Early look on Ubuntu Friendly – Ensure the hardware you buy would supports Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Friendly is an initiative by Ubuntu community to ensure that desktops, laptops, netbooks are compatible with Ubuntu, hence “Ubuntu-friendly”. Ubuntu-Friendly depends on community participation to verify whether the hardware fully or partially supports Ubuntu, and rate its usability based on the core components tested.

When will it be available?
Ubuntu-Friendly will be available and integrated right into Ubuntu 11.10. Early adopters and testers can have access to it by Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Beta 2 due to be released in mid-September.

The tool used for hardware testing is “Checkbox” which is accessible from the Live CD, under System Testing menu.

p/s: Visit Ubuntu Friendly page on Ubuntu Wiki, for more information.

Kudos to the Ubuntu community for coming up with this project, it’ll make life more easier in finding computers that fully support Ubuntu hardware!

Pingness.com: Free service to monitor website uptime

It is undeniable that uptime is important for business and personal websites. For example, a website with low uptime may mean that the host is having technical problem or the web server is overwhelmed by client requests (serving web pages may incur a lot of overhead)

Pingness.com service does not require sign-up, you need to submit your email address and website url, and pingness will send reports of your site downtime (if any) and when the website is back-online.

pingness

Howto solve ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host error

I’ve keep getting the message “ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host error” after I managed to finalized my CRUX linux on my decTOP box today. After enough looking into documentations, I finally found out that I need to edit the “/etc/hosts.allow” file to allow SSH connection, for example:


#/etc/hosts.allow
sshd:ALL

or for more conservative setting


#/etc/hosts.allow
sshd:LOCAL
sshd:192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0

I can connect ssh to my box normally after that.