Bits of Linux: 2014 #1

In this edition: This is the first post of a new bi-weekly series called Bits of Linux, where I share a selection of interesting articles, discussions, QA, open source software projects, new Linux devices and a dose of fun stuff related to Linux.

This is the first post of a new bi-weekly series called Bits of Linux, where I share a selection of interesting articles, discussions, Q&A, open source software projects, new Linux devices and a dose of fun stuff related to Linux, that have been published during the past 2 weeks. In this inaugural post I go back a little further to the beginning of December.

To not miss posts in this series, subscribe to the Bits of Linux RSS feed. Now let's get into it.

📰 Articles

Chromebooks Beat iPads in US School Sales For First Time

715,000 Chromebooks and 700,000 iPads were sold to US education institutions between July and September 2014, thus for the first time Chromebook sales exceeded iPad sales in US schools according to IDC.

Running bash commands in the background properly

An article discussing methods of running commands in the background and explaining what they actually do. The information should apply to most POSIX compliant systems (Linux, OS X, BSD, etc).

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world.

The Fascinating World of Linux System Calls

Let's talk about system calls. Simply put, system calls are the primary way that programs interface with the operating system. I would go as far as to say that a basic understanding of system calls is a requirement for any serious Linux user.

💬 Discussions / Q&A

I'm Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer, AMA!

Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman did an AMA (Ask me anything) answering many questions from people in the Reddit community, for example:

Q: What is your opinion on the Android platform and its openness? And about companies like Amazon that branch off AOSP...

A: I love Android and the fact that other companies are able to fork it and create their own versions of it (like Amazon and CyanogenMod.) Google really did the right thing there in allowing that to happen.

Does running Ubuntu on a Chromebook through crouton affect performance of ChromeOS?

So long as you're not doing anything intensive in Ubuntu at the same time, not really. Depends on how much RAM you've got. Crouton uses a chroot to run other Linux distros, without actually entering the chroot it won't run, so on reboot you'll only have ChromeOS running.

Before I switch to Linux, what are the biggest downsides of Linux as opposed to Win8.1?

I have done a lot of reading about why I should switch to linux and all of the great advantages that it has over Windows (not a huge fan of OSX). What are the things that I should be aware of before I make the switch? (Driver/hardware problems, compatibility, learning curve, applications, etc.) Thanks guys!

Can someone tell me how they like the HP Chromebook 14?

I won't go back to Windows, and my next Chromebook has to have same specs I currently have as a minimum, it will probably have far better.

Would you buy a premium Chromebook?

Honestly, the main selling points of a Chromebook for me are the battery life, lightness, and and price. A good triple-product of these three quantities (something like battery*lightness/price) would require the battery and lightness to go up like crazy if the price goes up.

💻 Linux Devices

First Impressions of the Toshiba CB35-B3340 Chromebook 2

Unboxing and first impressions of the Toshiba CB35-B3340 Chromebook 2 by Chrome Unboxed.

HP Chromebook 14-x030nr Snow White

The HP Chromebook 14-x030nr is an NVIDIA Tegra K1 powered Chrome OS laptop with a 14-inch diagonal HD display.

HP Chromebook 14-x050nr Snow White

The HP Chromebook 14-x050nr is an NVIDIA Tegra K1 powered Chrome OS laptop with a 14-inch diagonal full-HD display.

ODROID-C1

ODROID-C1 is the world's most affordable ARM Quad Core board computer. It can run Ubuntu, Android 4.4*, and other Linux OS systems.

📖 Open Source Software

FLOSS Weekly 319: Fedora 21

Mathew Miller joins hosts Randal Schwartz and Joe Brockmeier to talk about the release of Fedora 21. Fedora 21 is an operating system based on Linux and developed by the community-supported Fedora Project.

Kill Me Softly

Kill processes the right way: killmesoftly tries to send a SIGTERM to a process, if it doesn't die within 15 seconds it sends a SIGKILL, if it still doesn't die it reports it.

moreutils

moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.

😎 Fun Stuff

Documentation: fix formatting to make 's' happy

4 years old Maisa Roponen patches Linux Kernel to fix the tragedy so all the letters can be happy again.

Regex Cross­word

A crossword game where the solution must match regular expressions with a wide range of difficulties from beginner to expert.

Unix command line histogram

With the command below you get a visual representation of your most used Bash commands:

history | awk '{h[$2]++}END{for(i in h){print h[i],i|"sort -rn|head -20"}}' |awk '!max{max=$1;}{r="";i=s=60*$1/max;while(i-->0)r=r"#";printf "%15s %5d %s %s",$2,$1,r,"\n";}'

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December 22, 2014

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