Oracle VM VirtualBox, formerly Sun xVM VirtualBox and innotek VirtualBox, is a family of x86 virtualization products for enterprise and home use.VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.

e4rat ("Ext4 - Reducing Access Times") is a toolset to accelerate the boot process as well as application startups. Through physical file realloction e4rat eliminates both seek times and rotational delays. This leads to a high disk transfer rate.
Placing files on disk in a sequentially ordered way allows to efficiently read-ahead files in parallel to the program startup. The combination of sequentially reading and a high cache hit rate may reduce the boot time by a factor of three, as the example below shows.

e4rat is based on the online defragmentation ioctl EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT from the Ext4 filesystem, which was introduced in Linux Kernel 2.6.31. Other filesystem types and/or earlier versions of extended filesystems are not supported.

It’s funny how knowledge leads to knowledge. You start digging deeper into one thing, and discover threads leading off into related fields. I began by researching maze algorithms, decided I wanted to see what mazes in more complex tesselations would look like, and after one thing or anouther found myself learning about Wythoff constructions.

The result is Kaleidoscope, a library for generating uniform tilings using Wythoff constructions.

gem install kaleidoscope

A uniform tiling is a tesselation of a plane using regular polygons (with a few other constraints that I won’t go into here). What this means is that, in essense, you give Kaleidoscope a few input parameters, and it hands you a bunch of regular polygons.

This guide is meant to serve as a comprehensive reference for setting up an Ubuntu slice. It was started by a fellow who started taking detailed notes after having hosed his slice multiple times. It won’t tell you how to do everything, but it should be enough to get most people started.

The guide is broken up into sections. Each is meant to be somewhat self-contained, although later sections may depend on the actions of previous sections.

This guide assumes you’re starting out with a brand new slice, loaded with Ubuntu (6.06 Dapper Drake edition). Hopefully you already know some command-line Linux and know how to operate an SSH client (like PuTTY). Your IP can be found in the SliceManager.

Finally, I pulled a lot of stuff from other guides in compiling this. Thanks to all the other developers out there for documenting your experiences! As a relative newcomer to VPS hosting, I can’t thank you enough.

railsready: Setup script to get Ruby and Rails running on Ubuntu with one command
Adam Stacoviak posted this 1 day ago
How would you like to get a full Ruby on Rails stack up on Ubuntu with one command?

Now you can by running Rails Ready. Rails Ready is a setup script that gets Ruby and Rails running on a fresh install of Ubuntu with one command (Tested on Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS (Long-term Support)).

Here’s how I like to setup a Rails stack on Ubuntu 10.4. This recipe makes use of Apache as the webserver with Passenger to serve Rails, MySQL as the database, RVM (installed system-wide) to manage Ruby (I select Ruby 1.9.2 as the default these days), and the latest Rails, which is 3.0.3 as of this morning, and Bundler for installing gems. It also makes a system user for you to use, and a deploy user for deployments with Capistrano.

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments. For more information, see the part of the getting started guide on ”Why Vagrant?”

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work? Check out the getting started guide, the getting started video.

Note: this procedure requires an .img file that you will be required to create from the .iso file you download.
TIP: Drag and Drop a file from Finder to Terminal to 'paste' the full path without typi...

Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Java applications are compiled to bytecode, which at runtime is either interpreted or compiled to native machine code for execution.

The language itself derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities. JavaScript, a scripting language, shares a similar name and has similar syntax, but is not directly related to Java.

Ever been working in a VM that is command line only and wished it wasn’t so small? Well, that was how I felt constantly until now. Step on past the break to see how to change the resolution in an X-less install by utilizing uvesafb.

MirrorBrain is an open source framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It solves a challenge that many popular open source projects face - a flood of download requests, often magnitudes more than a single site could practically handle.
A central (and probably the most obvious) part is a “download redirector” which automatically redirects requests from web browsers or download programs to a mirror server near them.

We would encourage Mac users to download Ubuntu Desktop Edition by burning a CD for the time being. But if you would prefer to use a USB, please follow the instructions below.

Note: this procedure...

iSCSI is a network protocol standard that allows the use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. How do I setup Iscsi Initiator under Ubuntu Linux? How do I format and connect to an iSCSI volume under Ubuntu Linux? How do I store VMware or Virtualbox virtual machine images using iscsi storage?

Tired with your ordinary GRUB loader?

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is the product, powered by Eucalyptus, that allows you to easily run your own Amazon-EC2-like private cloud. It’s a lot simpler than you’d think.
This is 3 parts tutorial you can use to Run your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Are you like me and have multiple Ubuntu machines under one roof? Are you tired of downloading the same update multiple times? Sick of what seems to be duplicate work? Let me introduce you to my little friend... squid-deb-proxy

Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons (copyright, license, patent, etc).

The intent of this post is to increase awareness of AppArmor and encourage it's use by Ubuntu users. Although there are portions of this post that may seem quite technical, it is not my intent to give a full technical review of the workings of AppArmor or compare AppArmor to alternate options, such as SELinux.

By upgrading directly from one LTS release to the next, you can skip the intermediate releases. This results in incredible savings of bandwidth, downtime, and hopefully your time and frustration.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs. It has basic VCD/DVD playback functionality, including DVD subtitles, but supports many text- based subtitle formats too. For video output, nearly every existing interface is supported. It’s also able to convert any supported files to raw/divx/mpeg4 AVI (pcm/mp3 audio), and even video grabbing from V4L devices.

Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Java applications are compiled to bytecode, which at runtime is either interpreted or compiled to native machine code for execution.
The language itself derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities. JavaScript, a scripting language, shares a similar name and has similar syntax, but is not directly related to Java.

A utility to multiplex ssh dynamic tunnels. Frequently, for instance when proxying a torrent client through a tunnel established with ssh -D, the tunnel will be swamped by traffic. sshsplit spawns multiple instances and distributes the load among them.

FlyBack is a snapshot-based backup tool based on rsync It creates successive backup directories mirroring the files you wish to backup, but hard-links unchanged files to the previous backup. This prevents wasting disk space while providing you with full access to all your files without any sort of recovery program. If your machine crashes, just move your external drive to your new machine and copy the latest backup using whatever file browser you normally use.

If you want to setup firewall rule with UFW use the one of the following procedure