The Open Source Journal

Just in case anyone ever wants to find them (or when I need to find them again...) if you'd actually like to WATCH videos in MCE, you'll need the following *64-bit* codec pack installed:

64-bit FFDSHOW Codecs

I brought my Vista machine out of hibernation this morning to discover that the physical DVD-RW drive had disappeared from My Computer. In fact, the virtual CD-ROM drive provided by Daemon Tools had disappeared, too. After a typical round of troubleshooting (reboot, check bios, uninstall driver from Device Management and reboot, etc) followed by a brief googling I discovered the solution below.

I was eagerly awaiting the newest in the series of Unreal Tournament games. I’ve followed them since the beginning, and it seems we have come nearly full-circle again with the newest incarnation, Unreal Tournament 3. The demo contains 4 game modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, vehicle CTF and duel. While I dabbled in team deathmatch and duel, most of my time was spent on regular deathmatch and CTF.

Under the right conditions (that is, with certain hardware configurations which I'll identify later) it is possible to literally double your sequential read performance from disk. That's right, I said double. All with a single command. What is this magic you ask? Read on.

Introducing PC-BSD

Is BSD ready for prime-time? PC-BSD 1.4, a desktop-centered, FreeBSD based operating system has just been released and is looking to attract attention from the growing throngs of Linux users. But how well does it stack up to popular and easy to use Linux distributions like Ubuntu? Why should anyone care about BSD, isn't it dead? Read on for more about the latest release of this up-and-coming desktop BSD, including installation and desktop screenshots.

Sometimes the machine you're working on has a little oops. Maybe the reboot command has hung and the system will not shutdown or a kernel panic has occurred and although you still have shell access, there is little more you can do with the machine. The solution is simple: you need to hard reboot the machine. But you're in Phoenix and the machine is in L.A. Like any good system administrator, you have the machine hooked up to an IP-KVM (or serial over IP, if the machine is headless), but the magic SysRq keys won't send properly. So what's a sysadmin to do?

I think at this stage in computers, RAID needs no introduction. It's a common component of servers, workstations, desktops, and even small, embedded devices. Still, there is some confusion between the different types of RAID (not to be confused with RAID levels, eg 0, 1...). So I'll begin with a comparison of these types, then move on to examples of software RAID in Linux and how it performs.

Now that the era of 1 TB drives is upon us, we're rapidly closing in on a limitation imposed by the legacy x86 MBR which contains the OS loader and partition tables. Due to the 32-bit nature of the MBR, the maximum partition size is 2 TB; a limit that must have seemed impossibly large 20 years ago, when hard disks were measured in MB and only the largest hard drives were more than one hundred megabytes in size!

What is LoggerFS?

LoggerFS is a FUSE-based virtual file system written in C++ using the FUSEXX C++ bindings. It seamlessly passes log data through the file system and directly into a database. Unlike existing log parsers, which often run periodically and scan the entire file for changes, LoggerFS takes a unique approach by masking the database backend with a filesystem frontend. When log lines are appended to a virtual file on the LoggerFS file system, lines that match a user-specified regex pattern are stored in a user-defined database. No need to poll the log file to monitor changes, simply prepare a target database, configure the file system using easy-to-read XML files, mount, and go!

Read more to find out how to use this exciting new log management solution!

In this tutorial, I'll be discussing how to use fusexx to rewrite the Hello World module that's packaged with FUSE. To get started let's create a directory called "hello_world_module":