Sometime in 2010, Google Chrome version of the operating system, its introduction to the netbook operating system. It will be much more than that, though. It's take on a completely new desktop operating system. Although the final version is still months from release there's enough Chrome available, we can begin to see what it will look.

For beginners, Chrome OS is Linux. To be precise, it owes much of its genes on Ubuntu. But that's all under the surface. You won't need to know the shell command from GNOME to use it. As in fact, you won't need to know about traditional desktop Linux - KDE and GNOME - either. Chrome OS's interface, Google's browser Chrome. If you use a web browser, you'll be able to use Chrome OS.

That'This is not the case now. Today, you have two options if you want to try Chrome OS. The first of these is to create yourself using Google's instructions. Even though it's pretty trivial for professional users of Linux, it's not for anyone else. A simpler way to try is to visit the Chrome OS blog, fan site Chrome OS frequently that the function is based on the Chrome OS, you can either run from a USB stick, or as a virtual machine using Sun's VirtualBox.

Either way, you should keep in mind that you're working with an outline of the operating system. This is no way, shape, or form the operating system that's ready for prime-time yet. Between it and the recent public comments from Matthew Papakipos, Chrome OS' engineering director, you can see where Google goes netbook with its operating system.

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This is a guide for running the Windows version of Civilization IV (no expansion packs) on Linux using Wine. I’ve written guides on this twice ;before, but recently I wanted to play and found that my previous instructions were out of date again. Since I last played with Wine 0.9.44, the graphical glitches have been fixed and the game’s disk DRM works without a no-CD crack.

On Ubuntu 8.10 with the Nvidia graphics driver, the game runs almost flawlessly on the highest graphics settings. I’ve played it for hours without a single crash. Here are the only minor issues I’ve noticed:

• The animated busy cursor only shows the first frame instead of animating.
• City growth and production meters on the map don’t work. (See the tweaks section for a workaround.)

Install the latest version of Wine
Wine is constantly improving; it’s worth your time to get the latest version for the best application compatibility. Follow the directions on Wine’s website to set up the official Wine software repository in Ubuntu.

After you’ve added the Wine repository, install Wine from the package wine (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install wine

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I use a one terabyte external hard drive for backing up data. The drive came formatted with a FAT filesystem, which I immediately replaced with the more reliable ext3. After formatting the drive as ext3 I noticed that the storage capacity had dropped considerably.

Why did this happen? Linux filesystems such as ext3 reserve a percentage of their capacity for privileged processes. In the case that the filesystem fills up, important processes with be able to continue functioning and writing to the disk.

By default 5% of a filesystem will be reserved. For modern high-capacity disks, this is much higher than necessary. On my 1 TB disk, this 5% works out to be 50 GB! If you’ve got a large filesystem, or a filesystem which does not store your Linux system files, it’s safe to reduce the percentage of reserved blocks to free up that disk space.

Use the tune2fs utility to do this. The command below would set the percentage of reserved blocks on the partition /dev/sdf1 to 1%:

sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdf1

Be sure to replace /dev/sdf1 with your own path; you can use the df command to get a listing of your filesystem device paths and their mount points.

I freed 37 GB of space by changing the reserved blocks to 1% on my TB drive.

[via tombuntu.com]

At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

How did they do it? Arjan said it starts with the right attitude. «It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds.» Instead of saving a second here and there, set a time budget for the whole system, and make each step of the boot finish in its allotted time. And no cheating. «Done booting means CPU and disk idle,» Arjan said. No fair putting up the desktop while still starting services behind the scenes. (An audience member pointed out that Microsoft does this.) The «done booting» time did not include bringing up the network, but did include starting NetworkManager. A system with a conventional hard disk will have to take longer to start up: Arjan said he has run the same load on a ThinkPad and achieved a 10-second boot time.


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If you are running your NSLU2 on a USB flash key, there are a number of
things you might want to do in order to reduce the wear and tear on the
underlying flash device (as it only supports a limited number of writes).

• The ext3 filesystem per default writes metadata changes every five
  seconds to disk. This can be increased by mounting the root filesystem
  with the commit=N parameter which tells the kernel to delay writes
  to every N seconds.


• The kernel writes a new atime for each file that has been read which
  generates one write for each read. This can be disabled by mounting the
  filesystem with the noatime option.


• Both of the above can be done by adding e.g.
  noatime,commit=120,... to /etc/fstab. This can also be
  done on an already mounted filesystem by running the command:
  

  mount -o remount,noatime,commit=120 /

  
  


• The system will run updatedb every day which creates a
  database of all files on the system for use with the locate
  command. This will also put some stress on the filesystem, so you might
  want to disable it by adding
  

  exit 0

  
  early in the /etc/cron.daily/find script.


• syslogd will in the default installation sync a lot of log files to
  disk directly after logging some new information. You might want to change
  /etc/syslog.conf so that every filename starts with a -
  (minus) which means that writes are not synced immediately (which increases
  the risk that some log messages are lost if your system crashes). For
  example, a line such as:
  

  kern.*                          /var/log/kern.log

  
  would be changed to:
  

  kern.*                          <span class="input">-</span>/var/log/kern.log

  
  You also might want to disable some classes of messages altogether by
  logging them to /dev/null instead, see syslog.conf(5) for
  details.


• In addition, syslogd likes to write — MARK -- lines to log
  files every 20 minutes to show that syslog is still running. This can be
  disabled by changing SYSLOGD in /etc/default/syslogd so
  that it reads
  

  SYSLOGD="-m 0"

  
  After you've made any changes, you need to restart syslogd by running
  

  /etc/init.d/syslogd restart

  
  


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Have you ever done a thing repeatedly on your computer and wished that you could automate it and get it to run on its own?

In Linux, the easiest way to schedule and automate a task is to use the crontab. This is a command line based application that allows you to execute commands or scripts automatically at a specified time/date.

For those who dislike the terminal and command line interface, Gnome Schedule is the graphical equivalent of the crontab. It leverages the power of vixie-cron, dcron and at to manage your crontab file and provide an easy way to schedule tasks on your computer. Be it scheduling a recurrent task or task that happens only once, Gnome-schedule has no problem in handling it.



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A few days back we looked at how to password protect your GRUB boot entries so that a password is required before anyone can boot the operating system or edit the boot entry.

Let’s look at some ways you can use to reset your Linux system’s password. You might know that the root user can change the password for any other user. However what if you forget your root password? This is what we would attempt to achieve here.

So, how to reset password in Linux?

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San Francisco (CA) — At the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco on April 8-10, 2009, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place. There, sponsored by Intel, will be assembled together the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft representatives. For the first time ever, the three-way group will sit down at a single table to debate and discuss the future not only of their respective operating systems, but also the OS industry in general. What will come from such a meeting? I truly believe that only God knows.
The sit-down meeting will be moderated by Jim Zemlim, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. It will include Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Strategy, and Sun's Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, Ian Murdock. But where's Apple?

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