Introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 was install-time encryption support where using the alternate installer one can fully encrypt their disk in an LVM using dm-crypt. Unfortunately, the Ubiquity installer in Ubuntu 8.04 continues to lack LVM and encryption support, but using Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 6 we have looked at the performance cost of this encrypted configuration on Ubuntu Linux. Rather than looking directly at the disk read/write overhead caused by the encryption process, we have provided some benchmarks to see how the real-world performance is impacted in both gaming and other desktop tasks.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_hdd_encrypt&num=1

OSSEC is a scalable, multi-platform, open source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS). It has a powerful correlation and analysis engine, integrating log analysis, file integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, centralized policy enforcement, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.

http://www.ossec.net/main/

This is pretty brilliant.

An Australia company is testing what could be the undersea equivalent of a wind farm. Their devices would capture wave energy and convert it to electricity.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080501-wave-video-ap.html

Another thing that everybody except for me probably saw last week.

Non-embedded big version here.

Not so clean.

tried to update cpan
perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::CPAN’

catastrophic errors all over the place. I thought it was just the Scalar List Utils error from a while ago, but Perl is hoaked - feeds you back pages of

/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:420:24: error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory

until you run:

apt-get install libc6-dev


Or apparently you need to install the build-essential package.

Ok, so you still need to install Scalar List Utils (because the XS version isn’t included)
Then install Compress-Zlib, and to do that, manually install all the prereqs.

PITA.

Ubuntu 8.04 was officially released as production code on Friday. I’d already been running beta versions of it on two laptops (or the wife was, I should say) so I felt that I pretty much was ready to take my production laptop to it as soon as it hit general release code.

All the public distribution sites were swamped, of course, but it was pretty easy to snag it via Ubuntu’s official torrent.

I burnt the iso out to CD and did a full clean install from it. It nice how little there is to backup when you run all your work through a windows virtual machine and all your personal life data lives on web based applications.

On my Dell D620, it loaded fine, detected all hardware, and was ready to go in about 15 minutes. I ran Envy to get the newest video drivers (nice that it’s included in packages now), and then followed the instructions for making VMWare workstation support the newest 2.6 kernel.

Encrypted LVM didn’t seem to be an option on my build, so I didn’t do it even though I’d been planning on it.

Also, Firefox Beta 3 started refusing to remember my bookmarks. I probably caused that by resetting it back to defaults initially, but got tired of that fast and moved by to Firefox 2. Really, probably should included a default browser in a distro that hasn’t made it to a general release.. but that’s just like my opinion, man.

Also, default fonts always seem sucky - am I the only one who notices?

I’ve been a big fan of the $9.99 special wireless routers for a while, but I’ve started having problems recently. I’m not sure if it’s because everybody in the neighborhood is buying fios and all the lame actiontek routers are being installed with the wifi enabled, but for whatever reason I’ve been having a hard time associating and staying associated with my ap for a while. In the last couple days it’s gotten really bad, to the point where I’d put in the wpa shared key and retry for twenty minutes before being able to get on.

I decided what I needed to do was get some reasonable router and put some nice stable package on it like dd-wrt.

Digging through the dd-wrt forums, it looked like the recommended highest performance router was the Asus 500g Premium. I found it at NewEgg for $79, not a bad deal at all.

Factory out of the box, it’s a pretty neat little router - it’ll take an external hard drive, act as a UPNP stream server, print server, run bittorrent apps, fileshare, streaming webcam, etc.

Instructions for installing the dd-wrt firmware are here. I accidentally followed the ones for a slightly different model and did a bunch of tftp prep files that were entirely unnecessary, but ultimately had it running in ten minutes.

It’s pretty amazing the stuff people are doing on these little routers - here’s a bunch of prepackaged apps ready to be installed. If you want, you could run just about anything on this little device.

And only fair to say that I was reminded and inspired by this project.

“Atom” is the brand name for Intel’s newly-launched ultramobile processor line, but it could just as well be the name for Intel’s next-generation 45nm microarchitecture. This new core microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, forms the basic building block from which Intel will assemble the brains for everything from high-end servers to svelte notebooks. Insofar as Nehalem represents a lot more than just a new processor, it’s a significant shift for Intel at almost every level.

What you need to know about Intel’s Nehalem CPU: Page 1

This is the type of chart only a true geek could make.

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

The Internet? Bah! | Newsweek.com