zdnet.co.uk writes:

In an interview at the linux.conf.au conference, Torvalds admitted that Linux was lagging behind on power-management and energy-diagnosis tools.

“It is an area we were pretty weak in a few years ago and just building up the infrastructure took a long time, but now we are at a point where we have most of it done,” said Torvalds.

“That doesn’t mean we are done. Now we have an infrastructure in place… we have the tools to measure power and notice when the power is higher and why that is, which is pretty important. Before, it used to be a black box,” said Torvalds.

Yay for Linus! And also Linux, of course. Linux not only saves the world by promoting freedom of choice but also making computing environment-friendly.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Here is what happens when you do the dreaded “rm -rf /” command in Linux:

Popularity: 14% [?]

Okay, this is no way related to Linux but it is cool anyway. This is a very cool sample music created by mixing the Windows sounds together.

Can someone do something like this with Linux sounds please?

Popularity: 20% [?]

The ongoing investigation of the NBN-ZTE deal has indeed shaken the country. Filipinos are again torn apart: there are those who believe the claims of witness Jun Lozada and those who trusts the administration. Yesterday, Filipinos who support Lozada prayed together in La Salle Greenhills to show their support not only for Lozada, who is strong enough to face the biggest people in the country, but also to hope and pray that the truth will soon prevail. Even former President Corazon Aquino attended the Mass dubbed as Misa ng Sambayanan Para Sa Katotohanan. Aquino said that nothing is impossible through prayers and many Filipinos agree as they have proven the power of prayer during the EDSA Revolution way back in 1980’s. Even passing vehicles showed their support by blowing their horns.

As much as I hate blogging about politics, I would like to make my blog reach out to my fellow Filipino geeks that we should encourage all Filipinos to be aware of what is going on. It is time for us to pay attention and know the truth. We have this nasty habit of whining how much the government sucks but turn a blind eye on what is really going on. How can the people trust those who lead the country when scandals like this are just as normal as daily weather forecast? There is even someone there who openly admitted violating election laws but what happened? Does justice still exists in this country?

Popularity: 15% [?]

The latest version of Linux Kernel has been released and available to download. Laster version is 2.6.24.2

Download your copy here

Popularity: 11% [?]

You read it right. Mythbusters just served us painkillers for those tech problems that makes our heads ache. This article in popularmechanics.com was written by Jamie Hyneman from the oh-so-cool Discovery Channel show Mythbusters.

From the article:

Computer operating systems loaded with stuff I don’t want and will never use.

In the tech world this phenomenon is known as “software bloat” or “feature bloat.” It’s a well-documented problem and a frequent complaint about Windows OSs—Vista in particular. In addition to being buggy, the extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don’t load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat.

Most features can be set up as options. Why not start with a computer loaded with basic stuff that works 100 percent of the time? Then, give us the option of adding the bells and whistles. There’s another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there’s no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.

And high-tech companies—stop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn’t routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3.

And I so totally agree with him. The only reason I want to upgrade my software is if there are any vulnerabilities that need fixing. If not, wise men say don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. That’s why I love Linux. You do not have put in what you don’t need. You wouldn’t want food shoven down your throat, do you?

Popularity: 17% [?]

If you want that Vista-look on your Xubuntu-powered PC, there is a good article to read so you can achieve ‘that’ look without crashing your system. The blog Design your own desktop with Xfce 4.4 uses Xfce to achieve the look and feel of Vista without hogging all the memory resources. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.

Popularity: 16% [?]

www.networkworld.com writes:

Microsoft’s aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than “a marketing thing,” according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

“They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don’t think they’ve — not that I’ve gone through any huge amount of law cases — but I don’t think they’ve generally used patents as a weapon,” Torvalds said. “But they’re perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, ‘Hey, isn’t this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.’”

Torvalds made the comments during the second half of an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin on Oct. 16. The foundation is expected to make the rest of the interview publicly available on its Web site Monday. The foundation released the initial portion of the interview in January.

“Another reason why I don’t think Microsoft really seriously would go after patents is when you’re a convicted monopolist in the marketplace you really should not be suing your competitors over patents,” Torvalds continued. “I think that most Microsoft lawyers would say, ‘You know, let’s not do that; that sounds insane’.”

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To those who are not yet aware, the NBN-ZTE Scandal has a new ’secret’ witness: CEO of the Philippine Forest Corporation Rodolfo Noel I. Lozada, Jr. Lozada implicated that FG Jose Miguel Arroyo and Former COMELEC Chairman Benjamin Abalos in the said scandal.

Lozada left the country hours before January 30 Senate hearing he was supposed to attend. This prompted the senators to issue a warrant of arrest against him. As soon as he returned to the country, the Senate was not able to get him as he was taken away by suspected presidential guards. In a petition seeking his release filed before the Supreme Court, his wife Violeta said he was taken into police custody against his will. (from GMANews.tv)

Inquirer.net writes:

Former Commission on Elections chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr. denied that he threatened the life of Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada Jr. and claimed that Lozada even went back to the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club in Mandaluyong City several times after the threat was allegedly made on January 18, 2007.

Abalos said Lozada, the Senate’s star witness on the controversial $329-million contract with ZTE Corp. for the national broadband network (NBN), went back to Wack Wack several times in February, 2007 after the death threat was allegedly made.

“Sinabi daw niya tinakot ko siya noong January 18 (He claims I threatened him on January 18). At that time, I was still president of Wack Wack,” Abalos said during a live television interview at the ABS-CBN studios in Quezon City. Lozada was also being interviewed live, although he was at La Salle Greenhills in Mandaluyong. The “face-off” happened via split-screen on television.

Lozada testified before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing that Abalos threatened his life by saying: “P.I, ka, huwag kang pumunta sa Wack Wack sa Mandaluyong kundi ipapapatay kita (You S.O.B., don’t show yourself at Wack Wack or I’ll have you killed).”

Stay tuned as I update you on this national issue that we need to be aware of.

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Ok, I may not be a guru when it comes to installing and configuring Apache and PHP but here is a sample of how I install Apache and PHP on Fedora or Red Hat boxes fresh from source. Pardon my newbie-sh technique but here it goes:

Installing Apache:

# cd /usr/src

- Download the http package

# wget http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz (change this to a mirror available to you)

- Extract the contents of the package

# tar zxf httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz

# cd httpd-2.2.8

- Configure the source depending on your requirements. At this point, configure may fail because of unsatisfied dependencies. Check what the error is and you can download the required package using yum or up2date. If you do not need SSL module for secure page (https), you can leave out the –enable-ssl part.

# ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache –with-mpm=prefork –enable-ssl –with-ssl=/usr/local/ssl –enable-log_config=static –enable-vhost_alias=static –enable-includes=static –enable-dir=static –enable-access=static –enable-mime=static –enable-mime_magic=static –enable-mods-shared=most –enable-cache=shared –enable-disk_cache=shared –enable-file_cache=shared –enable-mem_cache=shared

Tip: To check what these directives mean, you can issue ./configure –help .

# make

- If everything goes well, your fresh http will be installed in /usr/local/apache with the following command:

# make install

Installing PHP:

# cd /usr/src

# wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.2.5.tar.gz/from/us.php.net/mirror (change this to a mirror available to you)

# tar zxf php-5.2.5.tar.gz

# cd php-5.2.5

- Same with http. The configure part will depend on your requirement.

# ./configure –with-config-file-path=/usr/local/apache/conf –with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs –enable-calendar –enable-ftp –without-pgsql –with-zlib –with-openssl=/usr/local/ssl –with-mysql –with-mhash –with-mcrypt –with-curl –disable-cgi –enable-mbstring –enable-soap –with-bz2 –enable-sockets –enable-zip (If configure fails, read the error why the it failed and install first the dependencies then run again the configure.)

# make

# make test

# make install

To start the httpd service, execute

# /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start

You can create a symlink to your /etc/init.d so you can start apache by typing /etc/init.d/httpd start

# ln -s /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl /etc/init.d/httpd

There you have it. You have successfully installed Apache with PHP on your webserver. I will continue this little howto with how to configure your webserver.

Popularity: 12% [?]