Thushan Fernando Uncut

With the amount of coverage surely to be taken by Windows 7 we can’t forget the other side of the force, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex was released a few hours ago.

Believe it or not I actually stayed up waiting for it to hit the servers, then hopped over to the iinet FTP server (mirror’d by the Internode servers also) as the 3FL Mirror (Westnet) wasn’t up to date (it is now!) and started leeching the sucker.

8.10 brings:

• Linux Kernel v2.6.27 - which has the new Atheros driver, improved webcam support and support for the UBFIS file system, among other things documented on KernelNewbies.
• Support for the UBIFS file system - especially for SSD/Flash drives in the hope it will improve performance and longetitivity of such devices.
• GNOME v2.24 - which brings a slew of improvements including a tabbed nautilus.
• X.Org v7.4 - includes Xorg-Server 1.5 which brings faster startup/shutdown times, hot-plugging for input devices.
• Network Manager 0.7 - which adds 3G and PPPoE connectivity
• Dynamic Kernel Module support - recompiles kernel modules automajically when kernel is updated.
• LOTS more, documented in the 8.10 Release notes.

Mono 2.0, Python 2.6 and OpenOffice 3.0 didnt make the cut but will be present in 9.04 already dubbed the Jaunty Jackalope.

Download Ubuntu 8.10 and give it ago. For a complete look at Ubuntu 8.10, checkout these reviews:

• Simple Thoughts - Ubuntu 8.10 Comphrensive Review
• Polish Linux - Ubuntu 8.10 A Positive Evolution
• The Linux Format - The LXF Test

Whilst I’ve had to hurry off to work with barely a few hours of sleep I did catch a few minutes of usage after a speedy install thanks to the USB installation method.

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I’ll admit it, I still have a floppy-drive attached to my maturing beast, which is primarily used as my day-to-day development box. Floppies come in handy for that odd install of XP or below that require RAID drivers (though you can just use nLite and bundle it by default).

But what about the CD-R’s and DVD-R’s in the days of Cloud Browser based Operating Systems (funny)? I recall burning ISOs like no tomorrow when new versions of Ubuntu were released - and I’m sure everyone else who has gone down the Linux or BSD route has had similar experiences.

But before you go burning that ISO at the next install (maybe Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex at the end of the month) you might want to consider an alternate route - and whats more, I’ll bet you it will install faster on newer systems.

I bought a Corsair Voyager GT 16Gb (pdf info-sheet) flash drive a few months back, whilst I’ve been fairly disappointed that its advertised speed fell short of expectations due to the Samsung manufactering process changes, I still kept it dear to myself having paid about AUD$109 for it. (I name things, the drive was dubbed DrSporky). Even though its rated at about 34MB/S read (so realistically it should do about 25-30MB/s) I’ve managed to clock about 19-21MB/s copying a 500Mb file using Teracopy - a real benchmark not a synthetic test and 8Mbp copying it back to the drive (see below). Nothing to sneeze at, but the difference between the GT and the non-GT was the 30MB/s+ read-speed I figured.

I use it almost daily and it carries around a bootable version of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) thanks to the multi-platform utility UNetbootin.

UNetbootin is written in C++ using the Qt4 Toolkit engine (full information is available on the Universal Netboot Installer page on Launchpad) so its compatible on Windows and Linux. Simply download the latest version, insert your USB drive and either let UNetBootbin download the distro you’d like to try _or_ browse to the Disk image to one you’ve already grabbed.

Give it a go and see what you think, installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 on a mates system (ASUS P5KPL-CM & Core E2180) took less than 10minutes (at most 20 if you inlude boot and configuration)!!! The best part is that you can easily reuse it easily formatting etc *AND* store your own things ready to utilise whenever you need it.

So the next time you got install _anything_ give UNetbootin ago and make use of that fast USB Drive instead of wasting CD/DVD writables that you usually endup throwing away.

Its My Life, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Windows 16gb, bootable, bootable usb, bootcd, corsair, flash, gt, iso, linux, mlc, nand, samsung, slc, ubuntu, unetbootbin, UNetbootin, voyager, Windows

ntop is a network probe that shows how much the network is being utilised with very little overhead and impressive graphical representation via the web. Its definately a must-have tool if you run a fileserver.

The version of ntop on the ubuntu mirrors is 3.2.x, so I set out to update to the latest release this weekend (3.3.x released in June last year).

This install is being done on Ubuntu 7.10 using ntop 3.3.7.

First up lets download the distribution of ntop we’re going to be installing. This is the internode mirror in Australia, but you can find your closest mirror via sourceforge.

$ wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ntop/ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next we need to extract the files to a folder.

$ tar -xvf ./ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next up lets install/make sure we have all the dependencies we need to build this version.

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) librrd2-dev libtool libpcap-dev tcpdump librrd2 rrdtool rrdtool-tcl libgdbm-dev libgdbm3 automake autoconf automake1.7 debhelper gettext html2text intltool-debian libgd2-noxpm-dev libjpeg62-dev libncurses5-dev libssl-dev libwrap0-dev po-debconf

Once the dependencies are installed you can go into the extracted folder and tell it to setup the environment and configure it.

$ cd ./ntop-3.3.7/
$ chmod +x ./autogen.sh
$ ./autogen.sh

This will make sure your environment is correctly setup and configure to build the necessary make files. There shouldn’t be any errors at this point as you have installed all the correct dependencies. Nextup we need to build the application and install it.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Then you can start nTop by running the following command:

$  sudo ntop -P /usr/local/lib/ntop/

There we have it, browse to http://localhost:3000 and you’ll be running the latest and greatest ntop.

Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, software guide, howto, linux, software, ubuntu

Ubuntu 8.04 was released when I was in Japan, but it didnt stop me from downloading it - sucked it up at ~5Mbps which was bloody ridiculous!

Now we can finally get our hands on the first update to this LTS, Ubuntu 8.04.1 which contains - amongst a slew of bug-fixed packages - Firefox 3.0 Final. More information on the changes are posted on the Ubuntu mailing list release notification.

I’m still running 7.10 on the server at home - until I get the bawls (and time!) to redo the lovely server ZEUS has become to be! In the meantime, my Dell M1330 is upgrading to the 8.04.1 release as I write.

Grab a copy of Ubuntu 8.04.1 today!

On a side note, just recently saw the release of Sabayon Linux 3.5 which brings some really cool things to the table, I’ve downloaded the LiveDVD and considering giving it a go.

Linux/Unix, Operating Systems firefox, Gnome, KDE, Kernel, laptop, linux, LTS, open saucey, open source, Sabayon, software, ubuntu, ubuntu 8.04.1