Friday, September 8. 2006
The release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), back in June, brought not only a new desktop system to the Linux world, but also a server system with long-term commercial support. It has one key advantage over similar offerings from Redhat and Novell; the flexibility of the Debian dpkg packaging system.
This was of particular interest to me, as a system administrator who generally installs Debian, if given a choice. One of the annoying problems with Debian has been its potentially short support lifespan; essentially as long as it takes to get two more releases out. Admittedly this hasn't been a real problem, to date, but not having firm dates has been an issue in some environments in which I've worked.
Another was its perceived lack of commercial support, which often made it very difficult to bring into a corporate environment. While I've worked in situations where I had complete authority to use whatever OS I chose, I've also been in workplaces where it has been made clear that Debian simply would not be used, due to the lack of a commercial organisation providing security support.
Ubuntu's server release solves both of these problems, so I installed a copy to see how it held up.
Continue reading "Review: Ubuntu Server Edition 6.06"
Wednesday, June 28. 2006
QEMU is well-known as a free replacement for VMware, allowing users to run a PC within a PC. What isn't so well known about QEMU is that, in addition to emulating x86 architectures, it can emulate AMD64, Sparc, MIPS, PPC and ARM CPUs.
In the case of the ARM architecture, QEMU provides a convenient, if slow, environment in which development can be done for embedded systems.
This article describes the process involved in building a Debian/ARM server running under QEMU. It assumes that Debian is also being used as the host server.
Since QEMU's arm emulator has no ability to emulate either IDE or SCSI disks, it will be necessary to install the server on an NFS exported partition.
Continue reading "Running Linux for ARM processors under QEMU"
Saturday, May 13. 2006
Ten years ago, shortly after I started my first job as a network programmer at an Australian university, I received a call from a person working in one faculty who was having some network difficulties. All of their computers were connected together by 50-ohm coaxial cable ethernet, and two of the computers on this network sent a considerable amount of data to each other.
This data, naturally, was echoed along the entire network cable and was the primary cause of delays and packet loss to other users of the network. The caller wanted to know of a way to solve this problem. My manager suggested the use of a bridge; the two noisy computers could be placed behind this device and their traffic to each other would be confined to their segment. This solution was particularly attractive as it would not require any other changes to the network or the network numbering; it could be inserted and would work immediately.
For a number of years now, the Linux kernel has had the ability to turn any host with more than one network interface into a bridge. This article explains how it works.
Continue reading "Ethernet Bridges under Linux"
Friday, March 24. 2006
The Ubuntu Linux distribution launched itself into the Linux community only eighteen months ago, and in that short amount of time has managed to gather a considerably large amount of publicity.
The fifth alpha release, Dapper Flight 5, was released on March 10th, 2006; the final release of Ubuntu 6.06, codenamed "Dapper Drake", is expected in June, after founder Mark Shuttleworth recommended a six week delay to iron out usability issues.
This release will be promising considerable more than Ubuntu's earlier releases - making a big grab for the commercial desktop by supporting it for five years. Five years is a long time, and clearly the Ubuntu people want to make sure it's every bit as good as it can be. So how is it stacking up so far?
Continue reading "Review: Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5"
Wednesday, February 22. 2006
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