The pre-release release was announced with a bit of, what I hope is, sarcasm:

We are pleased to announce that there is now a version of the Flash Player for Linux that supports 16 theoretical exabytes of physical memory. This technological feat is accomplished using a bleeding edge type of processor known as a 64-bit CPU.

I feel a bit sentimental about it all. It’s weird, but I think I’m going to miss the hundreds of comments on every post gently requesting a 64-bit version. So don’t be afraid to pop in with a “64-BIT NOW!!!1!!” comment every so often, you know, just for old time’s sake.

The alpha release of 64-bit Flash for Linux is now available for download at Adobe Labs, go and get it if you dare.

Adobe Penquin.SWF blog [via Slashdot]

Digi International will update its RJ-45 jack-sized Connect ME device server. Available in December with Linux cross-development tools, the Digi Connect ME 9210 offers a faster ARM9 processor and serial data rates, while adding a serial peripheral interface (SPI), I2C, and cryptography hardware.

Yes, that is a server. And no, you most likely won’t be seeing one of those in your home office. This little devices are destined for “OEMs who want to network-enable small-format industrial equipment, says Digi. Specific examples include programmable logic controllers (PLCs), power distribution units (PDUs), and building environment controls.”

LinuxDevices.com

A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave.

It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service.

His companion replies: “When he was with me, he never did any such thing!”

Telegraph [via Slashdot]

Engadget

1. When will G1G1 v2 be available in Europe? Monday, November 17, just like in the United States.
2. At what price?Around $399 | £254 | €312 (No VAT will be applied only shipping costs!).
3. Which countries will be included? The 27 member states of the EU, plus Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.
4. Will we get customized keyboards? No, there will only be English/International keyboards.
5. Which power-plugs will be available? European and UK.
6. How will I be able to order or donate? Also via Amazon’s online-store at amazon.com/xo from where you will be redirected to amazon.co.uk.

OLPC News [via Slashdot]

• Songbird 1.0.0 Release Candidate released
  • Ars Technica review
• Amarok ported to OS X
• OpenBSD 4.4 released

In the mean while I’m going to have to leave you to download the live CD to try it for yourself.

Ubuntu

I’m a big fan of Sun’s VirtualBox. It allows me to run other operating systems (such as Windows and Ubuntu) safely and easily without having to deploy them beside my Gentoo install. Now here comes Linux.com with a quick guide to using VirtualBox from the command line (every Linux aficionado’s one true friend). You might as why you’d want to use the CLI, luckily for me the guys at Linux.com already answered that question:

The CLI works well for users who want to control a VirtualBox running on a headless server with no monitor or keyboard attached. Even desktop users, running and managing VirtualBox from the same machine, can pull a stunt or two with the CLI that they can’t do in the GUI, such as shrinking or cloning virtual disks, customizing the BIOS logo, and collecting metrics data from virtual machines.

Linux.com

First off, there’s the VPS from Linode (Linode stands for Linux Node) which comes with the following specifications:

• 360MiB RAM
• 12GiB storage space
• 200GiB data transfers per month
• Full SSH access (root)
• Managed DNS
• (and more…)
• $19.95 per month (about 14€)

I’d say that that’s pretty good value for money…  So far I’ve been extremely happy with the Linode VPS, no glitches or breakdowns and it’s fairly zippy (even though I’m in Europe and the server is in the US).  Oh, and when you order a VPS you get to choose which data centre you want it to be in.

If you do decide to get a VPS from Linode, I’d appreciate it if you used my referral code:

632bae5e8fd45745396cd410c14d94771105bc6a

I’ll be honest about it: I get $20 credit if somebody gets a VPS with that code (and keeps it for 90 days)…

Well, that covers the hardware, so to speak.

As for the software, the basic setup is this:

• Varnish HTTP accelerator
• Lighttpd web server (+ PHP + MySQL)
• Wordpress MU
• Gentoo Linux

And this whole stack is using about 110MiB RAM at the moment (uptime: 10 days and still counting) and can handle about 1000 - 4500 requests per second without a glitch.  I tested the requests/per sec using ab (Apache Benchmark):

10 000 requests, 50 concurrent:

hex-vps ~ # ab -n 10000 -c 50 http://proliferationoflinux.org/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        32458 bytes

Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   2.245 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      328850000 bytes
HTML transferred:       324580000 bytes
Requests per second:    4455.28 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       11.223 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.224 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          143077.87 [Kbytes/sec] received

10 000 requests, 100 concurrent:

hex-vps ~ # ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://proliferationoflinux.org/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 

Server Software:        lighttpd/1.4.20
Server Hostname:        proliferationoflinux.org
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        32458 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.618 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      329234598 bytes
HTML transferred:       324969496 bytes
Requests per second:    1160.32 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       86.183 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.862 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          37306.32 [Kbytes/sec] received

As you can see, at least if you’ve done this before, it’s fairly impressive. For the sake of comparison, I can tell you that before I installed Varnish, the server only did about 50 requests per second.

If you have any questions about the setup, do feel free to ask.  I’ll do my best to answer…  Also if you have any suggestions or ideas, they are also welcome.

As JP puts it on Slashdot: “In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft’s engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way.”

Andrew Bartlett, Samba Team [via Slashdot]