Is that a server in your pocket? | LUP 128

Is that a server in your pocket? | LINUX Unplugged 128

This week we dive into what the community thinks about putting a server in their pocket, show you some smart tricks with Gimp & some Windows nightmares. Plus some router chat & more!

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Smart Gimp Tricks

The Quickmask for adjusting selections: I’m a born-again Quickmask evangelist, because I went so long without realizing that it was there, and it makes selections so much easier.

Decomposing an image and using the components as a mask to select part of an image—that’s an easy way to select skies and get rid of a drab overcast sky, or to change or enhance the color of the sky.

Using the Dodge/Burn tool to make a background really white, for when you want an object to stand out and make the background go away. It can be a lot easier than selecting or erasing.

Feedback:

Noah Hit Something on the Head

“I wish Ubuntu would just use GNOME, and go back to trying to contribute useful bits.”

ScreenShot

Now, I have a few extensions installed, but the way I use GNOME isn’t much different from how someone would use Unity; I keep the Dash up at all times, I have those pesky tray apps up in the corner, and so on. This is so close to how I used to work in Unity, OS X, etc., that I’m puzzled at why GNOME gets treated like the red-headed stepchild sometimes.

Now, I know that once in a while the GNOME dev team decides to go off the deep end (Let’s make the filemanager work like old-school Finder and do that by default! Hell, let’s override users’ pre-existing settings, that’s how good it is!) but overall GNOME just keeps getting better.

Windows Secureboot Causes a Mess

I just made a potentially costly mistake: we nuked and repaved my friend’s brand new Lenovo Yoga 500 with Linux… without booting into Windows to disable SecureBoot explicitly. He didn’t want to accept the EULA; and we successfully booted into USB key (Ubuntu MATE 15.10, Ubuntu w/Unity 15.04) so we thought we would just go ahead.

I thought Ubuntu would have been candidate, but apparently not. Is this the correct way? Which distros would work? We tried installing and booting into Ubuntu Unity 15.04 (which is supposed to have the appropriate signature) but after install and reboot, we get the above. Given that Windows has been obliterated at this point, what options do I have?

Unfortunately, he’s leaving in just over a week, so if the conclusion ends up being “install Windows to do this” I’ll take it….. but I’d rather not!

Ever Heard of FriendOS?

I heard yesterday about Friendos. It looks like this: https://youtu.be/Y5n0f5DSbSM?t=16m14s , so it’s like Amiga Workbench in the browser powered by a Linux backend. They releasing public beta as open source this week.It will be able to run both thml5 and native applications. Their website is a little enigmatic right now:

FriendOS

Rover Log – Live Tracker

Live map of the adventures of Jupiter Broadcasting’s Rover Studio.

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

A Server in Your Pocket

Ocean is a mobile server, a device that combines the portability of a mobile phone with the flexibility of a Linux web server.

Want a portable Linux-powered web server that will fit into your pocket? Look no further than Ocean.

Ocean has been designed from the ground up for portability, and features an integrated battery that allows you to run web and Bluetooth applications in places where direct power is limited.

The device is approximately the size of an iPhone 6, and can easily fit in your pocket.

This bundle costs $149 and ships in February. Higher capacity versions are slated to ship later in the year.

DigitalOcean

Numbers don’t lie—it’s time to build your own router

I’ve noticed a trend lately. Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I’ve needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable).

A lot of you are probably muttering, “right, pfSense, sure.” Some of you might even be thinking about smoothwall or untangle NG. I played with most of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go more basic, more old school: a plain, CLI-only install of Ubuntu Server and a few iptables rules.

Admittedly, this likely isn’t the most practical approach for every reader, but it made sense for me. I have quite a bit of experience finessing iptables and the Linux kernel itself for high throughput at Internet scale, and the fewer shiny features and graphics and clicky things that are put between me and the firewall table, the less fluff I have to get out of the way and the fewer new not-applicable-in-the-rest-of-my-work things I have to learn. Any rule I already know how to create in iptables to manage access to my servers, I also know how to apply to my firewall—if my firewall’s running the same distro as my servers are.

Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks is a system software company founded with the principle of enabling high capacity networks that are easy to deploy and affordable. Led by networking experts and innovators from Cisco and VMware, we provide great networking for layer 2, layer 3 and overlay architectures supported by improved economics and a robust ecosystem — a modern alternative to proprietary vendor-locked stacks that constrain IT innovation.

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Gnome Core Apps

It would appear that the GNOME developers are currently in the process of revisiting the desktop environment’s moduleset and defining a clear set of core apps, which should form the default user experience in upcoming releases of the GNOME desktop (most probably starting with GNOME 3.20, which should be available in spring 2016).

At the moment of writing this article, the GNOME developers have only managed to announce that the Cheese webcam viewer app has been integrated as a core GNOME app as it is required by the GNOME Control Center, GNOME Initial Setup and GNOME Contacts components. They are also in talks with the developers of the Gedit text editor to make it a core app too.

Furthermore, the GNOME Color Manager component will also be pushed to the core apps moduleset, as the GNOME Control Center software requires it. However, the GNOME developers will also define a set of non-core apps, which they don’t recommend GNU/Linux OS vendors to include in their distributions when using the GNOME desktop environment by default.

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Phoenix OS

Google Android may have been developed as a smartphone operating system (and later ported to tablets, TVs, watches, and other platforms), but over the past few years we’ve seen a number of attempts to turn it into a desktop operating system.

One of the most successful has been Remix OS, which gives Android a taskbar, start menu, and an excellent window management system. The Remix OS team has also generated a lot of buzz over the past year, and this week the operating system gained a lot of new alpha testers thanks to a downloadable version of Remix OS that you can run on many recent desktop or notebook computers.

But Remix OS isn’t the only game in town. Phoenix OS is another Android-as-desktop operating system, and while it’s still pretty rough around the edges, there are a few features that could make it a better option for some testers.