Linxe's eye

After a short wait, I received the GuruPlug, this little computer will host the GLiB website (currently down ...). This is the pretty and elegant package: and the unpacking: It include only the GuruPlug, one eth cable and two electric adapters. The specifications and diagram are: Of course this machine runs Linux (Debian Lenny) and it includes some basic services: Wifi server, CUPS, LAMP (lighttp + MySQL + PHP), ssh, samba. This is the GuruPlug in action: Some action in the terminal: $ ssh root@192.168.1.1 Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.1' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. root@192.168.1.1's password: Linux sheevaplug-debian 2.6.32-00007-g56678ec #1 PREEMPT Thu Dec 24 03:15:48 PST 2009 armv5tel The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicabl...

Finally I have a netbook, the Asus EeePC 1000HA, a nice mini-laptop in white pearl. The hardware specifications are: Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor 160GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive 1GB of DDR2 RAM (667MHz) 10” WSVGA LED-Backlit 1024 x 600 LCD Ports: 3 USB 2.0, 1 VGA monitor out, headphone jack, microphone input, SD card reader (SDHC compatible), lock slot, Ethernet 10/100 Webcam (1.3 MP) Speakers and microphone built-in Battery: 7.4v 6600mAh 6-cell battery (3.5 - 7 hrs) Wireless: 802.11b/g Size: 25 cm (W) x 19 cm (D) x 3 cm (H) Weight: less than 1.5 kg The worst part is the SO, I don't understand why this model is exclusively sold with the almost-dead XP, so I installed the latest Mandriva release. Because this system require an external drive to boot an installer, I download the image for the official mirrors (inside /MandrivaLinux/official/2009.0/i586/install/images/ ) named all.img , this is a prepared image to copy in a USB drive and includes a boot-loader and the basic tools for a net...

The Linux Foundation launched the video contests for a "We're Linux", last day they announced the finalists , but I like this one (probably because my biological background): I hope this wins. Update : Origin is second place, the winner is http://video.linuxfoundation.org/video/1106

I own a little old laptop (it was owned by a very good friend, traded in a perfect time for us). It's a HP pavilion ZT1114, PIII @ 1GHz, only 256 Mb in RAM, no battery, I recently change the HD. The computer is still working well, except for versions of heavy Linux can run but response time is slow. Long time I used in this machine Mandriva , from 2007 to 2009 releases, changing the default desktop to XFCE to save memory and optimizing the system, also I tried Puppy Linux and other minimalistic Linux distributions. But always I feel something missing, an ultimate Linux distro with fast performance. Until few weeks I noted the new release of DreamLinux , a Debian based distro with a pretty and fast desktop (XFCE). I had installed last week and after one week of use, I like it! Everything works well. The AWN bar looks like MacOS X. The Debian stability and large collection of packages. EasyInstall application is really useful. DCP-Control panel works well. Of course not everything w...

Recently I found this great site Command-line Fu , a site where you can find these beautiful gems for the command line but it's different from other collections: What's this? Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on and discussed - digg-esque voting is also encouraged so the best float to the top. So, anyone can share their commands, you can look, learn and use or suggests better ways to do it, and beyond the Bash, also include tags (functions) for one-liners scripts in perl, python, etc. or by specific commands like curl, ssh, grep, ... With Twitter and RSS report systems you can follow the latest commands too (but only report the link and the function, not the command). Sweet. Via: Downloa...

The next February 13th has a special event, not for everyone, just for people like us (yes, you know, accept it ...) because the UNIX time at 11:31:30pm UTC will read in the terminal in curious form: 1234567890 . Why? Check Wikipedia : "Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing points in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1st. 1970, not counting lap seconds. It is widely used not only on Unix-like operation systems but also in many other computing systems. It is neither a linear representation of time nor a true representation of UTC (though it is frecuently mistaken of both) as the times it represents are UTC but it has no way of repesenting UTC leap seconds (e.g. 1998-12-31 23:59:60)." If you want to check it, or see other values for your favorite number, you can use the Perl one-line: perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";' Note: image from Wikimedia showing whe...

ZDNet Australia test some people in the street, they showed a Linux (which one? they didn't mention ...) with KDE4, they activate some fancy effects and told the people "this is the new windows 7", ... many people like it! I think they must tell the true, to see if they want to switch to Linux, anyway the cheaper W7 will be $200 usd (I prefer to buy a new computer with this money, I'm still saving for my AAO, donations accepted).

Bash is almost a complete programming language, I use every day (switching from the default tcsh in the servers, in Mac OS X is default) for automatic job launching. Extracted from: http://hacktux.com/bash/script/efficient. Avoid full paths to bash built-ins. Except when you require specific commands, when I use systems with 32 or 64b binaries, I need to specify which one to use, or define an specific directory to use in the PATH or as a variable. Avoid external commands for integer math. Because bash has math evaluation. Avoid using cat . Commonly people use cat and send to other commands with a pipe, but many commands can read files in the parameters. Avoid piping grep to awk . Because awk can filter the inputs, use /pattern/ Avoid piping sed to sed . Multiple filters can be applied to the input with the -e option ( sed -e "s/this/that/" -e "s/old/new/" filename ). Use double brackets for compound and RegEx tests. [[ ]] evaluate the operations between...

So do you have some PS3 and you're boring of play and watch Blue-Ray movies? You must know the PS3 is the most accessible CELL- based machine, why not use this computer problem in other areas beyond entrainment . In this PS3 ClusterGuide you can build step-by-step your own cluster with PS3, the receipt: 1. Take some PS3. 2. Interconnect it in a LAN. 3. Install Fedora PPC in each one. 4. Install cluster utils . 5. Learn to code in CELL- SDK for a better experience and performance . I accept some PS3 for scientific probes ... really I just want one to play ...

Last commercials from Windows show us a "real PC guy", because the "I'm a Mac" from Apple, this Spanish-English video show the PC but with Linux. Personally, I'm a complex mix of Linux/Windows/Mac/Solaris.

Last week, Mandriva released the 2009 version, because I'm a mandriva fan, immediately I downloaded the One- KDE ISO, burn it and installed in my old HP laptop ( PIII 1 Ghz , 256 Mb RAM, 20 Gb HD , Wi - fi card). The LiveCD run perfectly, show me the new KDE 4 desktop and made a clean install without problems (many others Linux LiveCD have problems just to boot in old hardware like this). I like to use a different partition for the /home, so my partition table looks like: / 5GB swap - 512 MB / geexbox - 100MB /home - rest Yes, I want to install the GeeXBoX , it's great for watch movies. Some good points are the new design, fast boot, the best hardware detection and many friendly menus to configure all. Remarkable is the improved URPMI , it is fast, now support simultaneous package download and the best part is the --auto-orphans option, this check for unused or broken packages and suggest uninstall , cleaning the systems even the kernel, removing unused drivers or m...

BABY(1) USER COMMANDS BABY(1) NAME BABY - create new process from two parent processes SYNOPSIS BABY sex [ name ] SYSTEM V SYNOPSIS /usr/5bin/BABY [ -sex ] [ -name ] AVAILABILITY The System V version of this command is available with the Sys- tem V software installation option. Refer to Installing SunOS 4.1 for information on how to install and invoke BABY. DESCRIPTION BABY is initiated when one parent process polls another server process through a socket connection (BSD) or through pipes in the system V implementation. BABY runs at a low priority for approximately 40 weeks then terminates with heavy system load. Most systems require constant monitoring when BABY reaches it's final stages of execution. Older implementations of BABY required that the initiating process not be present at the time of completion, In these versions the initiating process is awakened and notified of the results upon compl...

Ok , last time I judged the Ubuntu distribution so hard, later I started to think if there are a perfect Linux. First thing I believe is the Linux versatility, with the freedom of evolve or changing (forking) you can expect everything, so you can choice what to use as desktop, shell, editor, package system, ... Many distributions are open to change the default installation, or simply to allow to try any program in the repositories or just the code. The options are infinite. I remember when you need to decide the parts of your system, in the beginning of many distributions the installation system ask you the packages to include, some times you obtain an unstable systems, but many times you have a personal system. Many problems could be resolved reading manual or asking in the LUGs , but some times you needed to wait until the next release and a programmer or hacker fix it. Later the popularity of LiveCDs allows to install a full system which works fine, because many debuggers tested t...

Many of my linux -friends well know I don't like Ubuntu , yes the " so popular and friendly linux ", this week I had some buddy-support for this bad distro , but these people are fascinating using it! Basic problems include (in order of appearance ): Compile a C code. Why Ubuntu doesn't configure well the dependent libraries for static? I try the code in other Un *x environment and works well, but in Ubuntu I had to delete the static flag and edit the headers in source code. Execute a CGI script under Apache (I'm not 100% sure of Ubuntu systems but I guess). If the system install a httpd . conf file with basic rules to work, you expect this work, if it doesn't, I don't like to read the manual to fix something when many other distros like Mandriva do perfectly fine the first time. Install updates and reboot. Sorry for the similitudes, but this is a Windows feature, why do you need to reboot after the installation of updates? I like to update if I ...

Yesterday I was disturbed of my coding-state to answer a basic problem, which's the best font to display a sequences alignment? First introduce the concept of sequence alignment, if you want to compare 2 or more sequences in their composition of nucleic bases (for DNA or RNA) or amino acid (for peptids ), you must search similar blocks between all the context and try to fix the rest as possible. Many algorithms has been created to perform this task, with different approaches, if you want to know more, please go to Wikipedia or bioinformatics books. Ok , let's consider we have our alignment, really this is a text file with a special structure to easy visualize the blocks found. Some people make the mistake to cut-and-paste in a text document without change the font style, a font is just an image to represent letters or symbols, some are very artistic but generally the font does not conserve a proportional aspect in size, so the beautiful alignment changes its proportion and vi...

In this part we'll install and configure the other nodes, in the master node we have a DHCP server and a PXE network boot which serves the netboot system, so we just need to connect the net cable, a keyboard and a monitor to the node, turn on and wait to install the base system. Options include partition of the hda disk, we use the defaults and put all the system in a partition and default swap size. We add the general user named beagle and after rebooting, login, become root, change the password and install the SSH server: sudo su - passwd apt-get install openssh-server Repeat this for all the nodes. The next steps will be only from the master node. SSH access You need to create a pair of keys for each user to access any node without a password, first we create it in the general user beagle : ssh-keygen cp .ssh/id_pub .ssh/authorized_keys Root also need this keys, but we don't export the root's home, after you created the keys, you need to copy to all the nodes. This st...

This time I want to show how to build a HPC ( High Performance Computing ) cluster using Ubuntu Linux. Before to begin My Institute (Cinvestav - www.ira.cinvestav.mx) ask me to build a small cluster to general works and it'll be a learning system for bioinformatic. The cluster name is Beagle, they put the hardware and my friend LuisD and I the hard job. The design includes a master node to access, to check status and to send jobs, and 10 slaves nodes with /home exported with NFS, a job queque created with Sun Grid Engine, Ganglia is user to monitor the systems and also include MPI support. Hardware Master Node : AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2 Gb RAM, 1 hard disk IDE 80 Gb (hda), 1 hd SATA 320 Gb (sda), 1 external USB hd 1 Tb (sdb), network card nForce 10/100/1000 (eth1), network card PCI Realtek 10/100 (eth2). Slave Nodes X10 : AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2 Gb RAM, 1 hard disk IDE 80 Gb, network card nForce 10/100/1000 (eth0). Network Switch : 24 ports 10/100/1000. Many meters of network c...