So I have been writing this little play thing, kinda like a os in the cloud…..or not. you be the judge. Go check it out at Feekes.net/os. Be nice, its on a really slow slow connection.

1. Download file.

2. Rename the file to “update.zip”.

3. Plug your Droid into your computer via USB. On the Droid go to the Notifications bar and select “USB Connected” then press “Mount”.

4. Once the device is mounted, the SD card will show as a removable device on your computer

5. Put the “update.zip” file you just renamed into the root directory of your SD Card.

6. Unmount the device from your computer, and turn the Droid off.

7. Hold down the “X” key on the physical keyboard and the power button. Hold both of them down until you see a Triangle with an !.

8. Hold the Vol+ button then press the camera button and you will see a menu.

9. Using the D-pad on the physical keyboard, select the option to update with the update.zip file.

10. This should take a little bit. Once it’s done select the option to reboot the phone.

The phone will take much longer than normal to boot, don’t worry as it is normal

No I’m not picking my nose. Thanks for that Vimeo. NOTE: I say 2.1, thats obviously not what I mean.

Android 2.0.1 Update from Chris Fikes on Vimeo.

Fedora 12 demonstrates sandbox for desktop applications

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) specialist at RedHat developer Dan Walsh (not from Americas Most Wanted) has souped up the security mechanisms in Fedora and SELinux by adding a desktop sandbox which he’s calling “sandbox -X”. Users can run desktop applications of their choice inside his sandbox, which then protects the underlying system from any posible damage.

SELinux extends the standard Unix privilegs concept to add a role-based privilege model which, in principal, allows a user to forbid a PDF viewer from, for example, sending email. Currently, however, SELinux is mainly used to wall off server services.

Dan Walsh is now looking to change this and has designed a desktop sandbox. This can, for example, be used to run Firefox in an isolated environment, consisting of temporary directories, a unique X server instance – forwhich he uses Xephr – and a special profile which defines the revelent privileges. Currently this must be called manually.

sandbox -X -t sandbox_web_t firefox

Sandbox -X is already in Fedora 12 (+OneMillion for Fedora), scheduled for a November release, so interested users can already have a play. It is likely to be a while before it becomes genuinely user-friendly, with the sandbox currently forgetting all user settings each time it is run and also being unable to copy and paste into the host system.

Looks to be some amazing software for the security conscious Fedora user.

For months now, I have been dealing with slow transfers over ssh and smb from my home server. When I say slow, I am talking speeds ranging from 16 kilobit to 1 Megabit. Slow for a Gigabit network, slow for any network.

My server runs CentOS 5.3 64bit; Dual Opteron 1.8GHZ 4GB Memory and 8 250GB SATA2 drives in RAID5 with 3 Gigabit Ethernet connections, not a slow machine.

It all started when right after the upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3. Everything had been running smooth and great under 5.2, so naturally I start researching issues with the new kernel version, samba versions, and even new drivers for the NICs. I find a lot of people having issues with the Broadcom NICs on my server board, Asus M2N-LR. Well crap, I’m sick of dealing with the speed issues, so I order a new NIC. Intel ProServer Gigabit NIC. Great support under ANY operating system. Still nothing. Still the same slow speeds.  CRAP ! Thats all I can think. May the upgrade went bad.

So I wipe my server. You have any idea how hard it is to find a way to back up terabytes of data, trust me, its hard. Reinstall CentOS 5.3. Get all my data back on there, all my web sites back up, STILL NOTHING ! ! !  Slow as EVER ! ! ! !

I’m pissed at this point, I have spent hours redoing my server. So I make the CRAZY leap that maybe the mainboard is bad. I Order a new one. $229.99 and 3 days later, I put the board in. SAME FREAKING PROBLEMS!!!

I know its not my desktop systems, they work with other servers, but all on different networks. AH HA ! ! !

See that picture at the top. Yep, that little piece of crap Linksys SD2005 Gigabit workgroup switch was the culprit. Teach me to buy a more expensive switch to use at home, replaced it with a green series D-Link, and everything has been working great since.

You may wonder, what up with the title? I have a Spare Asus M2N-LR in box that I can’t return, so I’m giving it away. Send me a tweet to @feekes with Free Motherboard in it, and you could get it. I’ll even throw in a Linksys SD2005 paperweight.

I’ll pick the person at random in a week, and ship you the board for free.

Thanks.

***Update***

Since I had so few, I mean NO RESPONSES on Twitter, I’ll just give it away at the next tweetup.

Always odd to run a gnome in Windows, but hey, I love me some gnome apps.

Made mine at http://www.skinit.com/ get ya one if ya like.

Oh, click the image for the full thing.

Over the past two days I have received over 2000 emails, all from one sender. You might ask yourself, why don’t you just block this sender? I would, but I am required to be a member of this mailing list. The mailing list is the Fedora FreeMedia Mailing List. It sends out every ticket request, and update to everyone on the list. I can see where this was useful long ago, but this has got to stop. We at the Fedora Project need to at the bare minimum have two mailing list for this program, one for discussions, and one for tickets. Make the discussions required, and the tickets not. I’m sure most everyone on that mailing list is like me and have come complacent and just flat ignore the emails that come from this address, they don’t go to my blackberry anymore, that was a disaster. Give me one of your blackberry email addresses and let me send 2000 messages to it. It becomes very, very, VERY unresponsive and useless. Also, syncing on IMAP the deletion of 2000 messages takes a really long time.

The point, we don’t all need to see every action that takes place in the trac system sent out in an email. Lets just be responsible and check the trac system daily, I and most already do.

Fedora Document Management Login

Well, its Thursday and my wife has to do homework for her masters program. I think I will continue working on my little pet project, Fedora Document Management. PHP and MySQL based, this web based application will feature document revisions, document templates, document sharing with permissions, document locking, and some other things not thought of yet. Of course there will be a way to authenticate with LDAP before you ask. If you are a PHP programmer and would like to help, just use the contact form at the top, or heck, leave a comment, or even email me at cfikes@fedoraprohect.org.

A gentleman that received a disc from the Fedora FreeMedia Program wrote me and said:

Thank you sincerely for the copy of Fedora you sent, I appreciate it. I just wanted to tell you that it was very much appreciated. I will be installing it, then passing the disc along to someone else who may want to install it.

This is why we do it, spreading Open Source.

Fedora

This is just fantastic!!! The FreeMedia Program with the Fedora Project has had over 300 media request just over the course of today. WAY TO GO GUYS! I will start sending out my media tomorrow. I am so glad to see the interest in this new release booming. This is truly the best Fedora release yet.

Request your FreeMedia here.

Just check out the Fedora Project here.