Review

#geeklife: weBoost 4G-X OTR Review

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Will a cellular booster help me stay connected on my epic working road trip?

I'm a Linux geek, and I think I safely can assume everyone reading an article in Linux Journal identifies themselves as Linux geeks as well. Through the years I've written about many of my geeky projects here in Linux Journal, such as my Linux-powered beer fermentation fridge or my 3D printer that's remotely controlled using a Raspberry Pi and Octoprint software. The thing is, my interests don't stop strictly at Linux, and I doubt yours do either. While my homebrewing, 3D printing and (more recently) RV interests sometimes involve Linux, often they don't, yet my background means I've taken a geek's perspective and approach to all of those interests. I imagine you take a similar approach to your hobbies and side projects, and readers would find some of those stories interesting, useful and inspirational.

We discussed this at Linux Journal and realized there should be a space for Linux geeks to tell their geeky stories even if they don't directly involve Linux. This new series, #geeklife, aims to provide a place where Linux geeks can talk about interests and projects even if they might not be strictly Linux-related. We invite you to send proposals for #geeklife articles to ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

For this first #geeklife article, I'm telling the story of a geeky, connected working road trip I just took in my RV, and within that context, I also review a particular piece of hardware I hoped would make the trip possible, the weBoost Drive 4G-X OTR. In the interest of full disclosure, Wilson Electronics provided me with this review unit, and I did not purchase it independently.

Working Remotely

My job is 100% remote. It took me many years of braving multi-hour California Bay Area commutes and turning down opportunities to find a job where I finally could work completely from home. Smart organizations are finally beginning to realize the many advantages to having a remote workforce, but I've found it works best if you have the right team, the right tools and the bulk of the workforce is remote. When everyone is distributed, everyone relies on the incredible modern collaboration tools currently available, and you have focus and incredible productivity when you need it while still being able to communicate with your peers.

My wife is a freelance writer and has worked from her home office long before I also worked from home. Once I also landed a job where I was completely remote, we posed the following question to ourselves: in theory, we could work from anywhere with a decent internet connection, but in practice, is that really something we could do? What would that kind of working trip look like?

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Pulseway: Systems Management at Your Fingertips

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 20:51:51 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

In today's IT world, staying on top of anything and everything related to the most mission-critical applications or machines is increasingly important. With this need in mind, Pulseway provides a product of the same name built to give IT personnel the ability to monitor, manage and automate these very systems and the tasks or applications that they host. Managing an entire computing ecosystem (consisting of both physical and virtual machines) never should be too difficult a task, and Pulseway has proven that to be the case.

I recently was fortunate to have the opportunity to take this product for a spin. It's extremely simple to install and configure, and if you need help, everything is well documented in the User Manual on the company's website.

So, how does it work? First, you need to register an account on the Pulseway website. Two offerings currently are available: a limited free offering and a paid subscription offering. As you might expect, the limited free account limits the numbers of nodes you can manage, and it also restricts users from leveraging additional features and functionality, including an antivirus, backup/disaster recovery and more.

Once registered, you can sign in to the website and even download the mobile application to your phone or tablet—either Android or iOS. The last step is to download and install the monitoring agents to your mission-critical machines.

In my case, I installed the DEB file into an instance of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Once installed, the dæmon configuration file was modified to use my account credentials, and as soon as it started, the dashboard on both the website and on my mobile device saw the system, and it immediately began reporting CPU utilization, memory usage and so much more.

Figure 1. The Pulseway Web User Interface Dashboard

Both the web user interface and the mobile device share the same set of functions, so for the purposes of this review, I'm continuing with the mobile user interface.

Figure 2. The Pulseway Mobile User Interface Dashboard Summary of a Single System

Here's a rundown of some things you can do with Pulseway:

1) You can monitor historical CPU utilization to see how active or inactive your CPU cores are.

Figure 3. The Pulseway Mobile User Interface System CPU Graph

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UserLAnd, a Turnkey Linux in Your Pocket

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 12:07:07 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

There comes a time when having a full-fledged Linux distribution within reach is necessary or just plain useful. And, what could be more within reach than having that same distribution on a computing device most people have with them at all times? Yes, I'm talking about a smartphone—specifically, an Android-powered smartphone. Enter UserLAnd.

UserLAnd offers a quick and easy way to run an entire Linux distribution, or even just a Linux application or game, from your pocket. It installs as an Android app and is available for download from the Android Google Play Store. The best part is that because it operates from a typical chroot environment, you don't need to root your device.

I was fortunate enough to have a chance to spin up one of the early beta builds of UserLAnd. This beta build was limited only to SSH and VNC local connections from my Android mobile device, but it was more than enough to establish a sound sense of how things are and where things will progress.

To handle the SSH connection, UserLAnd leverages ConnectBot while using bVNC for anything graphical. The beta build I used supported only TWM. Future updates will add additional window managers and a desktop environment. Both ConnectBot and bVNC are installed when you create and launch your session (see below).

Immediately after installation and upon launching the application, you are greeted with a clean environment—that is, no root filesystems and no sessions defined.

Figure 1. A Fresh and Clean Installation of UserLAnd

There isn't much to do here until you create a base root filesystem to use in one or more connected sessions. Now, because this was a beta build, my option was limited to Debian.

Figure 2. Creating a Root Filesystem

Once the root filesystem is created, you can create your session, which includes connection type and user name. For connection types, in my case, the drop-down menu listed ConnectBot for the command-line interface and bVNC for a graphical environment. Future releases will add more options.

Figure 3. Creating Your Connection Sessions

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Product Review: GitStorage

Petros Koutoupis — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:45:44 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Petros reviews the GitStorage server appliance, which emphasizes data privacy and security.

By profession, I'm a software developer. Aside from a preferred editor, what matters most to a developer is the use of a Source Code Manager (SCM). So, when a new product comes along featuring my favorite SCM, Git, I had no choice but to spend some time using it.

GitStorage develops and distributes a Git server appliance of the same name with an emphasis on data privacy and security. The company produces two flavors, the key differences being the following:

Price: $399 vs. $499
Local storage capacity: 16GB vs. 64GB
Number of users: 10 vs. unlimited
Color: pink vs. blue

When I received the product, it was packaged well with everything needed to hit the ground running: the device, a micro-USB-connected power plug, mounting screws and a basic set of instructions for connecting to the local device over Ethernet. All you need to do is connect it to your router or switch, apply power to the device, and within a minute, you'll be able to access a web-based front end to the device's assigned IP address from within your preferred web browser.

On initial connection, you're greeted with a setup and configuration menu. This setup allows you to configure the administrator account, generate CA certificates for your web browser, configure SMTP email relays so you even can connect the device to an existing Dropbox account for remote synchronization—all of which can be configured at a later date.

The GitStorage Dashboard

When the configuration is complete, you're redirected to the dashboard of a very intuitive user interface. And because this is a single-purpose appliance, the features and functionality presented in the interface are simple and easy to understand. You can dynamically create or remove users, create new or remove existing code repositories, and assign the appropriate users to those repositories. When those same users log in to the web interface, they will be limited only to the repositories to which they are assigned.

A View of Repositories

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Return to Solid State

Kyle Rankin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:28:37 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Three years ago, I first reviewed an SSD (solid-state drive) under Linux. At the time, I had an ultra-portable laptop with a 4200rpm hard drive that really bogged down the performance on what was otherwise a pretty snappy little machine. Although there definitely were SSD reviews around, I didn't notice many comprehensive reviews for Linux. Instead of focusing strictly on benchmarks, I decided to focus more on real-world tests. In the end, I saw dramatic increases in speed for the SSD compared to my 4200rpm drive.

That may have been true back then, but what about today? For example, one thing that always bothered me about my first comparison was the fact that at the time, I had only a 4200rpm 1.8" drive available to me, and I was limited by my ATA/66 bus speed. My new laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X200s, came with a 7200rpm 2.5" SATA drive, and ever since I got the laptop, I've been curious to repeat my experiment with modern equipment. How would a modern SSD hold up to a modern 7200rpm SATA drive in real-world Linux use? Recently, Intel was kind enough to provide me with a review unit of its new 320 SSD line, a follow-up to the X25 SSD line, so I decided to repeat my experiments.

My Testing Methodology

As in the previous review, I focus mostly on real-world performance tests, but I still throw in some raw benchmark numbers for those of you in the crowd who are curious. Where it made sense, I ran multiple tests to confirm I got consistent results, and here, I report the best performance for each drive. Also, when I was concerned about file-caching skewing results, I booted the machine from scratch before a test. The 7200rpm drive is a 160GB Fujitsu MHZ2160B, and after its tests, I transferred an identical filesystem to the 160GB Intel 320 SSD.

Test 1: GRUB to Log In

I'll be honest, I actually don't boot my laptop all that much. My battery life is good enough that I usually just close the laptop lid when I'm not using it; it suspends to RAM, and I resume my session later. That said, distributions, such as Ubuntu, have focused on boot times in the past couple releases, and my 7200rpm drive seemed to boot Ubuntu 10.04 pretty fast, so I was curious whether I even would see an improvement with the SSD. I used a stopwatch to measure the time between pressing Enter at the GRUB prompt to when I saw the login screen. The boot process is both processor- and disk-intensive, and although the 7200rpm was fast, it turns out there still was room for improvement:

7200rpm: 27 seconds
SSD: 16 seconds

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eyeOS Web-based Desktop OS

Michael Reed — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

eyeOS is a web based desktop operating system. Despite its unusual deployment orientation, in many ways, it's a full desktop operating system, complete with file management and full applications that operate within draggable, resizable windows. As well as an overview of what the eyeOS 1.9 branch has to offer, I'll take you through what I did to install it on a Debian type operating system. Overall, I felt that it was a usable system and perhaps even a glimpse at what most computing is going to be like in the future.

I'll be concentrating on my experiences of setting up eyeOS 1.9 rather than the 2.x version that was launched earlier this year. I tried eyeOS 2.x on a couple of different set ups, but I kept running into the serious performance problems that are widely reported on the eyeOS forum by other people who have tried it. The 1.x series also has the advantage of having been considered stable for more than two years.

Overview

As I said before, eyeOS offers a complete desktop with a suite of applications in a system that can be accessed over a network such as a LAN or the Internet via a web browser. It's a system that can supply a fleet of networked computers with their application environment in a cloud set up, or it could be your own personal refuge when you are stuck using someone else's computer.

When investigating a system such as this, most people will wonder about the performance. As one would expect, application launch and execution speed are sometimes curtailed compared with a more conventional desktop operating system. Graphical operations are also hampered by the extra layer of abstraction imposed by the browser based interface. However, if you think about it, most of a typical working day isn't spent moving and resizing windows or launching applications, and once a given application is running, response to user input, particularly via the keyboard, is good.

So, what are the applications? Well, the default set up features a wide range of applications including a calendar, an RSS reader, an email client, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a contacts manager and others. The applications themselves are surprisingly well-featured, and I find myself wondering if what eyeOS offers might have been competitive with what full commercial software was offering not so long ago. The file management extends to the necessary facilities to upload and download your files.

The eyeOS word processor. Its feature set is impressive.

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