I’ve read books of 2 of the most unique creators of operating systems, that is Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I did get the feeling that Bill Gates was a money-hungry, arrogant, geek-vampire from his book while I got the feeling that Linus Torvalds had bigger things in mind like creating open-source operating system platform and spread of free knowledge.  I think when I was growing up, Linus Torvalds was one of my heroes while Bill Gates too, but Bill kept making bad operating systems for money.

If it wasn’t for Linus, I don’t think we would have Firefox, Google Chrome, and pretty much open source software in general.  (or at least they won’t be as popular)  This is that one guy who made the best open-source operating system and boosted the open-source community by gazillion miles.

Well, to cap it off, here’s an interview with Linux Torvalds on his thoughts with Linux as of lately:

I’ve used different distributions over the years. Right now I happen to use Fedora 9 on most of the computers I have, which really boils down to the fact that Fedora had fairly good support for PowerPC back when I used that, so I grew used to it. But I actually don’t care too much about the distribution, as long as it makes it easy to install and keep reasonably up-to-date. I care about the kernel and a few programs, and the set of programs I really care about is actually fairly small.

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.

Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I’ve never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it’s supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn’t use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it.

via oreilly

Here’s a cool Eee PC Hack that uses a modified Fedora Linux to speed up the boot time of Eee PCs.  I think this shows how great linux operating systems are modification by uses.  I am sure you can do something similar with Windows, but not to the extent this hack does.

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.

via engadget, slashgear, Hack Page

Well, I have been struggling with one of my dedicated servers and just found this cool script that will auto-restart the Apache httpd server if it goes out.

Save the following as restart.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# Apache Process Monitor
# Restart Apache Web Server When It Goes Down
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Copyright (c) 2003 nixCraft project <http://cyberciti.biz/fb/>
# This script is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.0 or above
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# This script is part of nixCraft shell script collection (NSSC)
# Visit http://bash.cyberciti.biz/ for more information.
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# RHEL / CentOS / Fedora Linux restart command
RESTART="/sbin/service httpd restart"

# uncomment if you are using Debian / Ubuntu Linux
#RESTART="/etc/init.d/apache2 restart"

#path to pgrep command
PGREP="/usr/bin/pgrep"

# Httpd daemon name,
# Under RHEL/CentOS/Fedora it is httpd
# Under Debian 4.x it is apache2
HTTPD="httpd"

# find httpd pid
$PGREP ${HTTPD}

if [ $? -ne 0 ] # if apache not running
then
 # restart apache
 $RESTART
fi

Then setup a cron job like this: (usually in your sa-update file under /etc/cron.d)

*/5 * * * * root /root/restart.sh  >/dev/null 2>&1

via cyberciti

There’s also a program called Monit that will do more automation.

Here’s how to decrease the load on your Wordpress blog by 5 factors! (if you are running a dedicated server)I was digging today for some stuff on digg and noticed this post about Wordpress performance.

Since Zedomax runs Wordpress, I decided to take a look.

Elliott was running only one server yet he claims that he can handle 1,000,000 hits a day on one server!

FYI, Zedomax is running 3 servers now and the load was at about 0.80 to 1.0 on an average day for the HTTP server and 0.60 to 0.80 for the MYSQL server. (The other HTTP server is for the other blogs)

So through Elliott’s suggestions at changing httpd.conf, my.cnf, php.ini, and installing eAccelerator, my load on the server dropped at least 5 times!

The load for the HTTP server is now at about 0.20 for the HTTP server and 0.15 for the MYSQL server.

Bottom Line

If you run Wordpress blogs, make sure to do the suggested changes and you will definitely notice the increased speed of your website loads.

Here’s some additions to the Elliott’s HOWTO for installing eAccelerator.

When I’m trying to execute phpize, I got this:

/usr/local/php/bin/phpize: line 57: aclocal: command not found

This means you don’t have phpize installed on your Fedora. You can install the php-devel which has the phpize in it like this:

“yum install php-devel”

I got this error when I was trying to install the above:

“Check that the correct key URLs are configured for this repository”

So you gotta do this:

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and replace the line

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

with:

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

Then when you do “./configure”, if you get an error, you need to install some more tools. (which wasn’t documented)

So I installed Autoconf and Automake by using:

“yum install autoconf”

and

“yum install automake”

This might be basic for an experience linux-er but it took me couple hours to get it so hopefully it will help ya.

Then you can follow the rest of the directions.

Hey thanks Elliott for sharing the information with the world. I really appreciate this, you made my websites run faster!

Do you need to learn to install VMware on your new Fedora or Ubuntu? Here’s a cool site that has a massive collection on VMware howtos.

Here’s a cool site that shows Linux distro rankings and more.

via distrowatch

Here’s some cool linux shortcuts.
complete list via pio’s blog

Here’s a cool article on the new Ubuntu 6.10. The above picture i think is the 3D window system…

As of October 26, Ubuntu has released their latest Linux operating system, version 6.10 aka Edgy Eft, which can be downloaded here. Ubuntu has been the up and coming star company in the Linux O.S. scene for the last couple of years. They just seem to get more popular with each release and along with their releases getting better with each release. I would dare say they have nearly the cult following like Apple Computers or Google. Ubuntu, as you might be able to tell, is an unorthodox company, even for a company in the Linux scene!

Ubuntu was originally founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African multi-millionaire, who once paid $20 million to ride into outer space on the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission. The company’s name Ubuntu actually derives from the South African (Zulu) concept of ubuntu, which means “I am because you are” or “humanity towards others.” Ubuntu tries to apply that concept into their business model. The companies slogan is “Linux for human beings” and they go as far as to offer to ship for free a copy of their distribution to anyone in the world. The concept of Ubuntu fits perfectly into the world of Linux and open source software. Without the work of others, there would be no way that Linux would be what it is today and the same applies to Ubuntu.

via lunapark6

Wine HQ v.0.9.22 is available now, the latest version for running your programs in Linux.

Now let see, I do have some programs that need to run on my Fedora FC5…