Ubuntu Tips n Tricks: July 2011

Friday, July 29, 2011

Affordable But Capable Ubuntu-powered Laptop Computers

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 05:30 AM PDT

Ubuntu, slowly but steadily, is gaining prominence in the Microsoft-dominated world of desktop, laptop and netbook computers. While this gradual rise may not be enough for your next-door Joe to switch to Ubuntu, it does however give the devoted Linux user some decent choice while buying his or her new laptop.

Recently, laptops and netbooks have started showing up in the market and are pre-loaded with Ubuntu. Though this may not be any different than buying a Windows-based laptop and replacing the OS with Ubuntu, it does offer a few advantages. Buying an Ubuntu-powered PC allows you to overcome the initial hiccups many new Linux users face, which are mainly related to hardware incompatibilities.

So, if you are planning to purchase an affordable but capable Ubuntu-powered laptop, here are some nice ones you can add to your wish list:

System 76

This is one of the most popular computer companies when it comes to making Ubuntu-powered machines. For about a year or so, they have been designing computers especially for Ubuntu and to be honest, they are actually quite good at it. System 76 makes sure that you have a completely functional Ubuntu desktop from the moment you first boot the device. They sell netbooks, laptops, servers and desktops that are reasonably priced with professional tech support included.

Being a Linux-centric company, you are offered a lot of choices while buying a System 76 computer. For example, if you are planning on buying a 15 inch laptop, you get to choose the amount of processing power, memory and disk space you want in there. You also get to choose to include a laptop bag as well as add extra warranty, battery and AC car adapter. By default, you get a one year limited warranty with full technical support.

Every System 76 laptop, desktop or netbook ships with the latest version of Ubuntu with Flash pre-installed. And mind you, every piece of hardware in that machine works flawlessly with Ubuntu. What's more, they are the folks that manufacture the world's most powerful Ubuntu device, which is Serval Professional. System 76 currently ships in UK, US and Canada. Shipping is done usually within 10 days from order. Prices might be slightly over your budget but don't forget that you get full technical support with it.

Kogan Agora Ubuntu Laptop

Kogan is an Australian company that has been manufacturing consumer electronics for quite a while. In the FOSS community, they are well known for making low-priced Linux-based netbooks and laptops. We've already reviewed their Chromium-based laptop before and we've been quite disappointed by it.

However, the latest offering from the Aussie consumer electronics giant manages to impress us quite a lot. The 12-inch laptop comes with 1GB DDR2 RAM (expandable to 4 GB), 250 GB Hard Disk and a 1.3GHz Intel Pentium Processor. The specifications are nowhere near the high-end computers that are in the market today. But, being a budget laptop, we cannot complain. Priced at just 350 USD, this little device comes with the latest version of Ubuntu pre-installed. Even though the 3.5-hour battery life leaves a lot to be desired, a fully functional low-cost laptop might appeal to the Tuxians looking for a decent secondary device.

Efika MX Smartbook

This is a laptop manufactured by a company called Genesi and is targeted towards developers and advanced users. The sleek 10.1-inch laptop comes with an 800Mhz A8 ARM Cortex processor, 16GB NAND Flash, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes loaded with Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' and weighs about 2 lbs. Like Kogan Agora Laptop, Efika MX is not a full-fledged performance machine. However, if you're looking for something really affordable then this is your best bet. Efika costs only 200 USD and can be ordered from the Genesi website.

Nufront ARM-Powered Laptops

These are two new devices, which were recently showcased at CES 2011. Manufactured by a Chinese company called Nufront, these laptop computers run the latest version of Ubuntu. One is 10-inch and the other is a 14-inch laptop, both sporting a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The 10-inch version comes with full-size VGA, two USB ports, HDMI output, and an SD card. The 14-inch one comes with 3 USB ports, built-in Ethernet, HDMI and hi-res screen. Both the devices are expected to land in the market soon. On the pricing front, expect the devices to be cheaper than the ones with Windows. So, if you are planning to get a good secondary device, you might want to wait for these. Apart from running Ubuntu, Nufront also plans to launch devices running Android operating systems.

Here's a video demonstrating the main Nufront products, which were showcased at CES 2011:

Written by: Abhishek, a regular TechSource contributor and a long-time FOSS advocate.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

[HowtoForge] Newsletter 07/28/2011

HowtoForge Newsletter 07/28/2011
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*** Version 1.2 of the ISPConfig 3 Manual ***
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The next update of the ISPConfig 3 Manual is available in PDF format (version 1.2 for ISPConfig >= 3.0.3.3; Date: 05/04/2011).

Version 1.2 for ISPConfig >= 3.0.3.3 (Date: 05/04/2011)
Author: Falko Timme
308 pages

The manual can be downloaded from these two links:

http://www.ispconfig.org/ispconfig-3/ispconfig-3-manual/
http://www.howtoforge.com/download-the-ispconfig-3-manual

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ISPConfig Monitor App for Android Phones
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With the ISPConfig Monitor App, you can check your server status and find out if all services are running as expected. You can check TCP and UDP ports and ping your servers. In addition to that you can use this app to request details from servers that have ISPConfig installed; these details include everything you know from the Monitor module in the ISPConfig Control Panel (e.g. services, mail and system logs, mail queue, CPU and memory info, disk usage, quota, OS details, RKHunter log, etc.).

Download/Usage
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For download and usage instructions, please visit http://www.ispconfig.org/ispconfig-3/ispconfig-monitor-app-for-android/ .

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We at HowtoForge are proud to announce that our new Facebook page is now available under http://www.facebook.com/howtoforge. As most of you probably have a Facebook account, we want to use this additional channel to post updates and get feedback from you. Therefore we would like you to "Like" our page, share it with your friends, post comments, etc. :-)

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New HOWTOs:
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* How To Encrypt Directories/Partitions With eCryptfs On Debian Squeeze
* How To Configure Automatic Updates On Debian Squeeze
* Using Apache2 Content Negotiation To Serve Different Languages
* Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 15 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)
* Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.6
* How To Install, Secure, And Automate AWStats (CentOS/RHEL)
* How To Take A Screenshot Of Your Login Screen

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How To Encrypt Directories/Partitions With eCryptfs On Debian Squeeze
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eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. You can use it to encrypt partitions and also directories that don't use a partition of their own, no matter the underlying filesystem, partition type, etc. This tutorial shows how to use eCryptfs to encrypt a directory on Debian Squeeze.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-encrypt-directories-partitions-with-ecryptfs-on-debian-squeeze

How To Configure Automatic Updates On Debian Squeeze
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This tutorial shows how to configure a Debian Squeeze system to have package updates installed automatically without user interaction. In addition to that I will show you what needs to be done to have the system email you about available updates on a daily basis.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-configure-automatic-updates-on-debian-squeeze

Using Apache2 Content Negotiation To Serve Different Languages
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Content negotiation is the ability of a web server to deliver the document that best matches the browser's preferences/capabilities. For example, if a resource exists in multiple languages, the web server can choose which variant it serves based on the Accept-Language header delivered by the browser. This tutorial describes how to configure content negotiation in Apache2 to serve different languages based on browser preferences.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/using-apache2-content-negotiation-to-serve-different-languages

Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 15 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)
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This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on a Fedora 15 GNOME desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8100 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop. I will use the free nouveau driver in this tutorial instead of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. nouveau is an accelerated Open Source driver for NVIDIA cards that comes with experimental 3D support on Fedora 15 - on my test system 3D support was working without any problems.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/enabling-compiz-fusion-on-a-fedora-15-gnome-desktop-nvidia-geforce-8100

Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.6
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Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 5.6 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-centos-5.6

How To Install, Secure, And Automate AWStats (CentOS/RHEL)
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AWStats is a free and very powerful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. It can analyze log files from all major server tools and convert them into nice graphical display. There are a lot of articles out there for AWStats, the reason I decided to write this one was to consolidate all the different tips and tricks I've learned through my journey into one comprehensive article associating the fantastic efforts of so many out there. There are a few methods of installing AWStats, this article will describe the simpler method of the two utilizing YUM.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-secure-and-automate-awstats-centos-rhel

How To Take A Screenshot Of Your Login Screen
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Normally you use a screenshot tool to take screenshots of your Linux desktop. Unfortunately, this doesn't work if you want to take a screenshot of your login prompt. This tutorial explains how you can take a screenshot of your Linux desktop login screen nevertheless.

You can find the document here:
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http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-take-a-screenshot-of-your-login-screen

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

5 Tiniest Linux Distributions For Your Ancient Computers

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 01:09 AM PDT

Not so long ago, IBM, in its ads, made a bold claim that read "Linux is everywhere". While a Windows-crazy fanboy would be quick to repudiate that claim, any levelheaded IT guy would tell you how true that is. Linux can run on almost any kind of device, be it a gigantic supercomputer or a tiny mobile gadget.

When it comes to normal desktop computers, every user is not privileged enough to use a Quad core beast for their daily computing needs. This is where lightweight and tiny Linux distributions come in. They are distros that use very few resources as opposed to traditional Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu and Fedora. Such distributions are useful if you are stuck with a low-spec'ed computer or are planning to blow the dust off that Pentium-II rotting in your attic.

So, without further ado, here's a list of tiniest Linux distributions that will help you resuscitate your dying PC:

Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux or DSL is a Linux distribution that is exactly what it says on the tin. It is a fully functional distro that comes packed in a Live CD taking up just 50MB worth of space. DSL is specially designed to run on older machines and has a ridiculously low set of requirements. All you need is a 486 or higher processor and a RAM greater than 8MB. DSL comes loaded with popular applications like Vim, XMMS, Firefox and naim. A few years ago, Damn Small Linux was one of the most popular distributions. However, due to infighting among the project's originators and main developers, there haven't been any new releases since 2008. Also, it appears like the future of this project is uncertain; so don't expect to make this your primary distribution.

You may read our past reviews of Damn Small Linux HERE and HERE.

SliTaz

SliTaz, which stands for Simple Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone, is a Linux distribution with a root filesystem. The tiny distro boots from a CD or USB device into an Openbox desktop. Moreover, much like Tiny Core, SliTaz can also be booted from the computer's RAM. The project is new, actively developed and is quite similar to DSL. To run SliTaz, all you need is a 16MB of RAM and an x86 or i486 processor. The latest stable release of Slitaz is version 3.0 that was released in March 2010.

We have also reviewed SliTaz before, you could read it HERE and HERE.

Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution that can entirely run from RAM. Upon booting, users can enjoy a fully functional ICEWM desktop with popular applications like AbiWord, Firefox and Mplayer. Puppy Linux comes in a cute little ISO image that weighs just 100MB. As with other lightweight distributions, it has a modest set of requirements making it a great resuscitator for those old Pentium machines. The open source project is actively developed with its last release being in April 2011. To run the puppy you need at least 128MB of RAM; however, it is possible to run it on a computer with RAM as low as 48MB.

Check out our reviews of Puppy Linux HERE and HERE.

Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux GUI desktop based on Linux 2.6 kernel, BusyBox, Tiny X and Fltk. The fully functional yet minimalistic distribution comes packed in an itsy-bitsy image of 10MB. The minimum requirements to run Tiny Core are 48MB RAM, and an i486DX processor. If, however, you have a PC with specs lower than that then don't worry, there's an even tinier version of Tiny Core called Micro Core. Micro Core Linux is a stripped-down variant of Tiny Core Linux with a graphical desktop and requirements being as low as 36MB of RAM.

The real unique thing about Tiny Core is the fact that it is an operating system designed to run from the RAM rather than the hard disk. Tiny Core loads itself into RAM from storage, then mounts applications on storage, or installs applications to RAM from storage. Hence, besides being fast, you get a clean system on every reboot. Tiny Core Linux, according to the developers, is a "nomadic ultra small desktop capable of booting from CD ROM, Pen drive, or frugally from a hard drive." Despite being designed for such a niche audience, Tiny Core is actively developed, with the last release being on June 18, 2011.

BasicLinux

BasicLinux or BL3 is a Linux distribution specially optimized for old PCs with very low configurations. The Slackware-based distribution uses a small-kernel and BusyBox to provide a low-RAM Linux, capable of performing basic tasks like web browsing and email. BasicLinux also includes MagicPoint a minimal presentation tool similar to Microsoft Powerpoint. The minimum requirements for using BL3 are -- an Intel 386 processor, 3MB RAM (yep, that's not an error), and a floppy drive or DOS. The latest version is 3.5 which can be downloaded from HERE.

Monday, July 25, 2011

TechSource's Ultimate Guide to Using Google+ (Part 2)

Posted: 25 Jul 2011 01:06 AM PDT

In the last post, we covered all the basics of Google Plus, comparing it head-to-head with its rival -- Facebook. Today, we'll be looking at some tips and tricks that will help you more efficiently manage your Google Plus account. We'll touch upon privacy settings, keyboard shortcuts, Facebook to G+ migration and many other cool things.

So, without much ado, here is the second part of our 'Ultimate Guide to Using Google+':

Profile Privacy

In Google Plus, you have complete control over your profile. By clicking the edit button on the top right, you can select which parts of your profile are visible to whom. This is an indispensable feature for users who are concerned or are paranoid about their privacy.

Posting

Like Facebook and Twitter you can post status updates, photos, videos or share links with your G+ friends. You can choose to make the posts public or limit them to your circles. You can also format your posts using the following tricks:

To write text in bold, wrap the piece of text within two asterisk (*) symbols. For example, * this is some text in bold *

To write in italics, wrap the text between two underscore (_) symbols. For example, _ This is some text in italics _

To Strikethrough some word or phrase, use the minus/dash sign (-) before and after the piece of text. For example, - I didn't want to write this -

Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Plus has pretty simple keyboard shortcuts for navigating the interface. Here's a list of the important ones:

Use 'j' to navigate down the stream.

Use 'k' to navigate up the stream.

Use @ or + to mention someone in a post or comment. For example, +Luke I'm your father!

Or @Luke I'm your father!

On the home screen, press the 'q' key twice to jump to the chat box.

Use the space bar to scroll down the stream.

While writing a post, press the Tab key to open the dropdown menu that allows you to choose the circles.

Press 'Enter' while on a post to start commenting on it. To end your comment, press Tab + Enter.

While viewing a post, pressing Tab also allows you to cycle through the comments.

Resharing

Like Twitter's retweet button, G+'s share button allows you to repeat posts and share them with your friends. Just click on the share button beneath the post to reshare it.

Finding People on Google Plus

There is a box at the top of the home screen that allows you to find any Google Plus user by searching his or her name. The search results give priority to users who are already in your circles. Alternatively, you can also try a free service called 'Find people on Plus'. Here, you can find and discover popular and not-so-popular Google Plus users according to their nationality, follower count, gender and every other parameter your stalker mind can think of.

Adding more people

Google now allows you to send invites to people who are not yet on Google Plus. Also, you can choose to import friends from Yahoo Mail, Hotmail (Windows Live Mail) or upload contacts from an address book file.

Moving from Facebook

If you are a Facebook junkie, you can invite all your FB friends to Google Plus using the following trick:

1. Open a new Yahoo or Hotmail account and export all your existing Facebook friends there.

2. Then in G+, go to your circles, in the 'Find and Invite' section, import them from your new Yahoo/Hotmail account to G+.

Alternatively, if you are a Chrome/ Chromium user, you can try the Facebook Friend Exporter extension.

Also, if you want to move all your Facebook photos to your Picasa/Google Photos account, you can use the 'Move your Photos' extension for Google Chrome or Chromium.

Notifications

You can set Google Plus to send you notifications for replies, follows and other updates. You can choose to receive them either by email or by SMS. Currently, the SMS service is available only in United States and India. To enable or disable notifications, click the gears icon on the top right corner. From the dropdown menu, select Google + settings. Here, you'll find all the relevant settings to enable/disable notifications.

Sparks

With Sparks, you can choose to receive articles pertinent to your interests right on your home screen. Here's a short video on what sparks is about:

Dealing with trolls, noise and other nonsense

Be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or G+, trolls are everywhere. They usually disrupt a nice and popular conversation just to draw attention to themselves. If you find a trollish comment on any of your posts, you can delete that comment or choose to report it as spam. Occasionally, when you post something very personal, you might want to disallow resharing and comments. If at all, things get out of hand, you can report abuse using the report abuse button in the drop down menu next to a post or comment. To curb the noise on your homescreen, you can also mute a particular post. Furthermore, if you find a particular person in your circles annoying you can choose to block him or her using the same drop down menu.

Backup your photos, profile information, circles and posts

Google allows you to back up all your data that includes photos, profile information, circles, and posts to your desktop. To do that, just click on the gears icon on the top right corner. Then go to Google + settings. Go to the Data Liberation tab on the left hand side.

From here you can download all your G+ data in a nicely packed zip file.

Vanity URLs

By default, Google profiles have very long names and sharing your profile with others on the Internet becomes quite a drag. To address that problem, there is a free service called Gplus.to. Here, you can convert your profile's URL into a shorter and more meaningful link.

Google Plus on Mobile

Google Plus also has a mobile version of the site that can be accessed from all the major smartphones. If you own an Android, you can download the native G+ application from the Android market. If you're on an iPhone, you can download the freshly-released G+ iPhone app from the Apple app store.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

TechSource's Ultimate Guide to Using Google+ (Part 1)

Posted: 23 Jul 2011 12:04 AM PDT

The whole world is talking about it right now and it's getting more awesome every day. It's Google's new social network Google Plus (Google+). The Facebook-killer is getting rave reviews from social neophytes and experts alike. Lauded for its simplified privacy settings, Google Plus now has more than 20 million users worldwide and the number is growing rapidly. If you just received an invite and have been perplexed by the user interface, don't worry; this guide will make you a Google+ expert in no time.

Introduction

If you've been using Facebook for a long time, you'll find minor similarities between the user interfaces of G+ and FB. But since we've already explained some of the basic Google+ concepts in an earlier article, we won't go over them again. However, let's compare G+ and Facebook head to head just to get to know those features better:

Facebook Friends List vs. Circles

In Facebook when you post a status update, everyone from your high school teacher to your 10 year-old snot-nosed neighbor gets to see it. There is no way you can hide the update from a select group of people; everything is out there in public, sometimes leading to embarrassing problems. Google Plus takes care of this problem by allowing you to sort your friends into separate categories called Circles. A new account comes with a few circles already created by default such as Family, Friends and Acquaintances.

You can create your own circles and add people there. However, they won't be able to know which circle you have added them to. So, if you want you can create a special circle for all the people you dislike and then you can be assured that the feelings won't be mutual anytime soon. Whenever you post a notice on G+, you can choose which of your circles can view the notice. This is a huge improvement over Facebook's flawed privacy settings.

Facebook Like and Plus One

Competing neck-to-neck with Facebook Like comes Google's Plus One button. Despite being new, you'll find the button on most of the sites, including ours. Also, you'll find the button besides search results in Google. Whenever you 'Plus One' an article or a search result, it will show up in the +1's section of your Google profile. Similar to Facebook's Like, you can +1 posts and comments made by your friends but they won't show up on your profile. To undo a Plus one, just click on the +1 button again.

Facebook Chat and Google Chat

Google has made sure that once you start using Plus, you won't be needing Facebook anymore. Competing head-on with Facebook's chat feature comes Google talk. On the bottom left corner of your G+ profile, you can instantly start chatting with friends from your circles. And yes, it works flawlessly across all operating systems. So long, FB chat.

Facebook Video Calling and Google Plus Hangout

On Facebook, you can leave your friends a video message, which is a very new feature. Google Plus on the other hand, goes one step ahead with an amazing feature called Hangouts. Google Plus Hangout allows you to video chat with multiple friends from your circles at the same time. This nifty little feature is really catching on as Dell is already planning to use it for customer service purposes.

Facebook Places vs. Google Plus Hangouts

Both offer a great way to share your location with your friends. The G+ feature however, is a little more advanced than Facebook Places.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Top 10 Fastest Linux-based Supercomputers in the World

Posted: 21 Jul 2011 03:10 AM PDT

Supercomputers are computers that offer more processing capacity as compared to current processing capacity, particularly in calculation speeds. They are used in various fields be it research, aerospace or accurate weather forecasts. As of now, more than 90% of supercomputers run a Linux-based operating system.

We have here a "top 10 list" of the fastest Linux-based supercomputers in the world.

Note: The rankings and data in this article are latest as of June 2011. Please note that these rankings and performance ratings are carried out regularly and are bound to change over time.

10. IBM Roadrunner

The world's tenth fastest supercomputer, IBM Roadrunner was built by IBM at the Los Almos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. It costs around 125 million USD and is the fourth most energy efficient supercomputer in the world. A computer's performance is generally measured in FLOPS, which stands for floating point operations per second. IBM's Roadrunner has a speed of about 1 petaflops(1015) with a top speed of 1.456 petaflops which it reached in November 2008. It uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating system and occupies almost 6000 sq. ft. of real estate. Roadrunner's main use is to predict whether USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. It is also used in other fields like financial, aerospace and automotive industries.

The unique thing about Roadrunner is its use of two different processing architectures at the same time, more commonly known as hybrid design. This consists of AMD's Opteron along with IBM's own Powercell 8i. In case your dual core computer's speed was never good enough for you, the IBM Roadrunner boasts of a whopping 122,400 cores.

9. Tera 100

Built by the French company Bull SA, Tera 100 is Europe's fastest supercomputer. It runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and gives an average of 1 petaflops, peaking at 1.25 petaFlops. It is one of the most efficient supercomputers in the world running at an efficiency of 83.7 %. Going back to the specs, Tera 100 comes with 20 Petabytes of storage, 300 TB of memory and the processing power of 140,000 Intel Xeon processor cores. This supercomputer includes specially designed water-cooled doors, which cut electrical consumption to half when compared with traditional air-cooled ones.

8. Cray XE6

Housed in DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), California, Cray XE6 is currently the world's 8th fastest supercomputer. It has achieved a peak performance of 1.5 petaflops and runs on Cray Linux Environment version 3. Specs include, 1536 cores per cabinet with 8 or 12-core 64-bit AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors. XE6 also comes with a Hardware Supervisory System (HSS) that integrates hardware and software components to provide system monitoring, fault identification and recovery.

7. Pleiades SGI Altix

Pleiades is a supercomputer used by NASA to conduct modeling and simulation for their missions. Its performance averages around 1.09 petaflops with a peak of 1.315 petaflops. Loaded with a memory of 185 TB and 111,104 cores, Pleiades is the world's 7th fastest supercomputer. The beast runs on SUSE Linux and has about 6.9 PB of storage space with 12 Direct Data Network (DDN) RAIDs.

6. Cielo Cray XE6
This mean machine that was unveiled in May 2010, is the sixth fastest supercomputer in the world. It runs on Linux and is powered by AMD x86-64 Opteron 8 core processor. Cielo is located in Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA and is mainly used for research purposes.

5. TSUBAME 2.0

TSUBAME 2.0 is the successor of TSUBAME 1.0, which previously was the fastest supercomputer in Japan. TSUBAME stands for Tokyo Tech Supercomputer Ubiquitously Accessible Mass storage Environment. Tsubame is also the word for a swallow in Japanese that forms an integral part of their logo. To create TSUBAME 2.0, Tokyo Tech partnered with big corporations like HP, Nvidia, Intel, NEC and others. The Japanese marvel has a theoretical peak performance of a whopping 2.4 petaflops making it the 5th fastest supercomputer in the world. It has an aggregated memory bandwidth of 720 Terabytes per second. This is a huge improvement over TSUBAME 1.0 that offered around 17 TB/s. The storage capacity is of 11 Petabytes, which can be expanded. And yes, it runs on Linux.

4. Nebulae
Nebulae is a research supercomputer located in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It runs on Linux and has a theoretical peak performance of around 2.9 petaflops. Nebulae is the 4th most powerful supercomputer in the world and the second most powerful in China.

3. Jaguar Cray

Running on Cray Linux Environment, Jaguar is currently the world's third fastest supercomputer. It has achieved a peak performance of about 1.75 petaflops and was once the world's fastest supercomputer before being overtaken by the Chinese Tianhe-1A in 2010-11. The current model, that is Cray CTX5, is an upgraded version of the popular Cray CTX4. Jaguar has around 224, 256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores with 16 GB of memory for each node. The file system used here is an external Lustre file system, which is basically a massively parallel-distributed file system that is used for cluster computing. The world Lustre is derived from a combination of the terms Linux and cluster. The file system is capable of storing over 10 Petabytes of data and has a read/write benchmark of 240 GB/s. This mean beast costs a whopping 104 million USD and can be found at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

2. Tianhe-IA

Tianhe-1A is an upgraded model of Tianhe-1 that was developed by the Chinese National University of Defense in Changsha, Hunan. Tianhe-1 stands for "Milky Way number 1" in Chinese. Both the supercomputers use Linux as their operating system and are undoubtedly the meanest machines China has ever produced. Till June 2011, Tianhe-1A was the world's fastest supercomputer before being overtaken by Japan's K computer. The 88 million dollar beast consists of 112 computer cabinets, 12 storage cabinets, 6 communication cabinets and 8 I/O cabinets. Each cabinet has 4 frames, each frame having eight blades and a 16-port switching board. The system has 3584 such blades containing 7168 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs. Like the Jaguar Cray, Tianhe-1A also uses Lustre file system for its 2 Petabytes storage system. This Chinese marvel has given a peak performance of about 2.5 petaflops and is used in carrying out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft design. The best part about Tianhe-1A however, is the fact that it is an open access computer. Which means that it will provide services to other countries too. If you're planning to you buy it for Christmas, just remember that simply maintaining this supercomputer costs about 20 million USD a year.

1. K-computer

K-computer is currently the world's fastest supercomputer. It is developed by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. According to LINPACK benchmarking standards, K-computer managed to give a peak performance of a mind-blowing 8.16 petaflops toppling Tianhe-1A off its number one spot. This beast uses 68,544 2.0 GHZ 8-core SPARC 64 VIIIfx processors packed in 672 cabinets, for a total of 548,352 cores. In layman's term, K-computer's performance is almost equivalent to the performance of 1 million desktop computers. The file system used here is an optimized parallel file system based on Lustre, called Fujitsu Exabyte File System. Being such a high-performer, this supercomputer consumes about 9.8 MW of power, that's the amount of power that would be enough to light 10,000 houses. When compared with its closest competitor, that is the Tianhe-1A, the K-computer is miles ahead and it is highly unlikely that it would lose its number 1 spot any time soon. But hey, one never knows, the Chinese might eventually surprise us with something even more amazing.

Benchmarking: The benchmarks – that is, the figures which are in petaflops – are carried out using LINPACK. LINPACK is basically a collection of FORTRAN subroutines that analyzes and solves linear equations and linear least-square problems. The computer runs a program that solves a system of linear equations and the floating point rate of execution is measured. It is currently the best way to understand how fast a computer works thus making it a benchmarking standard in the world of supercomputers.

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