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Weekly Roundup - November 19th 2007

Posted November 19th, 2007 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of November 12th to November 18th 2007, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.

Articles posted on my blog

I continued to set up a new server last week on a VPS using CentOS 5, and a number of posts reflected things I was setting up and/or issues I was having. As is often the case with my posts, they give me a reference point for the next time I need to set these things up and I have a central repository for information.

• Tuesday: Switching off SELinux on CentOS 5
• Wednesday: BASH history auto completion binding the PageUp and PageDown keys to cycle through the history
• Thursday: Dealing with a Failed to acquire SSL session cache lock error log message with Apache when running the web server as a different user from the default
• Saturday: changing the hostname on CentOS
• Sunday: updating the virtual alias map in postfix

On Friday I looked at something other than server set up stuff, when a Linux CD Mall customer was having issues trying to get printing working with the MandrivaOne Live CD. I couldn't get it to work either initially until I worked out that you need to have the software repositories set up first, something which wasn't done at the time of install. I'm still blown away that the necessary packages aren't installed by default for printing on Mandriva. You can read more about this, along with screenshots, on the post titled CUPS printing not working on MandrivaOne 2008.0

Interesting articles found offsite

DamnSmall Linux 4.0 was released on October 23rd, and it was reviewed this week by Linux.com. Read the review and buy DamnSmall Linux from my other site Linux CD Mall.

Unfortunately the blogosphere is full of screen scrapers who steal your content and republish it, often changing the text slightly. Daily Blog Tips suggests complaining to Google and getting their Adsense accounts shut down rather than waste time chasing them down by other means.

I've noticed live.com is spamming my sites and have been meaning to write a post about this. In the meantime, I found this ppost which talks about it.

Recently there has been a lot of publicity about a new Linux distribution called gOS. This powers the Walmart $199 PC which apparently sold out in a matter of days. You can read reviews of gOS at eweek.com and linux.com, download gOS for free or buy gOS from the Linux CD Mall.

Red Hat released version 4.6 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux; this is the latest in the 4.x branch of RHEL and 5.1 was released last week. Read the release notes on the Red Hat website. Presumably CentOS 4.6 will follow soon.

Linux Mint 4.0 was released on November 15th 2007. It is an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution with comes with most media codecs installed "out of the box" which saves a lot of messing around when installing it. You can download Linux Mint for free, or buy it from the Linux CD Mall.

The next article has a whole bunch of AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript Libraries listed. I haven't used many of these but it's a good starting point for looking at various libraries and frameworks.

And finally this week, Linux.com reviewed Vixta, a Linux distribution which looks and feels a lot like Windows Vista. I suspect Microsoft will challenge the Vixta project at some point and force them to change the name, as this is clearly a breach of trademark. It can be downloaded from sourceforge or you can buy Vixta from the Linux CD Mall.