[Robert] sent in this tutorial on how to set up USB sniffing in linux. Useful for seeing exactly what is being communicated to and from your USB devices, this ability is built into linux. [Bert], the author, shows us the steps involved and how to filter it to get the data we desire. You can specify exactly which device to capture data from. His example, shown above, is a session with an Arduino.
Gizmodo has done us all a favor by wading through many forum posts and condensing them into a handy guide to installing Ubuntu on your Playstation 3. It covers some of the caveats of going this route. You have to backup all of your game data before starting since the system repartitions the drive. Ubuntu installs without any problem, but because the cell processor is a PowerPC architecture it means not everything has been ported to it. There are a few things you need to install to get the Sixaxis controller to be recognized as a joystick. Super Nintendo emulator SNES9X is available and works, mostly. It doesn’t support fullscreen and cries if you reconfigure the buttons.
Supporting developers through alternate operating systems isn’t new to Sony. With the original Playstation, they released Net Yaroze, a consumer grade dev kit. The Playstation 2 was the first time they officially supported Linux on a game console (our first Linux machine). The ground breaking thing about the Playstation 3 was bundling in Linux support with every single console; no specialized hardware needed. Unfortunately they’re not near as open with the PSP.
Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O’Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.
Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.
[via Waxy]
[photo: nrkbeta]
The target release date may be over five months out, but the Ubuntu team is already pushing the first alphas of Jaunty Jackalope out the door. The new release is not for the weak and is intended solely for people who want to vet bugs and contribute to the project. The release is designed to bring Ubuntu back in line with Debian. One of the areas they’re working on is the ARM port (we saw the Debian version on the G1).
[photo: Kordite]
[via Download Squad]
The Boxee blog has recently announced that they have finally released a Linux version. So far, only Ubuntu 7.10 through 8.04 support is available. We covered Boxee when they released their alpha version a few months ago. One of the unique things we found about it was the added social layer that allows the user to share their viewing and listening information on various social networking sites.
This XBMC based media streamer has won a lot of praise lately and we are excited to finally see it step into the Linux platform. Up until now, Boxee was strictly run on OSX 10.5 and thus bound to Apple’s hardware configurations. Once they get a stable version running, it will be extremely easy for anyone to build a media streamer from an old PC with various hardware configurations.
Download Squad’s [Kristin Shoemaker] has just published part 2 of their guide to web development using Linux. This time around they’re installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It’s a straight forward process under Ubuntu since you just need to select the few packages in Synaptic. Once installed, she shows you how to poke at Apache to verify that it’s running. They finish up by installing phpMyAdmin and the WordPress CMS.
Having a web server installed is useful for more than just development work. Many open source tools have a simple web based interface you’ll be able to access through your local web server.
