matt@foo ~ $ VBoxManage list vms
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.0.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Name:            Ubuntu
Guest OS:        Ubuntu
UUID:            7732c04e-0a50-461c-86d3-a18814ac9257
Config file:     /home/matt/.VirtualBox/Machines/Ubuntu/Ubuntu.xml
Memory size:     512MB
VRAM size:       8MB
Boot menu mode:  message and menu

[... truncated ...]

I'm a big fan of Sun's VirtualBox. It allows me to run other operating systems (such as Windows and Ubuntu) safely and easily without having to deploy them beside my Gentoo install. Now here comes Linux.com with a quick guide to using VirtualBox from the command line (every Linux aficionado's one true friend). You might as why you'd want to use the CLI, luckily for me the guys at Linux.com already answered that question:

The CLI works well for users who want to control a VirtualBox running on a headless server with no monitor or keyboard attached. Even desktop users, running and managing VirtualBox from the same machine, can pull a stunt or two with the CLI that they can't do in the GUI, such as shrinking or cloning virtual disks, customizing the BIOS logo, and collecting metrics data from virtual machines.

Linux.com

At this point I thought I'd take a moment to go over how this site is powered. First off, there's the VPS from Linode (Linode stands for Linux Node) which comes with the following specifications:

• 360MiB RAM
• 12GiB storage space
• 200GiB data transfers per month
• Full SSH access (root)
• Managed DNS
• (and more...)
• $19.95 per month (about 14€)

I'd say that that's pretty good value for money...  So far I've been extremely happy with the Linode VPS, no glitches or breakdowns and it's fairly zippy (even though I'm in Europe and the server is in the US).  Oh, and when you order a VPS you get to choose which data centre you want it to be in. If you do decide to get a VPS from Linode, I'd appreciate it if you used my referral code:

632bae5e8fd45745396cd410c14d94771105bc6a

I'll be honest about it: I get $20 credit if somebody gets a VPS with that code (and keeps it for 90 days)... Well, that covers the hardware, so to speak.

Read the rest of this post »

Andrew Bartlett from the Samba development team has published an article titled "A year since Microsoft's EU appeal failed" describing Samba's recent efforts for interoperability with Microsoft. As JP puts it on Slashdot: "In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way." Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team [via Slashdot]

As you might have read a recent post of mine, I've recently been getting acquiented with the Arduino platform.  Indeed I got my hands on my very own Arduino Nano this afternoon when it arrived in the mail. Now, quite handily, Wired has an interesting article on Arduino and Open Source Computing (titled 'Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?').

Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don't need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open. The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn't hurt by low-quality copies.

Wired on Arduino [via Creative Commons Weblog]

Donald Townsend. CC BY-NC-SA
A recently released study conducted by the Linux Foundation place the value of the Linux Kernel at around 1.4 billion US dollars (~1.1 billion €) and the value of a the full Fedora 9 distrbution at just above 10 billion US dollars (~7.85 billion €).

The companies and individuals who work on Linux-related projects and build this value proft by sharing the development burden with their peers (and sometimes competitors.) Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering this research and development burden individually, as Microsoft has done, is an expensive approach to building software. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.

O'Reilly Radar

This week I've been on a introductory course for Arduinos, so I thought I might share some of what I've learned. Arduino is an open source rapid prototyping platform based on easy to use hardware and software. It's intended to be used by hobbyists, artists, designers, and anyone who's interested in quickly and easily creating their own gadgets. It is possible to connect almost anything to the Arduino board. I myself have successfully experimented with servos, ultrasound distance sensors, and the Wii Nunchuck, among others. What's more, an Arduino can easily be connected up to a computer that can control the Arduino, and can receive data from it. The Arduino can work with pretty much any computing platform, and the official IDE is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows. I'll soon post some of my projects here, and in the meanwhile you can get more information on Arduinos on the Arduino home page and on the Arduino Wikipedia article.

• Arduino.cc (open inline)
• Wikipedia on Arduino (open inline)

For an idea of some of the things that you can do with Arduinos, go to Arduino Playground.

• Arduino Playground (open inline)
  • User projects (open inline)

If you understand Finnish, you can also go to Sulautetut.fi

Google has finally released the full source code of its Linux-based Android platform.   The source files are available for download at: http://source.android.com/posts/opensource David Bort writes on the Android page:

Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer.  Interested in working on a speech-recognition library?  Looking to do some research on virtual machines?  Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution?  All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with.

[via Ars Technica]

If you've been wondering why this blog has been so quite of late (again), here comes the answer. I've just finished the migration from my firend's VPS at Network Redux to a brand new VPS of my own at open inline). I also migrated from Apache to Lighttpd at the same time (boy, does Lighty use less resources!). I still have to do some optimizations and some other minor setup, but by and large everything now works. There's a few more details about the setup on the About page. No action is required by you, the user. We're still available at the same address and all user accounts have been successfully migrated. If you do experience any problems, please leave a comment below or contact me at webadmin ( a t ) proliferationoflinux ( d o t ) org.

Adobe has today released version 10 of their Flash Player. This new version comes with numerous improvements and is designed to compete with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, thankfully which is yet to gain a significant foothold on web sites...

"We're providing unprecedented creative control for developers and designers," with Flash Player 10, Barclay said. In addition, he said the new release is available immediately on Windows, Mac and Linux, including new support for Ubuntu 7 and 8. "Linux is a first-class citizen for us," he said.

It might be available for Linux, but Adobe still hasn't managed to produce a 64-bit build. Seriously speaking, this is getting ridiculous... I guess we'll be getting 64-bit Flash support at around the same time that Sun releases a 64-bit browser plug-in for Java... Adobe Flash Player [via eWEEK]

OpenOffice 3.0 is now available for download.  I myself will be testing it out once there's an Gentoo eBuild that isn't hard masked. OpenOffice.org