Archive October 2008
Azure is Windows Cloud or is it?
Microsoft has launched Windows Azure, the previously unofficially named “Windows Cloud” OS. It is a cloud services operating system that acts as the development, Web hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.
Being a bear of very little brains, I had to lookup the meaning of the word Azure one of the meaning is the blue color of the clear sky which I guess is what Microsoft are thinking, but did you also know that:
- In heraldry, azure is the tincture with the colour blue, and belongs to the class of tinctures called “colours”. In engraving, it is sometimes depicted as a region of horizontal lines or else marked with either az. or b. as an abbreviation. Blue means loyalty and truth.
- “Azure” is a 1937 song composed by Duke Ellington, with lyrics written by Irving Mills.
- Azure is a blue color on the HSV color wheel at 210 degrees. It is the hue that is halfway between blue and cyan. Its complementary color is orange.
- Azure, subtitled Ideas for the Jewish Nation, is the journal of the Shalem Center, an academic institute in Jerusalem. The magazine is published quarterly in English and in Hebrew; the Hebrew edition is Israel’s leading journal of public thought.
- The Azure is an under-construction 31-story modernist residential tower located at McKinnon and Wolf Streets in the International Center neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas (USA).
But could it be that Microsoft Azure is really a Jazz song sung by a bunch of fellows from Jerusalem on top of a tall building on a clear day?
Excerpt from Learning FreeNAS: Configuring storage in FreeNAS
Linux.com has published an excerpt from the book of Hi-Tech Squad’s Gary Sims. The excerpt is called “Configuring storage in FreeNAS”… Here is an excerpt from the excerpt!!!
The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.
Read more here: Linux.com :: Configuring storage in FreeNAS
Android is now available as open source
It was going to happen and now with the first Android phone coming to market, Google has made the source code to Android available as open source. Developers can now do much more than create applications that will run on Android. They can help improve the operating system overall by submitting potential new features, bug fixes, or other ideas.
Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.
About Android’s operating system:
- Based on Linux 2.6.25 for ARM.
- A set of kernel enhancements are provided to support Android. The patches include alarm, ashmem, binder, power management, low memory killer, kernel degugger, and logger.
- FAT32 file system is supported.
- Support for TCP/IP (TCP, UDP, etc).
- The platform will run on almost on any ARM based Linux kernel environment.
- The platform requires a minimum of 128 MB of RAM and 256 MB of Flash memory.
- 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi
- Standard USB interface, including USB 2.0
Read more here: Welcome (Android Open Source Project)
PC-BSD 7.0.1 available; get NTFS write support
The PC-BSD team have been busy and after much hard work and testing they are to announce the availability of PC-BSD 7.0.1, i.e. the first upgrade in the 7 series, with FreeBSD 7.0 under the hood.
Version 7.0.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements. Some of the changes are:
KDE 4.1.2
AMD64 version
NTFS write support
Adobe Flash 9 support (Linux -flashplugin9)
Better WIFI support
Updates to the System Updater
PC-BSD is a free operating system with ease of use in mind. Like any modern system, you can listen to your favorite music, watch your movies, work with office documents and install your favorite applications with a setup wizard at a click.
Read more here: PC-BSD – PC-BSD 7.0.1 available
EU Ministerial Conference Discusses Looming IPv4 Shortage
The looming shortage of IPv4 addresses, and the need to start using IPv6 addresses, is a frequent topic these days, and it was addressed this week at an EU ministerial conference in Nice, France, a conference organised as part of the French presidency of the EU.
The conference was told there needs to be an orderly transition to IPv6 with a recent policy paper from the European Commission suggesting that by 2010, at least 25 per cent of internet addresses in Europe should be updated to IPv6.
The EurActiv article on which the above information was sourced is available from www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/eu-warns-digital-gap-ip-numbers-dry/article-176127.
The website for the “Internet of the Future” Ministerial Conference is available here.
Read more here: Looming IPv4 Shortage Addressed at EU Ministerial Conference
New Mac Tablet, well almost, installing OS X on the Gigabyte M912X
Could this be what a new Mac with touch screen could be like? A YouTube user has managed to successfully load OS X on a Gigabyte M912X.
The Gigabyte M912 series of computers have the same basic specs as many netbooks, including a 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and an 8.9 inch display. But there are two things that set the M912 apart from most other netbooks. First, it has a touchscreen display that can be folded down on top of the keyboard for using the PC in tablet mode. And second, the higher end models feature high resolution 1280 x 768 pixel displays which are much crisper than the 1024 x 600 pixel screens that you usually find on netbooks.
Many thanks to Liliputing. You can read more here: Mac Tablet: Installing OS X on the Gigabyte M912X
New review of PC-BSD 7
Hi-Tech Squad’s Gary has written another article for Linux.com, this time about PC-BSD.
Until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu.
I had high expectations of PC-BSD, as much is said of FreeBSD’s stability and security, and having used FreeNAS, which is based on FreeBSD, I knew that FreeBSD has lots to offer. The idea of a desktop-orientated version of FreeBSD with easy-to-install software packages sounded useful. But on the whole PC-BSD failed to impress me. On the plus side, the Push Button Installation works as advertised and the ability to play MP3 and DivX files out of the box is something that many Linux distributions lack. But having struggled to install it, along with the KDE widget glitch and experiencing a system freeze, I feel that PC-BSD still needs some work.
Read more here: PC-BSD 7 is a mixed bag
iTunes doesn’t need to close down after all
The Copyright Royalty Board announced on Thursday last week that it would maintain the same royalty rate for CDs and downloadable songs, thus averting what could have been a protracted conflict over music royalties at iTunes and other online venues. Apple had gone so far as to announce that, if the royalties rate had been changed, they might be forced to shut down the music store portion of their site. Aidan Malley of Apple Insider reports, “A three-person panel of judges determining the changes for the Board said labels would still have to pay the same 9.1 cents per song as they do today, rejecting calls by the National Music Publishers Association and connected artists to pay as much as 15 cents per song.”
Although this decision is certainly not what National Music Publishers’ Association had hoped for, it brought a rapid end to the dispute between musicians and store operators.
Read more here: iTunes Remains: Music Royalty Payments Unchanged
Google contributes more code to WINE
With the recent release of Picasa 3 Beta for Linux, Google has contributed more code to the WINE project.
WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems). It can be thought of as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux. WINE does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code. With WINE you can run such programs as Microsoft Office and games like Counter Strike on your Linux machine.
Another popular application is Adobe’s Photoshop CS2 and here Google has been very active.
In January 2006, Google (working with CodeWeavers the commerical arm of the WINE project) improved WINE so Picasa 2.2 would run. This effort resulted in 225 patches committed to the WINE project.
Their work continued in 2007, committing a few dozen patches and they also worked again with CodeWeavers to improve Wine so it could run Photoshop CS2 properly. As a result, about 200 patches were committed to the WINE project.
To get Picasa 3 working on Linux, Google has continued to submit fixes to WINE.
Picasa 3 works great on Linux and I think Google and CodeWeavers need a big Hats Off.
FreeNAS vs Openfiler Review Forgets that FreeNAS can do iSCSI
The Linuxbsdos.com website has a worth reading comparison of FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
But the LearnFreeNAS.com web site has pointed out a simple, but yet fundamental, mistake in their review.
In the conclusion Linuxbsdos.com writes, “The main difference between FreeNAS and Openfiler is that one is a network-attached storage (NAS) server, while the other serves as both a NAS and a SAN (Storage Area Network) server. The SAN feature of Openfiler is what makes it appealing to enterprise and business users.”
The reason for this is that the reviewer didn’t know that FreeNAS also has iSCSI target capabilities and they only list iSCSI initiator in the feature list of FreeNAS.
Just to set the record straight: FreeNAS has iSCSI target as well as iSCSI initiator features and can act very well as an iSCSI/SAN server.
Read more here: FreeNAS vs Openfiler Review Forgets that FreeNAS can do iSCSI
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