I was fortunate enough to play Dungeon Defenders I on Android via both Google Play (before Trendy took it down) and Humble Bundle, and loved it. I’m itching to try DDII when it becomes available. With my new higher-spec laptop currently happily playing both League of Legends and World of Warcraft, I’ve become more active on Steam, and found that DDII is now available as an Early Access on there. So if you’re keen for your DD fix, take a look there. Currently Windows-only, though. :(
I have started posting up my builds of Docker.io. They are unofficial, and unsupported by the community, pending official support and code release supporting 32-bit architectures.
Some changes to the Docker.io code has caused the build script to fail, this was down to the code now using btrfs to build a driver. It has taken me a while to figure out how to fix that error message, but the script now works. You have to add this chunk of code anywhere before the main docker build
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/btrfs-progs.git
mv btrfs-progs btrfs #Needed to include into Docker code
export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)
cd btrfs
make || (echo "btrfs compile failed" && exit 1)
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=$C_INCLUDE_PATH:$(pwd) #Might not be needed
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=$CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH:$(pwd) #Might not be needed
echo PATH: $PATH
cd ..
Virtualisation, Sandboxes, Containers. All terms and technologies used for various reasons. Security is not always the main reason, but considering the details in this article, it is a valid point. It is simple enough to setup a container in your machine. LXC/Linux Containers for example, don’t have as much overhead as a VirtualBox or VMWare virtual machine and can run almost, if not just as fast as a native installation (I’m using LXC for my Docker.io build script), but conceptually, if you use a container, and it is infected with malware, you can drop and rebuild the container, or roll back to a snapshot much more easily than reimaging your machine.
Right now I run three different containers – one is my main Ubuntu Studio, which is not a container, but my core OS. the second is my Docker.io build LXC, which I rebuild everytime I compile (and I now have that tied into Jenkins, so I might put up regular builds somehow), and the final one is a VirtualBox virtual machine that runs Windows 7 so I don’t have to dual boot.
This is what I like about studying for certifications. They force you to look into subjects at a deeper level than you may otherwise have done. One of the topics in LPIC-2 is Kernel maintenance - understanding the kernel, how it works, the concept of dynamically loaded modules, compiling the kernel and modifying the configuration prior to compiling. It is very intriguing learning about this low-level part of the Linux OS.
It is a complex topic though, and compiling a kernel can take a while, depending on configuration. I managed to compile and install my first kernel today. :)
Meanwhile, since I’ve now obtained my SUSE 11 CLA from Novell (not sure if anything will come through in the post, though), I must really refresh my memory on openSuSE. My primary distributions have been Ubuntu and Fedora.
Whilst downloading various linux distributions including the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, I found out that I could download SteamOS, which is Valve’s own distribution for running its Steam platform. Problem is it only supports x64 which I don’t have (yet)
It would appear Microsoft are looking to port .NET onto Linux and Mac. Whilst Linux already has a replacement open source framework for that, this news is obviously raising eyebrows and questioning Microsoft’s long term goals.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer became infamous in 2006 after leading a Microsoft Windows meeting in a chant, “developers, developers, developers.” While the images of him clapping his hands and screaming became the target of the early social media and YouTube culture, he was right with his intention. Developers are the masters of the universe (at least in the world of software), and Microsoft gets it.
Today the company is making a rather big announcement: It is open sourcing the server side .NET stack and expanding it to run on Linux and Mac OS platforms. All developers will now be able to build .NET cloud applications on Linux and Mac. These are huge moves for the company and follow its recent acknowledgement that at least 20 percent of Azure VMs are running Linux. This struck a chord in the Twittersphere but wasn’t all that surprising when you consider how pervasive Linux is in the cloud.
