My blog started as brief reviews, or even self-addressed notes, of “pocket” Linux distributions. SLAX was series one, shortly followed by Knoppix and Puppy. Then, as we grown my believe in Linux, we started to dive into a universe of bigger distributions: Ubuntu and Kubuntu, Debian and PCLOS, and many more.
But “pocket Linux” is still a fondle we adore to play with. That’s because we have returned to that theme again and have finished reviews of SliTaz 4.0 and Puppy Slacko 5.3.1.

Today we wish to develope this theme a tiny more, and speak about another “pocket” distance Linux distribution. It won’t be one-man show, though. Let me deliver my today’s guest: Ahau from a Porteus Linux team.

Ahau: Hi, we am “Ahau”. we keep my genuine name confidential. we am a member of a Porteus Team. we offer as a Documentation Team Leader, judge on a forum, and maintainer for a XFCE editions of Porteus. I’m 32 years old, from a US, and we have been concerned as a member of a Porteus Community given a pregnancy in Dec 2010. Before that, we was a user of Slax and “Slax Remix”, from that Porteus evolved.

DD: Are there some-more people in a project?

A: Yes, there are several people concerned in a project. In further to myself we have a lead maintainer (fanthom, who started Slax Remix), a 32-bit maintainer (brokenman), and several people who minister modules, applications, support and support on a forums. We cruise ourselves a “Portable Linux Community”, and we take suggestions and contributions, theme to examination by a maintainers, from anyone who joins adult and is interested.

DD: Is there any grave plan leader? Who creates a final decision?

A: Fanthom is a lead maintainer and he would make a final preference in a box of any disagreements, though we customarily strech a accord on decisions even before anything like a opinion is needed.

DD: You picked adult a SLAX project, that was stagnating after Tomas M. motionless not to continue with a development. Now we have a opposite distribution. Why have we motionless to do so?

A: Fanthom started Slax Remix after growth on Slax was suspended. He did this in an bid to keep Slax stream with a newer kernel, rebased on a newer recover of Slackware, and he enclosed bugfixes and other customizations. He also built and expelled a 64-bit book featuring KDE4, that had never existed for Slax. He didn’t intend on starting a apart distribution, though progressing his plan on a third-party forum became illogical after roughly a year of growth and 9 releases.

DD: we listened that Tomas M. is entrance behind to SLAX project. What are your relations with his plan now?

A: We have many members that also Slax users, and we still revisit a Slax forums on arise to see what’s new there. We don’t have an central growth attribute with a Slax project, though we consider Slax is a good placement and we’re carefree to see some-more releases from Tomas M. in a future.

DD: Am we right in arrogance that Porteus Linux was never dictated to be a primary OS on a computer, though rather a “pocket” distribution, that one could use on others’ computers to have his favourite environment?

A: we consider it’s satisfactory to contend that Porteus is optimized to run from a CD or USB peep drive, though it’s also only as easy to implement Porteus on a tough expostulate for use as a primary OS. In fact, it will substantially foot and run even faster this way. One of a arch goals in building Porteus is progressing and enhancing flexibility. As we know, a name of a placement is subsequent from a difference “Portable” and “Proteus”, a greek God of a seas. A lot of a tone schemes and art work have H2O themes, and we like to consider of a placement as something that can be ecstatic in any enclosure and used for a accumulation of functions while maintaining a strange qualities, only like water. The placement itself is reduction than 300 MB and program can be simply combined and private in a form of xzm “modules” to fit a specific needs of a user, possibly it be for use as a primary OS, liberation tool, unstable distro, or anything else.

DD: Does Porteus Linux have a immeasurable community? What would we contend about a members?

A: We currently have only over 500 members on a forum, that is tiny compared to a incomparable distributions out there. But, we’re new and we’re growing, and when folks ask questions, they get a response. I’m ceaselessly speedy by a knowledge, skill, and welcoming inlet of a members. I’ve done many good friends in a community, and we demeanour brazen to my interactions there. We have an embedded discuss window for members on a forum, and it’s good for newbies with elementary questions and also for a members and contributors to get to know any other on a some-more personal level. It’s been a lot of fun operative with everybody there!

DD: The stream fast chronicle of Porteus is 1.1. Are there any skeleton for destiny releases? When will they be? What new will we see there?

A: Yes, Porteus chronicle 1.2 is in develompent right now; a second recover claimant is already accessible for download in a contrast territory of a server. The final chronicle should follow shortly. Porteus 1.2 will underline a further of a XFCE desktop sourroundings (available as a apart ISO) as good as a rewritten package manager (Porteus Package Manager, or PPM), a new GUI installer, a rewritten Langauge Selection Tool, and a rewritten “Save.dat Manager” that will concede some-more options and functionality (such as information encryption and a choice of filesystems) for users who wish to save their changes steadfastly on FAT or NTFS partitions.

DD: What are possess your favourite distributions, desktop environments, applications?

A: Obviously, Porteus is my favorite, and we still suffer Slax. we also like Puppy and SliTaz, though a immeasurable infancy of my time is spent in Porteus. I’ve only started messing with Android, if we can call that a Linux placement (I wouldn’t…). I’m a Xfce maintainer for Porteus, and that is my favorite desktop sourroundings now that I’ve schooled my approach around it. we consider Xfce has a right brew of functionality, beauty, and configurability, though it’s still light and intuitive. we cite KDE over Gnome, and we consider LXDE is a good DE as well.

DD: Do we review a blog Linux records from DarkDuck? What would we like to urge or change there?

A: we don’t review each blog entry, though we do stop by on occasion, we generally like your reviews of “pocket” distributions, as we like to know what other distros are adult to, and how they are receieved.

DD: Do we review any other blogs or FOSS-related web resources regularly? Who are your favourite authors, bloggers, reporters essay about FOSS?

A: we don’t follow many blogs, though we do keep adult on a XFCE forums and mailing lists, and we revisit distrowatch.com. we spend a lot of time researching a web perplexing to solve problems or learn how to do things, so we tend to rebound around a lot. we do have to give a shoutout to a folks during archwiki and gentoo-wiki, I’ve schooled a lot from their articles.

DD: Thanks for coming, Ahau. we wish to keep in hold and have another talk with possibly yourself, or maybe other members of Porteus group later.

A: Thanks for carrying me, DarkDuck! Feel giveaway to hit myself or anyone on a group if you’d like to do another interview, and greatfully try Porteus 1.2 when it’s released. We wish we and your readers suffer it!

Article source: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=167079

Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS 3.0.x On Debian Squeeze

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com
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Last edited 03/29/2012

This educational shows how to set adult a standalone storage server on Debian Squeeze. Instead of NFS, we will use GlusterFS here. The customer complement will be means to entrance a storage as if it was a internal filesystem.

GlusterFS is a clustered file-system means of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates several storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one vast together network record system. Storage bricks can be finished of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

I do not emanate any pledge that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this educational we use dual systems, a server and a client:

• server1.example.com: IP residence 192.168.0.100 (server)
• client1.example.com: IP residence 192.168.0.101 (client)

Both systems should be means to solve a other system’s hostname. If this can't be finished by DNS, we should revise a /etc/hosts record so that it looks as follows on both systems:

vi /etc/hosts

(It is also probable to use IP addresses instead of hostnames in a following setup. If we cite to use IP addresses, we don’t have to caring about either a hostnames can be resolved or not.)

2 Setting Up The GlusterFS Server

server1.example.com:

GlusterFS is accessible as a package for Debian Squeeze, therefore we can implement it as follows:

apt-get implement glusterfs-server

The command

glusterfs –version

should now uncover a GlusterFS chronicle that you’ve only commissioned (3.0.5 in this case):

root@server1:~# glusterfs –version
glusterfs 3.0.5 built on Jul 13 2010 16:44:21
Repository revision: v3.0.5
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Gluster Inc. http://www.gluster.com
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You might redistribute copies of GlusterFS underneath a terms of a GNU General Public License.
root@server1:~#

Next we emanate a few directories:

mkdir /data/
mkdir /data/export
mkdir /data/export-ns

Now we emanate a GlusterFS server pattern record /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol (we make a backup of a strange /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol record first) that defines that office will be exported (/data/export) and what customer is authorised to bond (192.168.0.101 = client1.example.com):

cp /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol_orig
cat /dev/null /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol
vi /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol

Please note that it is probable to use wildcards for a IP addresses (like 192.168.*) and that we can mention mixed IP addresses distant by comma (e.g. 192.168.0.101,192.168.0.102).

Afterwards we start a GlusterFS server:

/etc/init.d/glusterfs-server start

3 Setting Up The GlusterFS Client

client1.example.com:

On a client, we can implement a GlusterFS customer as follows:

apt-get implement glusterfs-client

Then we emanate a following directory:

mkdir /mnt/glusterfs

Next we emanate a record /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol (we make a backup of a strange /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol record first):

cp /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol_orig
cat /dev/null /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol
vi /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol

Make certain we use a scold server hostname or IP residence in a option remote-host line!

That’s it! Now we can mountain a GlusterFS filesystem to /mnt/glusterfs with one of a following dual commands:

glusterfs -f /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol /mnt/glusterfs

or

mount -t glusterfs /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol /mnt/glusterfs

You should now see a new share in a outputs of…

mount

root@client1:~# mount
/dev/sda1 on / form ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw form tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc form proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys form sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev form tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm form tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts form devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections form fusectl (rw)
/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol on /mnt/glusterfs form fuse.glusterfs (rw,allow_other,default_permissions,max_read=131072)
root@client1:~#

… and…

df -h

root@client1:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              29G  778M   27G   3% /
tmpfs                 249M     0  249M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                  244M  100K  244M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 249M     0  249M   0% /dev/shm
/etc/glusterfs/glusterfs.vol
                       29G  1.2G   27G   5% /mnt/glusterfs
root@client1:~#

Instead of ascent a GlusterFS share manually on a client, we could cgange /etc/fstab so that a share gets mounted automatically when a customer boots.

Open /etc/fstab and attach a following line:

vi /etc/fstab

To exam if your mutated /etc/fstab is working, reboot a client:

reboot

After a reboot, we should find a share in a outputs of…

df -h

… and…

mount

If modifying /etc/fstab doesn’t help, remove your change to /etc/fstab and supplement this line to /etc/rc.local instead (before a exit 0 line):

vi /etc/rc.local

This creates certain a share gets mounted after a network is up.

4 Links

• GlusterFS: http://www.gluster.org/
• Debian: http://www.debian.org/

Article source: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=167034

As a One Laptop Per Child beginning goes from strength to strength around a world, there are signs that Pakistan might be removing a summary too, after a Punjab supervision began handing out 125,000 giveaway Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers.

Chairman of a Punjab Information Technology Board, Umar Saif, pronounced a plan was designed to “facilitate improved entrance to educational calm and tools”, adding that it was a initial plan of a kind on such a scale to use open source software.

“Supporting open-source program during this scale, in a nation with prevalent use of exclusive and pirated software, is confidant and laudable. Due to a flexibility, zero-cost and broad-based educational support, open-source program is a de facto customary for college and university students worldwide,” he wrote.

“With 125,000 shining students versed with laptops, there is good event for a government, IT attention and universities to rise an ecosystem that affords entire network accessibility, localised educational calm and applications to make best use of these laptops in a aloft preparation system.”

However, while generally welcomed, a plan was not wholly but a detractors.

Some students reportedly noticed a roll-out as a thinly potential try by statute celebration a Pakistan Muslim League to secure a girl vote.

Others have suggested that a income would be improved spent on rolling out giveaway laptops to primary propagandize students.

In fact, OLPC owner Nicholas Negroponte argued as much during a Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco final November.

“Education is a prolonged tenure resolution to each problem,” he pronounced during a time.

“I don’t know of any solutions that aren’t practicable but some form of education. Primary preparation is a many critical – if we disaster that adult it’s a lot of work to change things for a better.”

There’s doubtful to be any let-up from a Punjab government, though, with a serve 300,000 units reportedly set to be handed out in 2013. ®

Article source: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=166969