Dual Boot Puppy Linux With Ubuntu

Puppy Linux is so nice that I always keep it around even if I don't need it. I have a small partition on my laptop where I install different versions of Puppy, and they co-exist with my main Ubuntu (actually Xubuntu) system. The installation is very easy.

How to Setup a WiFi Access Point on Ubuntu

If you have a single wired Internet connection (like in a hotel room) you can create Wireless Access Point with Ubuntu and share the Internet connection among multiple devices. This can be done very easily on Ubuntu (whatch this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0FFQVy3RUg) It will create an ad-hoc wifi network. However ad-hoc networks are not supported in some android models, windows mobile, and iOS devices. A more universal solution is to create an Access Point (or Infrastructure, or Hotspot) wifi network. This is a bit more complicated but not so difficult. Here I will describe how to do it.

Solving an interesting algorithmic problem

The second problem on Google CodeJam 2013, Round 1B was interesting: Problem B. Manage your Energy . The obvious solution of trying all the possible cases and combinations would not work, unless the input had very small limits (besides being not so easy to implement).

Exporting Custom Configurations From a Drupal 7 Site

After installing a Drupal7 site, I have made several configurations/customizations over time. Now I would like to export them somehow, in order to load them to another site. But the problem is that I don't remember exactly what I have done. The Features module does not help because you have to tell it exactly what to export, but I don't remember all the changes.

How to find all the modifications in the configuration of a server

I manage a virtual web server in the cloud (https://l10n.org.al) where I have made lots of configurations over time: installing new packages, tweakings for optimization, changes related to security, etc. Now, if I want to build another server that has the same function and purpose as the first one, I don't remember all the things that I have touched and changed. The long and tedious way would be to go over all the installations and configurations again, and still I may miss something.

How to set up a chroot environment for testing

Recently I have suffered a total system destruction in one of my computers. It happened while I was testing a software that I am developing, due to a simple bug. It helped me realize my lack of caution while testing unstable things, and I learned that it is always better to do the testing inside a chroot environment. Chroot’s provide isolation from the rest of the operating system, so that in case of severe errors damage can be mitigated.

Using NGINX as a Web Server for Drupal

Nginx (engine-x) is a web server that is regarded to be faster than Apache and with a better performance on heavy load. The difference is summed up succinctly in a quote by Chris Lea on the Why Use Nginx? page: "Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache."

Installing a Clonezilla Server

Clonezilla Server is used to clone many computers simultaneously across a network. This is done using a DRBL server and computer workstations that can boot from a network.

The Digital Signature and the X.509/OpenPGP Authentication Models

This article explains what is a Digital Signature, why it is an important part of the Digital Identity, and how it works. Then it describes the authenticity and social problems related to the usage of the Digital Signature. It explains as well the two authentication models, X.509 and OpenPGP, that can be used to solve these authenticity problems. Finally it makes a comparison between these two authentication models and their features and tries to explain why the OpenPGP model is better.

Virtual Machines on a CentOS Host

A powerful rack server can be used as a host for installing lots of virtual machines, and it can be used as a data storage as well. This article will describe how to use such a server, installed with CentOS, as a host for virtual machines.