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Now Available: April 2018 issue of Linux Journal

Carlie Fairchild — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 15:17:46 +0000

Linux Journal's April issue takes a Deep Dive Into the Cloud. Articles in this issue include:

Vendor Lock-in and the Cloud
Cloud Computing Basics
Complexities of Cloud Billing
Multiprocessing in Python
Smart-Home Hacks
A Talk with OSI President Simon Phipps
Tips for Securing Your Cloud Environment
Introducing ONNX: the Open Neural Network Exchange Format
EU's New Copyright Laws Attack Open Source
Write an Adventure Game in the Terminal with nurses
Bash Project: Create Dynamic Wallpaper
FOSS Project Spotlight: Ravada
...and more!

And yes, Linux Journal continues boasting as many pages as most technical books, this month’s issue of Linux Journal coming in at a hefty 178.

Subscribers, you can download your April issue now.

Not a subscriber? It’s not too late. Subscribe today and receive instant access to this and all back issues since 2010.

Want to buy a single issue? Buy the April magazine or other single back issues in the LJ store.

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Skype Out - Pidgin In

Johan Thelin — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:23:52 +0000

by Johan Thelin

Recently, myself and my colleagues at Pelagicore decided to try to ditch Skype for an open replacement. We have been suffering stability issues with Skype for a long time, but our customers rely on it for contact with us and most people know how it works. However, recent events such as Microsoft buying Skype and cancelling support for Asterisk motivated us to try the alternatives.

What we want to avoid is some sort of lock-in, and at the same time, we want it to be easy to have people join. After some discussions and tests we decided to go for Jabber and libjingle. This is what Google Talk uses, so anyone using GMail is automatically in. This was a big benefit for us, as we run Google Apps on our domain.

So, first out was trying video and voice directly from within the web interface to Google Apps. Our tests show that this works out of the box on both OS X and Linux, Chrome as well as Firefox. However, this does not take care of the lock-in situation that we wanted to avoid.

Next step - Pidgin! Pidgin is available prepackaged for Windows, OS X, CentOS/RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu - and as source code of course. Having installed it, video and audio seems to just work. Again - great success. File transfers also work great, so Skype is more or less replaced when it comes to our needs.

So, how is Pidgin configured for this? There are a number of guides for configuring Pidgin with Google Talk using a GMail account. For myself, I had to do some tweaking to get it to work with our Google App setup. So, here is the configuration I'm using:

On the Basic tab:

Protocol: XMPP
User name: john.doe
Domain: example.com
Resource: where you are right now, home / work / mobile
Password: I leave this as an exercise to the reader

On the Advanced tab:

Connect port: 5222
Connect server: talk.google.com
File transfer proxies: proxy.eu.jabber.org

During this transition, I tried the Skype integration in Pidgin. Basically - it sucks, and Skype is to blame for that. My recommendation is to use both clients if you need to during a transition period.

And a final tip - if you use the web interface for GMail, you can check out of chat there to avoid it opening a small window each time some calls you and you reply through Pidgin.

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Quick Tip: Setup Ubuntu-style Sudo on other Distributions

Michael Reed — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:11:44 +0000

by Michael Reed

Ubuntu's sudo command is something that I miss when I'm using other distributions. For the uninitiated, when using Ubuntu, you can execute privileged commands as the root user by prefacing them with sudo. This saves having to log in as root, do your work and then log out again (or if you're like me, forget to log out and keep doing things as root). Fortunately, it's a cinch to add the functionality to other distributions such as Debian or Fedora.

Here's a funny thing (well, I found it amusing): If you attempt to execute a command using sudo on, say, stock Debian, before being prompted for your password, you are issued a stern warning:

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.

#2) Think before you type.

#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Once you've got over the lecture and you enter the password, you quickly learn that other distributions don't handle sudo in quite the same way as Ubuntu.

[username] is not the in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

Eek! The Debian Police didn't actually turn up at my house on this occasion, and although I did notice a helicopter circling above my house for a while, it might have been a coincidence.

To add Ubuntu-style functionality you need to edit the file /etc/sudoers

Obviously you can't use sudo yet, so make youtself root by typing

su

Then, use your favorite text editor to open up /etc/sudoers. For example, under Debian type

nano /etc/sudoers

Scroll down until you find the line

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

and underneath, add the line

[your username] ALL=(ALL) ALL

substituting [your username] as appropriate. Save the file and exit the editor. Once you've done this, test things out by executing a command that requires root privileges. Under Debian, I ran:

sudo apt-get update

and sure enough, the command ran with root privileges. As with Ubuntu, it caches your password for a while, so you don't have to keep re-entering it for every command.

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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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Consolidate: Put Your Servers into a VirtualBox VM

Michael Reed — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Rather than installing a server, such as a web server, directly onto your main computer, why not install it in a VM? This sort of setup has a few advantages of security and convenience. These days, spreading resources out into the cloud is the in-thing, but consolidation is often underexploited. Hosting a server in a virtualizer such as VirtualBox is often a good approach for casual or occasional server needs on a home network.

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