Mint includes a compiler and Java and some of the latest hardware support available to Linux users. The desktop environment is stable and doesn't require 3-D support. Using Mint is usually a positive experience for me and this time was no exception. A big part of that is I can install the distribution in less than half an hour and then just start using the operating system without hunting down codecs or fiddling with repositories or switching to "fallback mode".
The graphical interface is clean and stays out of the way, the Control Centre is well organized and offers good deal of customization and the OS comes with a good collection of default software. I'm quite happy with this latest version of Mint. Dell and Canonical offer a new ultrabook, Haiku nears its first stable release and Seth Brown talks about GNU utilities Over the past several months we've been hearing rumours about a collaboration between Canonical and Dell.
This past week we finally got to see what had been growing behind the curtain. The new offering, which is primarily aimed at developers, is the result of a good deal of effort on Dell's part to make sure their hardware was properly supported with open source drivers. Back in October the latest stable version of Ubuntu was released and that version contained a feature which would send users' search results to various third parties, most notably Amazon.
Though this search feature can be disabled it runs by default and this has led some privacy activists, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to raise complaints. Now Richard Stallman is weighing in on Canonical's decision to enable on-line searches by default, saying " What's at stake is whether our community can effectively use the argument based on proprietary spyware.
The music and video lenses in the Dash have queried online sources since their introduction, and we will continue to expand our online sources over the next releases. The project has been slowly maturing over the past decade and, in recent years, alpha builds have been making the rounds.
In fact, Haiku developer Ryan Leavengood suggests we may see a general release sometime in Nor, with the increasing popularity of web applications, are productivity applications the problem they were a decade ago. These utilities are highly powerful and flexible, allowing users to manipulate large amounts of text and numbers.
In an informative blog post Seth Brown goes over a handful of the more commonly used utilities available to Linux and BSD users. In his post he shows us how we can use freely available utilities to inspect, reshape, enumerate, describe and visualize data using a few simple command line tools.
It's well worth a read if you're in the habit of processing large amounts of information. Now there is a new project, called Darling , which attempts to provide Linux users with a method of running software built for OS X. Darling provides a layer of OS X compatibility on top of Linux which should allow Linux users to enjoy software written for OS X, even if the source code for those applications is not available.
Right now the Darling project is in its early stages, but it does look promising. It's fairly obvious right from the start we are not dealing with a book on bicycle repair. As the title suggests, Kyle Rankin's book deals with identifying and fixing common problems that occur on Linux servers and it supplies a range of suggestions on how to best go about dealing with a malfunctioning server. That's just a very short, general outline though, so let's take a look at the book's contents.
I like this extended form of a table of contents as it makes for a handy reference if we want to jump right into the middle of a particular subject. Once we get through the list of contents and some opening notes we do not jump straight into fixing broken servers.
Instead Mr Rankin spends a chapter discussing the best ways to go about approaching malfunctioning infrastructure. He points out that people often have the urge to jump straight into the guts of an issue, but when a service is down it's usually best to form a plan of attack. He makes a number of suggestions about how to best approach running tests on an issue and how to coordinate troubleshooting in a team environment. A lot of Mr Rankin's advice falls under the category of what I like to call "common sense in hindsight".
Reading through his book I think most people will find themselves nodding their heads and thinking, "Of course it should be done that way," even if they haven't before used the techniques presented in the text. For instance, the book suggests coordinating a troubleshooting effort in such a way as to keep the entire IT team up to date on what has been tried and how long a fix is likely to take. This prevents overlap of effort and avoids confusion.
The book also makes the point that any changes to server infrastructure and configuration should be documented so everyone knows when things changed and in what way. Both of these points sound like common sense, but I'm sure anyone who has worked on an IT team has encountered fellow workers who see a problem and dive in without communicating the issue to anyone.
Perhaps we've even been that lone wolf IT person, changing things without letting others know. Mr Rankin reminds us and this sort of behaviour isn't ideal in the big picture. After covering the human side of server troubleshooting we get into the technical aspects of keeping our Linux servers healthy. The book makes the assumption that we have a little Linux experience under our belts and that we probably know how to do things like edit a configuration file and install packages. In some cases the book assumes we can set up a service, such as a web server, but we might not have experience in troubleshooting problems when the service goes off-line.
A few months ago I reviewed " The Linux Command Line " which gives us an introduction to the Linux system and command line interface. That book generally assumes everything is working properly. It explains what can go wrong, how to figure out why things went wrong and how to fix them. In this text the author covers slow systems due to high CPU or disk load, troubleshooting network problems, figuring out why DNS doesn't work, looking at the many ways e-mail can fail, common web server problems and working with databases.
The book also goes into hardware related problems and explains how to handle a server not booting and recovering from disk errors.
At the end of the book there is a chapter on investigating the failure of specific hardware components including memory, a server's power supply and temperature-related issues. There are several things I like about this book.
The first is the author's approach to solving problems. He regularly starts out with the most simple, likely explanation and moves up the chain of possibilities from there. Each step in his troubleshooting guide has a clear objective and either confirms or rules out a group of potential problems.
His approach is likely to save the system administrator a good deal of time. I also like that for each step the author explains what he is doing and why. The text then includes examples, usually two, one showing what the computer will do if the service is working and another showing what we might see if the service is not working.
For example, in the section on DNS we are shown two instances of running the nslookup command. The third aspect of this book I appreciate is the author's little side notes. So much of troubleshooting server problems, indeed any problem, is experience. There are always bits of trivia that a person won't find in a manual, little "gotchas" that a person learns to look for only after months or years of working in the field. Mr Rankin throws in a number of these tips, for instance he discusses how to find a balance between having enough web server processes to handle heavy traffic, yet avoid having your web server spawn too many processes, eating into your memory and forcing the server to use swap space, which greatly slows down the entire system.
The author adds these tips in a casual manner, but they are pearls of wisdom which will probably save junior system administrators headaches in the future. Of course, no text can cover all of the things which can go wrong with a server. There are so many programs, distributions and configurations out there that no book can cover them all.
In doing so I feel Mr Rankin has done a good job of laying down not just specific troubleshooting steps for a specific group of services, which are indeed useful, but he has also created a blueprint for troubleshooting in general. This book not only gives the reader specific examples and possible fixes, but also sets up a pattern for troubleshooting problems not covered in the book and I feel this may be the greater achievement here.
It's great to know how to hunt down problems with the Apache web server, but it's even better to know how to approach network service problems in general and that is what DOTNSBP gives us, a set of guidelines for troubleshooting which can be applied to a wide variety of problems.
As stated above, the text does assume we have some basic system administration skills, this isn't an introduction to Linux system administration, it is a guide for dealing with things when they go wrong and the book does its job very well.
If you are starting out as a new system administrator or if you plan to set up a Linux server to play with at home, then I recommend getting a copy of DOTLSBP and reading it before something stops working. This book will save you a good deal of time. NetBSD 5. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
Users running NetBSD 5. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases i. Most Macs with Intel processors will work with either bit or Mac images. If the bit image doesn't work, try the Mac image. Read the installation instructions.
Download Ubuntu Desktop. Download For other versions of Ubuntu Desktop including torrents, the network installer, a list of local mirrors, and past releases see our alternative downloads.
Installation guide If you need some help installing Ubuntu, please check out our step-by-step guide. Try before you install There's no need to replace your operating system to try Ubuntu. If you need help burning these images to disk, see the Image Burning Guide. Select an image Ubuntu is distributed on two types of images described below. Server install image The server install image allows you to install Ubuntu permanently on a computer for use as a server. Desktop image for bit PC i computers BitTorrent download.
Desktop image for bit PC i computers zsync metafile. Server install image for bit PC i computers BitTorrent download.
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