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Linux-natives blog: Linux and open source – technology and strategy

Posts Tagged: open source

Hosting my own cloud platform with Nextcloud

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 […]

Casting Android Device To Your PC With Scrcpy

Scrcpy is a free and open source tool that allows you to simply hook your android device to your computer via usb, allowing you to cast the mobile device’s display to your computer screen. It’s available for Windows, mac & Linux, including as a flatpak, snap or deb. Using Scrcpy Scrcpy requires USB debugging to […]

Magic wormhole – easiest way to transfer a file across the Internet

Transferring files between two computers on the Internet is as old of a problem as the Internet itself, and surprisingly hard. Sending an attachment over e-mail involves all kind of hassles and does not work for big files. Having both the sending and receiving part sign up for Dropbox or a similar service, or setting […]

Partition like a pro with fdisk, sfdisk and cfdisk

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 […]

Ubuntu/Gnome on a tablet

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 […]

Secure and flexible backup server with dm-crypt and btrfs

In our previous article we described an idea setup for a modern server with btrfs for flexibility and redundancy. In this article we describe another kind of setup that is ideal only for a backup server. For a backup server redundancy and high availability are not important, but instead maximal disk space capacity and the […]

The perfect Btrfs setup for a server

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 […]

Using RAID with btrfs and recovering from broken disks

Btrfs (pronounced Better FS) is a relatively new filesystem that operates on the copy-on-write principle (abbreviated COW, which stems a more friendly pronunciation for btrfs: Butter FS). Btrfs includes a lot of interesting functionality and replaces traditional Linux disk and filesystem tools like LVM (volume manager, disk snapshots) and mdadm (software RAID). In RAID usage btrfs is much more flexible […]

Ubuntu Phone and Unity vs Jolla and SailfishOS

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 […]

Ubuntu Phone review by a non-geek

  Few weeks ago I found a pretty black box waiting on my desk at the office. There it was, the BQ Aquaris E4.5, Ubuntu edition. Now available for sale all over Europe, the world’s first Ubuntu phone had arrived to the eager hands of Seravo. (Working in an open office with a bunch of […]

Why and how to publish a plugin at WordPress.org

The first ever WordCamp was held in Finland on May 8th and 9th in Tampere. Many from our staff participated in the event and Seravo was also one of the sponsors. On Friday Otto Kekäläinen had a talk with the title “Contributing to WordPress.org – Why you (and your company) should publish plugins at WordPress.org”. […]

WordCamp Finland 2015 brings WordPress enthusiasts together

WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress, the free and open source personal publishing software that powers over 75 million sites on the web. In May of 2015, WordCamp will finally have its debut in Finland. The event is set to take place at the home base of Seravo in Tampere. WordCamps come in all different flavours, based on the […]

OpenFOAM – Open Computational Fluid Dynamics

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 […]

How to create good OpenPGP keys

The OpenPGP standard and the most popular open source program that implements it, GnuPG, have been well tested and widely deployed over the last decades. At least for the time being they are considered to be cryptographically unbroken tools for encrypting and verifying messages and other data. Due to the lack of easy-to-use tools and […]

10 reasons to migrate to MariaDB (if still using MySQL)

The original MySQL was created by a Finnish/Swedish company, MySQL AB, founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael “Monty” Widenius. The first version of MySQL appeared in 1995. It was initially created for personal usage but in a few years evolved into a enterprise grade database and it became the worlds most popular open […]

A guide to modern WordPress deployment (part 2)

Recently we published part one in this series on our brand new WordPress deployment platform in which we covered some of the server side technologies that constitute our next-gen WordPress platform. In part 2 we’ll be briefly covering the toolkit we put together to easily manage the Linux containers that hold individual installations of WordPress. […]

Turn any computer into a wireless access point with Hostapd

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 […]

Host your private cloud easily using ownCloud

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 […]

Open source for office workers

Open source software is great and it’s not only great for developers who can code and use the source directly. Open source is a philosophy. Open source is for technology like what democracy is for society: it isn’t magically superior right away, but it enables a process which over time leads to best results – […]

Jolla and Sailfish Hack Day 2014-03-29

Due to popular demand we are organizing a second event! Would you like to learn how to write a Sailfish OS app and get it into the Jolla store? Or are you already working on a Sailfish app but need help with it? Join us on Jolla and Sailfish Hack Day to code and learn […]

Installing Node.js on SUSE Linux Enterprise

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 […]

Top 8 features and priorities for company websites in 2014

What makes a good website in 2014? Here are the top 8 most important priorities a business website must have to be successful and competitive today. 1. Responsive design The share of mobile devices is growing all the time so websites are required to work on devices of all sizes. Responsive design means that the […]

Jolla and Sailfish Hack Day 2014-02-22

Would you like to learn how to write a Sailfish OS app and get it into the Jolla store? Or are you already working on a Sailfish app but need help with it? Join the Jolla and Sailfish Hack Day to code and learn from other SailfishOS and QML enthusiasts. And if you already have […]

Seravo salad spring 2014 schedule

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 […]

FANC: Ecological and economical IT

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 […]

Past, present and future of VALO-CD

The VALO-CD is a project with the mission of making it as easy as possible for any average home of office user to start using Free and Open Source Software. Traditionally open source software has been a thing only known by computer enthusiasts while the average Joe has only known about (closed source) software from big […]

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Tips to optimize images for faster loading websites

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 […]

6 reasons to learn JavaScript

Presentation held at Happy Hacking Day 2013 at Haaga-Helia in Helsinki, Finland. In a nutshell, the six reasons to learn JavaScript are that it is: easy: JS is a high-level language where things like type setting and compiling is done automatically, so it suits even people with no previous programming experience. versatile: JS is multi-paradigm […]