The problem: there's a system that's been collecting dust on my shelf for some time now. I've come to realize, unfortunately, that I no longer remember the password for this machine. Rather than reinstall the system, I used an much easier method utilizing chroot.

The XO is the laptop produced by the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC) headed by Mr. Nicholas Negroponte. The goal of OLPC is to provide every child a laptop which they can use to experience technology and the Internet. Through the Give One Get One program (G1G1), residents of North America are able donate $400 to the OLPC foundation, $200 of which finances a laptop for a child, and $200 of which pays for the cost of delivering one to the donor. Colin Dean was one of the first to participate in G1G1, and this is his review of it.

n my earlier entry on uShare, I took a look at installing and using uShare. I'll spare you the introduction to uShare and get to the point of this writing. If you're unfamiliar with uShare, then by all means, read our review. In the article, I discussed creating an rc-script for uShare in Gentoo, to automate the process of starting and stopping it. This is beginning of a series of articles on how to package an application for Gentoo's Portage. I'm going to start by creating a more advanced rc-script than what I wrote earlier.

uShare is UPnP (TM) A/V & DLNA Media Server. It implements the server component that provides UPnP media devices with information on available multimedia files. uShare uses the built-in http server of libupnp to stream the files to clients. Originally, uShare was developed for use with GeeXboX, a LiveCD version of Linux aiming at turning PCs into small Home Theatre systems. We'll save our thoughts on GeeXboX for another time, but we do want to look into uShare. We discovered uShare as an way of connecting Microsoft's XBox360 to a Linux PC.

With Solid-State Drives (SSD) on the verge of mass consumer adoption, we're left wondering what kind of performance we're going to see from these drives. We already know SSD's require less power than drives with moving parts, but what kind of performance gains will we see? To get an idea, we took one the faster drives on the market, the OCZ Rally2, and ran it through our benchmarking process. To make things more interesting (and see how much performance we could squeeze from the technology, we're using two drives later in this article to use the drives in a RAID0 configuration.