LAMPDocs

Nowadays computer provides us a great deal of opportunities (of course, the majority of users can easily go without many of them), but with no exaggerations “surfing the net” represents one of the most important and essential ones. People who use Linux OS argue that given operating system is perfect for Web. In fact it’s hardly possible to disagree with them; however before you can start surfing the web the first thing you need to do is to configure network interfaces.

What are the network interfaces? They represent devices that are used to transmit and receive packages of data. The examples of network interface devices are: Ethernet card, ISDN adapter, modem and etc. You can imagine that a network interface is a mailbox or an end of pipe, where you can send information and receive an answer. The integral attribute of network interface is address.

Generally users encounter with IP (Internet Protocol) networks. In the given review we are going to consider IPv4 (4th version of IP addresses), which are still very popular among the end users. After that we will discuss how to setup a network connection in Linux, taking as an example Ethernet card (which presents an interface allowing to connect a PC to the net with the help of copper twisted pair cable with the data transfer speed of up to 1GB/s). You can setup other interfaces in a similar way. To setup the interface in Linux the following steps should be completed:

• Physical installation of the card in the system (we suppose you’ve already done this step or the interface is in the motherboard of your computer; moreover don’t forget to plug in the cable as well)
• Installation of the proper drivers, so Linux can work with your card
• Specifying IP address and some other parameters, which are needed for IP network

In Linux OS network interfaces (as the majority of other devices) are set up with the help of text files, which can vary depending on distributions, for example:

We are going to review it by Ubuntu example.

Read more…

Every single user while thinking about changing operating system, in particular Windows to Ubuntu, tries to make sure that new OS will allow him/her to do everything he/she got used to, i.e. it won’t lack functionality. As you remember, we had already reviewed Microsoft Office and Instant Messaging Clients alternatives for Linux distributions, so now it’s time to check how things stand in the other aspects. In the given post we are going to find out if Ubuntu multimedia capabilities are decent enough to be compared with the ones of Windows.

It’s quite an understandable fact that each of you has favorite apps for movies, music, Internet radio and so on. Moreover it can be just one single app, which you really like, thus willing to get at least comparable alternative. Fortunately there are a lot of things to choose from, so you can easily find the one corresponding to all your needs.

Here is the full list of the most popular multimedia applications to be reviewed (in alphabetical order):

1. Amarok
2. Audacious
3. Banshee Media Player
4. Dragon Player
5. Exaile Music Player
6. Juk Player
7. Kaffeine Player
8. Listen Music Player
9. Movie Player (Totem)
10. MPlayer
11. Quod Libet
12. Rhythmbox Music Player
13. SMPlayer
14. Songbird
15. VLC Media Player

As you understand the amount of programs deserving attention is much bigger, so if you encountered a nice app that wasn’t included in the list, please let us know.

Read more…

Almost every single user had at least once encountered the situation when he/she wasn’t able to find the documentation and installation disks for all the hardware. That’s why many users when they need to download and install the drivers for a particular hardware try to find out “who the vendor of this hardware is”.

In fact it’s not as hard to do as it may seem to be. There are just 5 simple steps…

1. Find out all the hardware connected to the bus

Launch the terminal and enter the command:

lspci

The list of all connected hardware is displayed. For instance, we are going to check the vendor of Audio device. In this step we need to remember the digits located in the very beginning of the line.

…

00:1b.0 Audio device …

…

We have the following digits: 00:1b.0

2. Determine ID of vendor and device itself

Enter the following command:

lspci –n

We get the list of the same devices, but displayed in a digital way. Find the line which starts with the numbers we got in the first step.

00:1b.0 0403: 8086:284b (rev 03)

Here we need to remember (or write down) the following digits – 8086:284b. IN fact these digits represent the passport of device: 8086 – ID of vendor and 284b – ID of device.

3. Right now to find out the real names we need to visit this site.

Using ID of vendor (8086) we find out that the vendor is Intel Corporation. If we click on ID we get the list of vendor’s devices.

4. According to 284b we get the name of the device itself. It’s 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller. ID represents the link to the list of subsystems for given device.

5. Possessing all the data we can easily check the vendor’s website (or any other website with drivers) to get the driver we need.