Do you want to setup a Linux Server but without buy a real Server or without buy Windows Server license or without partitioning and installing a linux server from scratch ?
This VirtualBox hdd server image has a simple and lightweight XFCE or LXDELAMPT (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python/Tomcat) server with a preconfigured LDAPWebmin for the remote access (remote server management tool), OpenSSH (Secure Shell), Samba to manage Windows Networks and Likewise-Open that is a GUI to manage Active Directories (LDAP) with Linux. (Lightweight Direcotry Access Protocol) for manage active directories, it has GUI (graphical user interface) and it is a preconfigured
Pre-Installed Lubuntu Server configured for LAMP and Tomcat Java Servlets
* Apache
* mySQL Server
* PHP
* Java Servlets
* OpenSSH
* Samba
* Webmin
* Likewise Open (with GUI)
Super Simple to use!!
Profile Tips:
Configure the new Virtual Device in VirtualBox with Bridged Network configuration before starting VM
Once the computer boots. Login in as "adminuser" with the password "adminuser"
At the prompt enter the following command at the prompt
adminuser@lubuntu-10>ifconfig
Notice that the IP Adress in the eth0 "inet addr:" is part of the local network, the same address range as you Host computer.
In the following examples replace {ipaddr} with the result of the ifconfig command from the previous step.
You now have access Webmin Server Administrator tool:
Open a web browser on you host computer to;
https://{ipaddr}:10000
With webmin you will be able manage the Ubuntu server from using a web browser on your Host computer.
Richard Stallman and the Free Software in Foggia Italy
On 05/17/2010 Mr. Richard Matthew Stallman was in Foggia for the first time in a high school
whose name is "Liceo Classico Vincenzo Lanza".
But maybe someone doesn't know who is that man, well Mr. Stallman is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer (as wikipedia says), he is the father of GNU Project
and the father of the free software movements and the founder of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.
In the conference he spoke primarily about Free Software, the GNU Project and also talked about why the proprietary software is dangerous.
Before start analyzing these concepts I would like to focus on the figure of Mr. Stallman.
In my opinion Mr. Stallman is a person with a large magnetic personality, able to move the masses and who has a remarkable humility hardly observable in the dry modern society.
I could not believe to my eyes, Mr Stallman was there and I have also shook my hand with.
But, why is Mr. Stallman so mcuh important (not only to me) for the whole IT world?
For reply to this question I have to speak about Free Software and what I learned yesterday from him.
History of Free Software
The philosophy of free software was born in 1971 at MIT in a community that loved to exchange software and programming source code snippets from their writings, so that anyone could make changes to these programs in order to further improve and redistribute it.
This software was called free software (free as livre which doesn't stand for without costs but stands for freedom, in Italy we have an appropriate word to define it… Gratis means without costs and Libero means free …. as freedom )
At that time, the term Free Software did not exist. Then in the '80s, the community broke up because of the emergence of new operating systems with proprietary licenses, which made it difficult for free trade in software.
In 1983, Richard Matthew Stallman founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, whose aim was to produce a Unix-compatible, which is completely free and freely distributable. Although not fully developed, the project at the kernel level called Hurd software (produced by GNU) was of such great quality that System administrators often replaced the original programs of their distributions of Unix with GNU versions .
Despite that, the company chose to protect their interests and likely to play against the philosophy of free exchange of codes without restrictions.
What are the differences between proprietary and free software?
The social conception that proprietary software (which is the system requiring that software can not be shared or modified) is antisocial, unethical, and wrong may appear surprising.
In fact, people usually take for granted the definition of proprietary software. Software manufacturers have worked long and hard to convince people that there is only one way of looking at it.
When vendors talk about "enforcing their rights" or "stopping piracy", what they say is actually secondary. The real message of these statements is in the unstated assumptions (listed below) which they take for granted, being that they want that them to be accepted uncritically.
These assumptions are:
--The software companies have the unquestionable natural right of ownership on their software,
and therefore have control over all its users. If this were a natural right, we could not raise
objections, regardless of the damage that may cause others. Interestingly, the United States,
both the Constitution and legal tradition reject this view, copyright is not a natural right, but a
government-imposed monopoly that limits the users' natural right to make copies.
--The only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to do, which is to say that we
(as users) should not care what kind of society we are allowed to live.
--We would not have usable software (or rather, that we could never have a program to do this or
that particular job) if we did not offer to the company the power over the users of the program.
This assumption may have seemed plausible but before that free software movement
demonstrated that we can make plenty of useful software without putting chains (or handcuffs as
Stallman often says).
If we refuse to accept these assumptions, and judge these issues based on common criteria of morality and common sense after you put first the interests of users, taking into account that users are first of all, we come to very different conclusions. Computer users should be free to modify programs to fit their needs, and be free to share software, because helping others is the foundation of society. This is the philosophy of free software.
What is Free Software instead?
A program is free software for a particular user, if:
* You have the freedom to run the program for any purpose (FREEDOM 1);
* You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs (because this freedom effective
in practice, you must have access to program source code, since making changes to a program
without having the source code is extremely difficult) (FREEDOM 2);
* The user has the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee (FREEDOM 3);
* You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can
benefit from improvements (FREEDOM 4).
Since "free" refers to freedom, not price, selling copies of a program does not contradict the concept of free software.
Another problem of proprietary software is that there may be malicious software features
which could control the installed software in the computer from remote, or install additional software without the user knowing it (the automatic update).
It is like software entering from the backdoor instead of entering from the front door.
The problem is that proprietary software is seen like a black box so we don't know what they are doing while they are in execution.
Stallman also said: “I don't say that in all proprietary software there are malicious features, some of them have this problem, others not”.
Differences between Free Software and Open Source
Sometimes Free software is confused with Open Source, which is basically another thing since there are differences in terms of ethics, history and licenses.
I will analyze only the license differences because in my opinion, they are more important.
Regarding free software, the used license is the GNU Public License (GPL). This license was created by Stallman himself; it seeks to respect the principles set out above, by introducing a copy left to guarantee them.
The term copy left means that after processing the mechanism by which free software is forbidden to redistribute it as proprietary software, you must report the changes made to the author of the software. Later, it was clear that not all developers were satisfied by this license by writing the LGPL in 1991. The LGPL allows you to insert codes in free software or in proprietary software, without affecting the final license of the software. But these licenses limit the public domain (the ability to sell changes to free software).
For this reason, new licenses were created like the BSD License (Berkley Software Distribution license), which is most diffuse in Apple world, and the MPL (Mozilla Public License) from Mozilla foundation.
Today, the term Open Source is more popular than free software.
Just remember that one of the largest companies worldwide, like Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), prefers to use open source .
There are two reasons why:
--In English-speaking areas, the concept of freedom can be expressed only with the word Free. The
word also means without costs. This confusion seems counter-productive for some companies;
--In every movement, there have always been some schism, and Free Software does not seem to
be an exception (but I hope that it does not happen).
What is the GNU Project
"In the image GNOME desktop environment!"
As Stallman said, GNU stands for GNU and not Unix. Whoever has not studied a bit of theoretical computer science will not see anything exciting in all this. In the GNU word is a hidden recursion, seen by the computer programmers as a divine programming technique…in fact, it was once said, “Iterate is human, use recursion is divine!” (L. Peter Deutsch)…but I am deviating a bit from the context of the article, I am sorry.
GNU is a set of software developed under the GPL license, which is the usable part of the most known operating system called Linux. We don't create mistakes we HAVE to call it GNU/Linux, because what the user uses is the GNU software, Linux is only the Kernel (i.e. the internal core which does the hardware abstraction and which handles processes).
Personally, I love GNU/Linux…in fact, in my computer, I have ONLY GNU/Linux.
Most known GNU software are GNOME, GNASH, EMACS, BASH and many more...
Concerning BASH, last year I developed a parser for BASH in JavaCC whose name is jBash and is published under the GPL3 public license and used in a project for the European community .
The question I posed to Stallman
How can a student, with a passion for computing, transform that passion into a real job while earning money from free software?
You can hear his answer in this video:
My personal conclusions:
Free software in public administration, schools and other public institutions in all the world, should be applied because the savings would be significant.
Personally, the answer Stallman gave to my question, did not convinced me, not for the motivations, which are noble and important, but because I imagine the difficult future for designers and developers of free software, as me, in a world where everything has a price.
It is not enough to live only by the maintenance of a free software or from its assistance.
As a student worker, I wish that this passion would turn into something profitable but in the right measure. The work for the glory is often superficial and eventually ends before arriving at a good stage of the project because of less money.
It is true that the policy of Free Software is based on the exchange of source, so someone else can continue my pioneering work, but it is also true that behind a proposed Free Software, there is not always a good basis for analysis and design…many developers of free software (as I did) have spent more time in writing the source code than in designing. This approach requires much maintenance and software costs increases exponentially (as a principle of software engineering) and software quality decrease just as rapidly.
In conclusion, Free Software is good for little/medium software without much complexity or for very big software such as software for humanity (GNU/Linux) because it should be tested and modified by a large number of people (remembering that in free software the end user is the real beta tester).
I must admit that all software, even most important, have to made available with the source code (fees may be applied and should be assigned all rights about recognition of creativity to their respective owners) to prevent major social problems such as monopoly and malicious software features.
Vincenzo Dentamaro
Thanks to: Nicole Marquez for the corrections made.
Flavio Tisi for Stallman contact.
The new sfs technology solves software dependencies and installation problems. It consists of a unique file that can be mounted as a normal file-system with all really needed libraries and files of the specific program. When mounted the sfslauncher will start the application stored into it. The procedure is completely transparent to the end user; Just double click on the "program.sfs" and sfslauncher will do the magic. Starting with version 1.0 we improved the integration: the operating system now knows the "sfs" file type as a native executable file.
The sfs packages contains only some libraries not provided in a standard Ubuntu installation, for example in a SFS package there will never be gtk+ libraries or system libraries, but only those libraries which that particular program needs to run properly and the library that are not in a normal Linux installation.Furthermore the static and dynamic linking between libraries is guaranteed, because the SFS load the GUI libraries and other important libraries from the standards shared directories (/usr/lib/ for example), rather less common libraries are loaded from the library directory contained in the SFS package, SFS also allow a system for the Dynamic Library Linking, I try to explain with an example how it works:I take 2 programs (programA.sfs and programB.sfs) both containing the same library called libraryX1.so. If the libraryX1.so is contained in the package programA.sfs when we launch the programA.sfs it will be loaded into memory, when we run the prgamB.sfs it will first seek the libraryX1.so into the mounted directory of programmA.sfs and if found this searched library, then do not load back into memory the same library, but will focus on the library already present in RAM, thus saving time of loading and space RAM.So in conclusion, unlike other technologies SFS Technology provides an interaction and a dynamic link between the libraries, does not contain standard libraries already present in a common installation of Ubuntu, is not a replacement for apt, it began as an aid to making using the software easier on Linux.The motto of Ubuntu is "LINUX for Human Beings"; well I think that the SFS Technology is a solution very close to the "Human Beings".
Thanks toNicole Monique Angelynn Marquez for the corrections made.
