Oct 232010
 

wiilinThis article is based on the slide of Daniele Napolitano, and on his presentation on Linux Day 2009.

The Wiimote is a revolutionary game controllers created by Nintendo for its Wii console and changed the concept of making the game player at the center of the physical interactions of the  video game.

While in the normal game controller maximum interaction with the game were the buttons and force feedback, we have motion and aiming sensors in the Wiimote, so the console  “know” what they are doing and where is the player in relation to the TV.

So it is:

For the player: a game controller

For the geeks: a concentration of technology

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Oct 212010
 

pdf linuxMany people associate pdf to adobe reader, but is this the best reader of this type of documents that we have on Linux?.

But in the while le’ts say that Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange. The file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

Originally a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008

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Oct 092010
 

penguinsleepSuppose you have a long-running task (for example, compiling a large program) that you need to run, but you also want to get some other work done. Linux lets you start a task in the background and keep on doing other things from the command prompt.

We will see in this article how to send commands in the background, then return them to the foreground, and make sure that also closing the current shell or terminal the process doesn’t remains tied to the session but continue to work.

An alternative to these command is using screen, as read in a former article, but now let’s see the command bg and the special character &

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Oct 022010
 

linux hardwareOn linux there are some simple commands that allow you to see what the OS is seeing (that does not always correspond with the hardware in the machine). Today we will see some of these useful commands that allow you to check the proper recognition of all our devices.

lspci – lsusb – lshw

lspci

lspci is a utility for displaying information about PCI buses in the system and devices connected to them.

By default, it shows a brief list of devices. Use the options described below to request either a more verbose output or output intended for parsing by other programs.

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Oct 012010
 

postinstall ubuntuAuthor: Aaron Haun

Installing and configuring Linux has really come a long way in the last few years. People who used to be afraid of it are now starting to realized the benefits and seeing that they out weigh the learning curve. It is usually ready to use straight out of the box but here are a few things that I do after an install to make my experience a little more pleasant.

The first thing I do is change my repositories. For those who do not know, Linux is an open source operating system and so is the available software. That means the source code is available to the public and anyone in the community can contribute patches and improvements. These patches and improvements are posted in a CVS repository. When you search your package manager for software to install it searches the repository for the data. There is a button to automatically select the best repository and use it as your default. Let it scan through the servers and pick the one it recommends when it is finished.

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