Building a Linux home media center
HardwareBy Tom Lynema My LHMC would have to interface with my existing home configuration via a wireless network with WPA security enabled and output to my television’s S-Video or composite inputs, and it would have to connect to my media server via NFS. For my LHMC hardware I choose the MSI MEGA…
Disk usage analysis and cleanup tools
HardwareBy Mayank Sharma Some distributions set up cron jobs that warn you when disk usage exceeds a certain percentage. But when your usage gets flagged as high, it’s deciding what goes and what stays that takes time. Finding the right file or folder to get rid of can be a chore…
Linux distros for older hardware
HardwareFor these tests, I dug out Igor, an old PC that had been collecting dust in my closet. Igor is a Pentium II 233MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM drive, a 3GB hard drive, and an integrated ATI 3D Rage Pro video card with 4MB of video…
How to suspend and hibernate a laptop under Linux
HardwareBy Manolis Tzanidakis Most modern laptops use Advanced Configuration & Power Interface (ACPI) for power management, so we’ll focus on that. Since ACPI support for Linux (ACPI4Linux) is in constant development, you’ll need a recent kernel (2.6.15 or later) in order to utilize all the latest advancements. Suspend ACPI state S3 — also…
Configuring your webcam to work under Linux
HardwareBy Bruce Byfield The best scenario for configuring a webcam is when you buy an external one. Numerous sites exist for different manufacturers and models, and a Web search can often tell you whether GNU/Linux supports a given webcam. In most cases, you probably won’t find much information on the manufacturer’s…
Five fun ways to use a Linux webcam
HardwareBy Razvan T. Coloja Record yourself One of the simplest ways you can record webcam videos is with mencoder. Using the Video4Linux driver, mencoder can take input from the webcam and save it in an uncompressed AVI file. Use the following command line to record an AVI with a resolution of 320×240 pixels. mencoder…