Nextcloud is a quality opensource alternative for commercial and “free” file-sharing and cloud platforms. It is originally based on ownCloud (initially released in 2010) and was forked to Nextcloud by the original developer Frank Karlitschek. The software is developed with security in mind, and the basic idea is to keep all the data under the […]
Everybody knows these basic keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. But there’s much more to them! With these handy tips, you can copy-paste more efficiently than ever before. The tips are convenient for all Linux and Gnome users in particular, as most of the shortcuts work out-of-the-box. There is no need to […]
Very often, using keyboard shortcuts in terminal is much faster than using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Master these keyboard shortcuts to become a terminal ninja!
Linux users, software developers and power users alike spend a lot of time in the command-line prompt. The default Bash shell that ships in most Linux distributions have stayed pretty much unchanged for years and years. We wanted to explore how to improve the every day command-line experience, and eventually came very fond of the […]
Most Linux distributions ship the hard drive partition tool fdisk by default. Knowing how to use it is a good skill for every Linux system administrator since having to rescue a system that has disk issues is a very common task. If the admin is faced with a prompt in a rescue mode boot, often […]
A couple years back we wrote a guide on how to create good OpenPGP/GnuPG keys and now it is time to write a guide on SSH keys for much of the same reasons: SSH key algorithms have evolved in past years and the keys generated by the default OpenSSH settings a few years ago are […]
Back in 2012 we blogged about Meego/Mer/Nemo, Android for x86 and other Linux operating systems for touchscreens and tablets. Back in the day we also compared Ubuntu Unity vs. Gnome 3 and which would work better as a touch operated system, and Gnome 3 was clearly the more mature system. Since then Ubuntu has dropped Unity […]
Btrfs is probably the most modern filesystem of all widely used filesystems on Linux. In this article we explain how to use Btrfs as the only filesystem on a server machine, and how that enables some sweet capabilities, like very resilient RAID-1, flexible adding or replacing of disk drives, using snapshots for quick backups and […]
Today, 6th of June we celebrate World IPv6 day. Ipv6 is the new standard for IP protocols. IPv6 is important because, as everyone by now should know, the public IPv4 address space is running out. In fact all IPv4 address blocks have already been mostly consumed by registrars and the resource problem is being avoided […]
How to fix black screen after login in Ubuntu 14.04? (Ohje suomeksi lopussa.) A lot of Linux-support customers have contacted us recently asking to fix their Ubuntu laptops and workstations that suddently stopped working. The symptom is that after entering the username and password in the login screen, they are unable to get in. Instead […]
With billions of devices produced, Android is by far the most common Linux-based mobile operating system to date. Of the less known competitors, Ubuntu phone and Jolla are the most interesting. Both are relatively new and neither one has quite yet all the features Android provides, but they do have some areas of innovation where […]
OpenFOAM (Open source Field Operation And Manipulation) is a numerical CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) solver and a pre/postprocessing software suite. Special care has been taken to enable automatic parallelization of applications written using OpenFOAM high-level syntax. Parallelization can be further extended by using a clustering software such as OpenMPI that distributes simulation workload to multiple […]
Do you want to make a computer function as a WLAN base station, so that other computers can use as it as their wifi access point? This can easily be done using the open source software Hostapd and compatible wifi hardware. This is a useful thing to do if computer acting as a firewall or […]
Would you like to have the easy of use of cloud storage and file syncing but without the trust issues or costs that come with using public cloud services? Do you like Dropbox but hesitate to use it? What you might be looking for is OwnCloud, the open source software you can run to host […]
As of today, Microsoft has officially ended the support for Windows XP and it will no longer receive any security updates. Even with the updates, XP has never been a secure platform and by now users should really stop using it. But what should people install instead? Our recommendation is Lubuntu. Windows XP has finally […]
The officially supported collection of software in SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 11 Service Pack 3 does not contain all conceivable Linux software, but in the Open Build System there are tons of software that is build for SLES 11SP3. Installing these software packages and repositories is of course on your own risk, as they are […]
Seravo salad is a monthly event where we discuss relevant subjects related to open source and the Internet, while the attendees enjoy a healthy salad lunch. The event is organized in cooperation with Hub Tampere. This tradition started during the autum of 2013 and the presentations so far have been about our customer cases, social […]
The first device running SailfishOS, the successor of Meego, has finally been released. It’s elegant and beautiful both on the outside and inside. It has multiple unique features that makes it unlike any mobile device we’ve seen so far. We have been waiting for Jolla to release their phone for more than a year and […]
IT isn’t typically considered to be very environmentally friendly or cheap but The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation’s (FANC’s) strategy to use open source software has helped them achieve both. The issue of environmentally friendly IT is actively discussed at the The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto). There are a number of web […]
What do you need for a secure and well managed Linux environment? SUSE and Seravo presents SUSE Finland and Seravo Oy will have a joint SUSE event in Tampere on Wednesday 2013-11-20 starting at 13:00. The event is in Finnish and more details can be found in the COSS.fi calendar, which is the primary listing […]
For a multitude of reasons ranging from user conversion rate to search engine ranking, it is important for web sites to load fast. The first rule of thumb to having fast loading pages is to keep the amount of data the users need to transfer small. The smaller the web page file and its dependencies […]
Update October 2013: We bought a new Dell XPS 13 in October with Ubuntu pre-installed but unfortunately it seems to have problems with the wireless: wifi connections seem to disconnect at random and thus wifi is useless. We found out that the in the new laptop shipped to us this fall the Intel wifi card […]
Most Android phone manufacturers provide operating system upgrades, so you can run the latest version of Android even with an older smart phone. With closed software phones like iPhone this is not possible, since Apple wants to force its customers into always buying a new phone. However not all Android phone manufacturers provide upgrades, or […]
The SUSE Roadshow will visit six locations in Finland. Seravo Oy will be co-hosting the event at Tampere, where it will be held at Bravo Plaza, which is located just next to our office at the Finlayson area. Lately SUSE has released several new products (all of course based on open source software) and there will […]
The Library Directory (hakemisto.kirjastot.fi) is to our knowledge the first completely open public sector IT project in Finland. Not only is the whole source code is available at GitHub, but also the revision history has been public since day one and the project is open for collaboration. Anybody who finds a flaw can file a bug. Heck, […]
The Open Build Service is a great innovation that significantly lowers the barrier to package software for multiple Linux distributions. It enables building packages for many different Linux distributions at one go, both RPM and Deb based. For example the Seravo Remote support program is built via OBS for 15 different Linux distribution versions. Actually the […]
Modern touch screen smart phones are great and enables you to do almost anything, but there is one feature that older mobile phones are still better at: battery life. I imagine most smart phone users recharge their devices every other day or so, which is fine as long you have easy access to electricity. However, […]
For some reason, which we where unable to find information on, Google hasn’t published their navigation app for Android in Finland. However it does exist, and it works wonderfully. To install the Google Navi app, you must first uninstall your current Maps app, and then install the modified Maps app with Navi enabled, which can […]
The Linux virtualization module KVM is gaining a lot of popularity and system administrators everywhere are interested to learn about it. As many Linux users run VirtualBox to host other OS’s under their primary OS, the easiest way to get experience about KVM is to replace VirtualBox with it and thus getting used to KVM. […]
Would you like to SSH and browse a company network from the comfort of you Linux desktop, but the VPN client software is available only for Windows desktops? Don’t worry, there is a solution: relay the connection via a virtual Windows machine.
