Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Free MIT courses

You won't get any credits for taking these courses. Just gaining free knowledge is all that is offered. If interested the 2 links I will provide will tell you all you need to know. Knowledge is power.

MIT FREE COURSES


MIT to make all faculty publications to be open access

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

SPAM ALERT!!!

Spammers really did it this time...
Every single post in YATS got spammed and unfortunately I am trying to clean up the mess using an EeePC 701(and without a mouse...), since I am not at home. This is very cumbersome at least.
I really hope that Google has noticed such massive spam attacks and finds a way to prevent it in the near future, by which I mean tomorrow:). If a blog that has about 50 visitors/day got 40 spam messages at once, imagine what must have happened to blogs and sites with 100x times traffic!!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Fedora 10: Living on the edge



Some people ask me from time to time what will Linux be after 6 months or a year, what changes are planned, which features will be implemented. The answer is actually very simple: Try Fedora & see first-hand! What you see in Fedora now will be used by all distributions' next releases. Since the creation of the Fedora Project, when the distro was named "Fedora Core" the goal was clear:push innovation to the limit, try new technologies, live on the edge!! At first many considered Fedora a test tube for Red Hat and maybe it was. But now it is for all! What other distros consider risky and "not mature" Fedora delivers it and with style I might add. Because Fedora always was rightfully proud about its artwork and never gave as an unstable OS.

Fedora 10 with KDE4

What new things does Fedora bring with its latest version 10?
  • PackageKit: It is the biggest development in Linux program installation in years, in my opinion. It can be used by ALL distributions as a GUI while using their back-end of choice (APT, YUM, ZYPPER, URPMI, whatever). Unification at no cost to diversity & choice. It can't get any better, can it?
  • KDE 4.1.3(now 4.2.1): It feels stable and well integrated. Can't wait for version 4.3!
  • Gnome 2.24: It brings incremental updates as usual, such as tabs in Nautilus.
  • OpenOffice 3: Version 3 can open MS-Office 2007 files. A big Plus to interoperability that Ms-Office XP+2003 users need a plug-in to achieve!! Fedora made the update. Ubuntu hasn't yet.
  • Firefox 3: I know, if you read once more about Firefox 3, you 'll shoot yourself on the leg!!
  • Plymouth: It's hard to describe, so see the video. It's not a screensaver, it's the bootloader!!



  • RPM 4.6: This is a major update to RPM package management system, "the first one in several years, to replace the ageing and messy rpm 4.4.x codebase"
  • Improved pulseaudio.
  • Latest kernel 2.6.27
  • Latest Compiz fusion 0.7.8



  • Boot-time: Fedora 10 includes multiple boot-time updates, including changes that allow for faster booting and graphic booting changes.
  • The great (as usual!) Solar theme.

As you saw in the above videos, it is not an exaggeration to say that Fedora 10 is the best looking OS by far.

All my hardware worked out of the box, although I don't have any "exotic" devices (ATI 3650 video card, Sound Blaster X-FI and onboard ethernet controller). Pulse audio gave me no problems. A nice addition is LXDE Desktop (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), as it uses less system resources than Gnome or KDE and is ideal for older computers and netbooks.

The only disadvantage I discovered after a few days of using it, is that Yum speed is not as good as Ubuntu's & Debian's apt-get and Synaptic. It takes some time to check the dependencies, while synaptic is much snappier.

Would I suggest Fedora? To anyone that has never tried Linux before, I will keep suggesting Ubuntu. First time Linux users don't usually care so much about the free/open source ideology and want the easiest possible way to have 3d graphics, flash and wireless support. And Ubuntu makes it much easier for the new user. Ubuntu's Live-CD is better as well, as it includes OpenOffice(although it is ver 2.4.1) where Fedora's has abiword and Gnumeric.
On the other hand I suggest to anyone who is feeling comfortable with Linux to try Fedora. Because if there is an innovative OS, than this is Fedora. And it's configuration tools are better.

Sounds great! Where can I get Fedora? Is it completely free?

You can get Fedora from the official Fedora Project site.It is totally free and does not ask for serial numbers, activation or registration. You can download the CD version or a DVD version that contains both Gnome & KDE. Or you can download the PowerPC version if you have an old MAC.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

25 Reasons to Convert to Linux

Businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies and other organizations around the world are converting1 their computer operating systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux at an increasing pace. They are likewise converting their application programs from commercial software to free software (also referred to as open source software). There are at least 25 reasons for this situation, including:

http://www.linfo.org/reasons_to_convert.html