web hosting reseller service providers offers unlimited domains allowed on their resalable web space and on the other hand some offer limited domains allowed so it depends on your personal requirements and demand of the local market you deals with that which way it can fit your needs. There are a lot of companies who also offers free webmasters tools / templates so this can be also helpful for you if your service provider offers such nice utilities for free with reseller hosting account to help you to grow with little more value added packages.

Some of web hosting providers have FrontPage extension services on their web hosting servers so that can be a good idea for you if your website is having FrontPage extension installed then you can update your website in real-time using your FrontPage itself so in that manner you can say good bye to the overload of ftp clients and that sort of jobs. You shall also double check with your provider that they don’t have any limit of number of database allowed or database space restrictions sort of things as sometime you take reseller account in hurry and then you go nowhere as when you need those things you realizes that your decision was not good enough.

So, check with any popular internet search engines such as google or yahoo to find out any good reseller hosting provider in your local area and check with above noted points to determine which one can be the best for your needs.

What is Linux ?

Linux, also known as GNU/Linux, is a free, UNIX-like operating system, developed originally for home PCs, but which now runs on practically every hardware platform available including PowerPC, Macintosh, DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc, ARM, Mainframes, and many others. Linux aims for POSIX compliancy to maintain maximum compatibility with other UNIX-like systems. With millions of users worldwide, Linux is probably the most popular UNIX-like OS in the world.

The Linux System

The central nervous system of Linux is the kernel, the operating system code which runs the whole computer. The kernel is under constant development and is always available in both the latest stable release and the latest experimental release. Progress on development is very fast, and the recent 2.6-series kernels are simply amazing on all counts. The kernel design is modular, so that the actual OS code is very small yet able to load whatever functionality it needs when it needs it. Because of this, the kernel remains small and fast yet highly extensible, in comparison to other operating systems which slow down the computer and waste memory by loading everything all the time, whether it is needed or not.

Linux systems excel in many areas, ranging from end-user concerns such as stability, speed, and ease of use, to serious concerns such as development and networking. Nowadays, Linux even offers a wide variety of free and commercial productivity packages such as the OpenOffice suite which can import and export files from other platforms, including Windows and MacOS.

Stability

Linux has long been praised for its stability–Linux boxes are known for running months or even years at a time without crashing, freezing, or having to be rebooted. Linux users sometimes poke fun at other, less stable operating systems, by way of screensavers like BSOD (Blue Screen of Death, which displays crash screens from various other platforms).

Linux is extremely secure compared to other platforms. Viruses and Trojan Horse programs are practically non-existent. Linux servers practically run the World Wide Web, so one cannot argue that there are so few malicious programs for Linux because it represents an insignificant number of target machines.

Speed

So much of the web is built on Linux that the acronym LAMP has emerged. LAMP represents Linux, Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (web application language). This acronym may need to be changed eventually due to the rapid growth of PostgreSQL, Ruby, and Java on Linux web servers.

Unlike some commercial operating systems, no free Linux distributions impose any artificial constraints on how you use the operating system. There are no arbitrary limits to the number of user accounts you can create, the number of simultaneous connections your Linux-based web server can handle, or arbitrary limits any other Linux resources.

Linux machines are known to be extremely fast, because the operating system is very efficient at managing resources such as memory, CPU power, and disk space. NASA, Sandia, Fermilabs and many others have built very powerful yet inexpensive supercomputers by creating clusters of Linux boxes running in parallel. Clusters of Linux systems have been responsible for rendering the graphics for movies like Shrek, Titanic, and many others.

Many high-profile organizations have adopted Linux. For example, visit the NOAA (the National Weather Service at www.srh.noaa.gov) and you can thank Linux for the weather reports you will see online.

Graphical Interface

Linux has dozens of different, highly configurable graphical interfaces (known as window managers) which run on top of Xorg, a free implementation of the X Window System. The most popular complete desktop environments at present are KDE (the K Desktop Environment) and GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment). These offer the point-and-click, drag-and-drop functionality associated with other user-friendly environments (for example, Macintosh). Both can be configured to look and feel like other environments such as Windows or Mac, and KDE is remarkably extensible. Even complex tasks like system administration, package installation, upgrading, and network configuration can be done easily through graphical programs. Almost all programs that work with one window manager work with all the others, so you don’t need to feel like you must pick your favorite desktop environment based on your favorite applications.

Xorg now supports 3-D windowing environments such as Beryl and Compiz for amazing visual effects, and most people won’t have to upgrade their computers in order to take advantage of these enhancements.

Software Development

Programmers often find that the Linux development environment is second to none–a good thing for end users who depend on these software developers to provide free software. Nearly all development software for Linux is free and covered under the GNU Public License, which guarantees that it will always remain free. Linux systems come standard with C and C++ compilers and an assembler, and usually include Pascal, FORTRAN, compiled Java, Perl, Python, and BASIC implementations as well. In addition, modern languages like Ruby and classic languages like LISP are all available, fully functional and completely free.

Linux runs two of the most popular development environments, Eclipse and KDevelop, and you can use these environments to with just about any programming language available. These two development tools support web application development, but there are additional free/open source highly sophisticated development tools dedicated to building web applications.

In addition, the source code for nearly any Linux program is freely available (and often included by default). This not only means that bugs are discovered and corrected almost immediately, but development of software proceeds at a much faster pace than one finds even at extremely successful commercial software houses. This phenomenon is called Open Source and is the subject of much discussion and amazement in the business world, the computer world, and the press.

The Open Source nature of Linux also makes it ideal for embedded and specialized systems (routers, cell phones, multimedia entertainment centers, point-of-sale systems), because there’s no limit to what you can do to customize Linux for your special needs.

Networking

Networking comes naturally to Linux. Probably all networking protocols in use on the Internet are native to UNIX and/or Linux, so one can expect that UNIX and Linux would network better than any other platforms. Setting up a network on a Linux machine is surprisingly simple, because Linux handles most of the work.

A large part of the Web is running on Linux boxes, especially because of the Apache Web Server which dramatically defeated its commercial competitors, proving the effectiveness and viability of the Open Source approach.

Productivity

Productivity software availability has exploded in recent years, and commercial developers have been producing excellent software for the Linux platform. The Firefox browser, Opera, and Mozilla are freely available (with some licensing restrictions) as well as the OpenOffice productivity suite, KOffice and a host of others, which often come standard on Linux distributions. Many distributors package commercial software with their distributions, and many commercial producers offer free downloads for Linux. Linux productivity packages can usually read and write files from productivity packages on other platforms; Linux has always been at the leading edge of compatibility and openness.

Linux happily coexists on the same machine as other operating systems including Windows or Mac OSX, and Linux easily accesses the files stored by other operating systems. You can use one of many virtualization techniques to run Linux and Windows or any other operating system (even another version of Linux) on the same machine, simultaneously. You can run many Windows programs on Linux via Wine, or commercial helper products such as Crossover Office or Cedega, both of which even support the popular game Word of Warcraft! There are countless Linux distributions which run beautifully from a CD or DVD without the need to install the operating system. This makes it possible for new Linux users to see if they like Linux without erasing their old OS or having to buy another computer.

Longevity

The open source nature of Linux guarantees it is here to stay, and the amazing growth of Linux over the past years bears that out. Best of all, as long as you stick with a truely free/open source operating system like Linux and truely free/open source applications, you can never get locked into depending on any particular vendor. Linux puts you in control of what you do with your software, how, when and if you choose to change or upgrade it.