A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on using a Chromebook to develop on a cloud platform. Its based on a Digital Ocean remote server and like most people who wish to attach to the command line interface on a remote server I use SSH. It’s an encrypted connection over the network/internet from end to end. However being a cloud server I was wondering if it was possible to secure this a little bit more?

A chat with a friend on the way into work provided me with a solution.

The solution is Two Factor authentication a system beased on a simple premise, something you know (the SSH password in this case) and something you have (your mobile phone in this case, but it could be a secure token) which will deliver a random number.

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Most of the guides you will see using this utility mine included cover how to get Ubuntu 12.04 the LTS version working, however there is also scope within the command line to get the latest and greatest up and running. specifically the -r switch. Issuing the following command will provide you with a bare bones Ubuntu 13.04 install

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Being a few months in with my Acer C7 Chromebook as my only laptop i’ve very pleased with what it does, I do have the Crouton Ubuntu chroot installed and upgraded the device to 16Gb of Ram, however there is one core thing I miss with this setup. VMWare/Virtualbox. I find i’m often building virtual machines, usually Ubuntu to test bsh scripts or build LAMP Environments to test some PHP out with. That isn’t something i’m able to do even on the CHROOT Ubuntu environment.

All however is not lost, and i’ve found a way to get round this..

Read my ChromeOS virtual soluton

Will the believers in the desktops ever stop making this year is the year of Linux on the desktop...

They say a week in politics is a long time, well a year in the mobile phone industry is an eternity and what huge changes the industry is going through. A year ago the roost was ruled by Apple and Google, 3G was the fastest we can go and handsets were finding a stock size at 4.5″.. The world however of the mobile device is now a very different place and very much in a positive state of change..

What does the Ubuntu Phone need to succeed?

After being retired (for four years) from teaching high school Computer Science, I decided to get back into programming again. I once taught a beginning programming class using the Ruby language, and I thought that would be a good way to get back into programming. So, I decided I needed a “Ruby refresher”, and I wanted to learn more about that language than I taught in the classroom.

It’s always a pain when you forget your password, and i’ve often done it on an Ubuntu install. All however is not lost as a stock Ubuntu install its quite easy to reset your password

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With austerity being the watchword of our times being able to get as much out of that IT hardware you have is as important as ever, more so when the industry is in shift at an OS level and maybe the hardware you have isn’t quite up to the task of Windows 8?

In a bold move today Ubuntu have announced plans to move forward with an Ubuntu Phone which it is touting the interface is the difference here. This is a big statement in a marketplace which has been owned by Apple and Google for the last 3 to 4 years.

The UK got its first 4G network this month and the choices for 4G phones are thin on the ground at the moment the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 were there at launch however as a long time Android and IOS user i’m finding both operating systems at that stage of their life when they ar about features not innovation. This may well change in the future however, and you must understand these words are hard for me to say, Microsoft seem to be innovating quite a bit in the OS market, pushing the boat out and taking some risks.

My phone of choice on EE is the Nokia Lumia 920, Nokias last bi breath attempt at staying alive as a company it would seem however this is a phone developed for Windows Phone 8 in Microsoft. It is the phone Microsoft were happy to share the stage with at launch and it’s got generally good reviews.

Lets start this with the two important things the phone and the 4G..

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Unless you’ve been under a rock or are the type of Luddite who thinks the pen and paper is modern hi tech, you cannot fail to have heard about the most miss used expression on the Internet, the cloud. It’s a buzzword which every ill equipped marketing goon has latched his crayon’s onto and will mention in every presentation ever.

Put simply the cloud is the image used when tech people wanted to display the Internet outside their own network, this turned into a location firstly where data could be stored and more recently where “Big Data” is stored.. Honestly I have no idea who comes up with this stuff.

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The busiest period of the year for consumer technology purchases is reaching us quickly December is Thanksgiving and Christmas and January Sales time Cash is going to be spent and the smartphone market is a huge slice of that cash which will be spent.

Following a week of announcements what state is this market segment in?

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While this post states its the post install for the Macbook Pro it will cover any 64bit Nvidia Ubuntu 12.10 post install...

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With Mountain Lion not cutting the mustard, it was time to see what Ubuntu 12.10 offers the Mac Community so i've just installed the MAC Spin of the 64bit Ubuntu's latest offering.

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If you have installed IOS6 and your device is draining battery like no one's business then you really need to read this, i promise it will solve your battery issues. It's not the normal notifications and location services shutdown...

While being a huge fan of the GNU/Linux OS I do also live in the real world which means using Active Directory Domain Controllers and Windows networks. this week however I’ve had to build for a project a stand alone AD network. This got me thinking to a project I built for a school 6 uears ago which I did the same thing with Samba on Fedora.

Now,
For Ubuntu
Open Terminal and type
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

(Fedora 32-bit)
wget -O grub-customizer-2.5.7-i686.rpm http://goo.gl/vE2Ev
sudo yum install grub-customizer-2.5.7-i686.rpm

Even when I'm not able to update the site as much as I would like, please note the feeds Tuxmachines pulls in. In the side columns below the fold are Linux.com, LinuxToday.com, and more. On the news feed page is a wider variety.

We know the mobile phone is where it is at, we also know the cloud is the glue which binds all our devices, what if this didn’t have to be the case? The cloud is great when you are tethered to your Wifi or a mobile signal, great if you work in a big city with lots of Wifi hotspots or mobile coverage. Not so good when the office blocks access to it because of security risks, or you live in a 3G blackspot.

I've seen it discussed before, but it sometimes doesn't really hit me until I see where someone who is talking around it, completely misses it.

Of course, I'm talking about the Star Trek influence. How close are we to realizing Star Trek Technology?