skype tagged blog post

Splashtop to Ship ASUS Motherboards With Linux Preinstalled On BIOS

last updated May 15, 2008 in Hardware, Linux, Mozilla, News

In what I think is the biggest victory for Linux so far, DeviceVMâ€™s Splashtop Linux desktop will ship across the entire P5Q range of motherboards.

Download of the day: Skype 1.4 for Linux

last updated October 8, 2007 in Debian Linux, Download of the day, Linux, Linux desktop

Skype 1.4 for Linux has been released and now available for download. Skype for Linux is a version of Skype P2P VoIP software for computers running a Linux-based operating system. It will give Linux users the opportunity to make free phone calls via the Internet worldwide.

If you have glibc and Qt libraries installed skype should run on your Linux box. The software has been tested on:
=> SuSE
=> Gentoo
=> Debian
=> Fedora
=> Sun Java Desktop System Release 2
=> Mandriva
=> Ubuntu

Download Skype for Linux

=> Visit official site to download Skype for Linux.

Skype outage due to bad log-in mechanisms

last updated August 20, 2007 in Beyond nixCraft, High performance computing, Networking

On 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. According to official blog post it was windows update service:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our usersâ€™ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skypeâ€™s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

There was also news about some Russian crackers brought down the service. Skype has denied this rumor and assured that no malicious activities were attributed or users’ security was in danger, at any point.

This incident clearly provides few hints:
(a) Microsoft dominates PC desktop market.
(b) Application code can bring down entire network, so always consider HA ( High-Availability networking and storage) along with app code
(c) Skype does not blame Microsoft. It was their own code

What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux?

last updated September 13, 2006 in Linux, News

Update: Many issues mentioned in linked articles are no longer true. This post was originally written way back in 2006.

Nathan Willis has some good information on this topic.

From the article:

So you just bought and assembled a brand-new AMD64 workstation. The only decision that remains is whether to install a 64-bit Linux distribution, or stick with comfortable, tried-and-true IA-32. If you are seeking an easy answer to that question, I can’t help you. Running 64-bit Linux has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, a lot of the cons are out of your hands — but they’re not really Linux’s fault, either.
For starters, you should know that there are essentially no proprietary applications for a 64-bit Linux desktop. Google, Adobe, iD, Skype, and the rest of the independent software vendors (ISV) who release Linux binaries of their apps by and large do so solely for 32-bit Intel architecture only.