Archive for the ‘Gnu/Linux’ Category

20 Years of Linux

Wednesday, 6th April 2011 by
Timeline showing 20 Years of Linux

Linux Foundation: 20 Years of Linux

Just a little Windows remote admin nugget …

If you have File/Printer sharing enabled in a windows PC, you can shut it down or restart it from a Linux PC on the network using the following:

net rpc shutdown -I IPADDRESS -U USERNAME%PASSWORD

You’ll need the samba-common package for the net command, and the user being supplied will need admin privileges.

If you are getting the VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode error dialog shown below …

… it is because you have the kvm and kvm_intel kernel modules enabled. You will need to unload them using the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r kvm_intel
sudo modprobe -r kvm

You should now be able to start your Virtual Machine.

If you want a permanent solution, you need to disable full virtualisation for qemu/kvm using the Boot-up manager. You can do so by following these steps.

1. Install the Boot-up Manager:

You can do this via the Software Center, where you can find it in the System Tools section:

screen shot of software-center

Alternatively, you can install it by typing the following in a console:

sudo apt-get install bum

2. Start the Boot-up manager from the System > Administration menu.

3. Untick Full virtualization on i386 and amd64 hardware and click Apply.

Screen shot of the Boot-up Manager

Note: VirtualBox will still run under full virtualisation provided your system supports it.

While many distributions of GNU/Linux have been more than suitable for most users, there have been quite a few obstacles preventing it from getting into their desktops. One of the main reasons behind this is that Windows comes preinstalled with almost all new PCs, and most people including those that are moderately tech savvy are afraid of installing GNU/Linux or even any OS on their computer. Keep reading »

After playing around with Vista for a couple of days on my new HP dv2899ea Artist Edition Notebook, I had decided it had to go. For starters it had a restore partition that had taken up 12GB and for some reason the actual supposedly fresh installation took up at least twice as much. But I made a set of system recovery discs on just in case if for some reason I decide to install it again. That took about a year and a half to create! (OK, may be it was a little closer to a couple of hours.) Keep reading »

Infoworld has coverage of Ubuntu Linux Founder Mark Shuttleworth speaking Open Source Convention (OSCON), asking the audience Can we go right past Apple in the user experience we deliver, adding Certainly on the desktop experience we need to shoot beyond the Mac, but I think it’s equally relevant [in] the mobile space.
Keep reading »

screenshot of a project managment toolThere are a fair few project management tools available for Linux that differ in simplicity of use as well as the features they include. Most of them would be suitable for smaller projects, but there are a couple that would be as suitable for complex large scale projects as the commercial solutions such as Microsoft Project.
Keep reading »

Reading this blog post about the OS as a platform I recalled a gripe I often have when installing software on Linux… the lack of a common interface for applications to register themselves with the OS/Desktop Environment. By that I mean, there is no facility for an application installer to say: Keep reading »

There are plenty of office suites as well as a whole host of other productivity software freely available for GNU/Linux. Most of these provide the average user with all the functionality they need from a word processor, desktop database or spread sheet application. Some will even open documents created in Microsoft Word or Excel with varying degrees of success. There will be some issues when it comes to Keep reading »

There are plenty of applications in GNU/Linux for playing music or watching movies and TV, and many of them will work perfectly fine on old computers that choke on the simplest of tasks in Windows XP. Keep reading »