Platonic

The most awaited web browser for internet freaks “Firefox 3″ is now ready. Its about to set the Guinness world record for Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. One of the lightest browser available on the earth. If you have never tried Firefox before, today is the best day.

Join your hands with firefox community to set this record.

Recording and Editing audio is a great art and sound engineers would love to have a tool which lets them do anything they would like to on their tune. Audacity is one such tools which brings in smile on any body who would like to play with Audio files. Its easy to use and configure. On top of all this its an OpenSource project released under GPL. This tool has been used in OpenMovie project as mentioned earlier in my post on “Big Buck Bunny”.

(Work environment of Audacity)

Audacity is built on lot many other opensource projects like expat,  OggVorbis, FLAC, LAME, SoundTouch, PortAudio etc which makes it rock solid. Try this out today for a sample audio editing task and you will get addicted to it. Audocious…

Opera released 9.5 last week. Its light and looks elegant and jazzy with new browser engine. Theme looks great. It also has got book mark synchronization now.   Opera is now thinking more about “fraud protection”. Find some fraud protection features added. More can be found out here. What i didn’t like in this browser is the unicode support and font configuration. I’m not able to read Kannada pages with ease. I might have to hack into the core to get it working. I will get on with this business later today….

Expanding LVM on a live server is a big challenge. At least for me it was big enough. That too when you’re doing it for the first time you will be bit more scared. DELL PowerEdge comes with RAID-5. We recently added a 5th drive into this array and configured that as the VirtualDisk via DELL Server management tool called OpenManage.

The next step involves expanding the size of the partition without formatting the content. Following link helped us a lot with this LVM Expansion but before that, we had to run fdisk on the drive and delete the partition first (without writing it),  then recreate and set the partition id to Linux LVM. Finally write all these changes to disk and reboot the server. Once this is done, expanding LVM is easy. Deleting partition in fdisk is very scary. You have to be very sure about such commands on Linux box.  Thanks to Dave from Atjeu for testing all this on a test server before implementing.

Ubuntu Forum thread which gave me the required hint.
(We used the instructions from step13 onwards)

Here is what we had to do with the LVM expansion.

fdisk /dev/sda2
umount /var/backup
pvdisplay
pvresize /dev/sda
pvdisplay
lvextend -v -l +4372 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
vgdisplay -A
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -f -v /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -f -v /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -D /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
df -h
mount /var/backup

Here /dev/sda2 is the patition, /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04 is the volume which we wanted to expand. /var/backup is the mount point.

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Is it possible to run internet explorer on Linux?

Yes, it’s possible. Wine has made it happen. Tatanka website tells you how you get it installed on your Linux desktop here.

Check out the installation progress in the above picture.

This will be very useful when you try checking websites on IE while working on a Linux box. Cool isn’t it?

Looks like this tool has got a small problem, there is a font rendering issue for Kannada and other languages on this tool. It will be challenge to fix it.

Blender Foundation has released its 2nd Open movie “Big Buck Bunny“. Its a short animated film created by “The Peach Project” which follows the “Orange” project’s world’s first open movie “Elephent’s Dream” released in year 2006.

(World’s First Open Movie)

Guess what, these open source movie  projects used open source tools like 3D modeling suite called Blender, GIMP, Audacity as tools.  Blender provided them all assets required for animation studio used for production.

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If you’re a web hosting service provider, system administrator, website owner you got to think about a tool which lets you manage your server and websites easily. Cpanel is one of my favorite control panel for web hosting automation. Cpanel gives a lot of help to system administrator and save a considerable amount of time. Its ease of use and the fresh web2.0 design lets website owners manage their websites easily. On top of all this, Cpanel constantly improves and updates its product features. If you don’t have Cpanel on your servers think of using it, you will find the reasons below. Following gives an update on recent changes happening in Cpanel features.

cPanel 11.23 introduces a number of exciting changes to our industry leading control panel product. While there are many changes on the backend to cPanel and WHM with the 11.23 release, we’ll focus on four main areas: Memory Usage Reduction, Mail Flexibility and Efficiency, Backups and Transfers, and User Specific Changes.

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eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Yes, i’m having trouble with eAccelerator on my VPS server. I could find that shared memory needs some alterations to the hardware node on which my VPS has been created. Luckily I could find the following solution in eAccelerator FAQ page itself.

I’m using linux 2.6 kernel and eAccelerator doesn’t get loaded when the shm_size is set to value bigger than 32mb. Php gives this warning: PHP Warning: [eAccelerator] Can not create shared memory area in Unknown on line 0

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