Arriving at Fort Oasis was no vacation. The community of coal miners have mysteriously dissapeared and left facility looking like a wasteland. You receive a transmission on your radio about a sole survivor…. Explore the remains of the island, craft weapons and gear to survive, slay evil minions and more.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Total Chaos in GZDoom

Note: This guide applies to the Moddb Doom II version of Total Chaos. Other versions may require additional steps.Tips & Specs:
To learn more about GZDoom, see the online manual: https://zdoom.org/wiki/GZDoom

Mint 19 64-bit

GeForce GTX 1060
Nvidia 396.54
GZDoom 3.6.0

Download GZDoom for your distro

https://zdoom.org/downloads

Save it to your computer

Double-click to install GZDoom

Click Install (Mint)

Go to your Menu and run GZDoom one time

Click OK

Download the Total Chaos Standalone

https://www.moddb.com/mods/total-chaos/downloads/total-chaos-10

Click “Download Now”

Note: There is also a “Retro Edition” for improved performance on lower spec computers.
Open “totalchaos_standalone_1000b.zip” with your Archive Manager

Select all files
Click Extract

Navigate to the GZDoom directory

Full path:

Code:

/home/username/.config/gzdoom
Click Extract

Click “Show the Files”

The gzdoom directory now has the Total Chaos standalone installed

Here is the .pk3 we will use to launch it with GZDoom

Note: I was not able to find a way to put all of the game files in a single folder and launch it with GZDoom
Test GZDoom and make sure Total Chaos launches

Open Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)
Type:

Code:

gzdoom -file totalchaos.pk3

Code should start scrolling up and the game should launch after 10 seconds…

Then you will see the title screen in fullscreen

Controls
Total Chaos is using the standard Doom controls

Update the controls to WSAD and jump, crouch, etc.

Grain Effect
The film grain effect might be a bit intense. You can turn it off in the Options, Post Processing menu

Shortcut to Total Chaos (Mint)
Right-click the menu

Click Configure

Click “Open the menu editor”

Select “Games”

Click “New Item”

Name: Total Chaos

Command: gzdoom -file totalchaos.pk3
Click the icon
Navigate to the Total Chaos icon folder
Select the Total Chaos icon
Click OK

Now you can launch Total Chaos from the Menu

Conclusion:
Total Chaos runs pretty well, but has a few stutters… It didn’t affect game-play and the developer is working on optimizing it. In fact, there is a “Retro Edition” that is already optimized for lower spec computers like laptops and netbooks.

I found the game to be a fun survival exploration action game. I love the levels, interaction, crafting and action mechanics. The developer spent a lot of time dialing in the game so it was a challenge, but still possible to have fun. The graphics and ambiance is amazing considering they are using a modified Doom engine.

Gameplay Video:

Screenshots:

Source

Take action to secure your passwords, containers, and more with these top articles from Opensource.com this year.

It’s been an interesting year for security and users. It all kicked off at the beginning of the year with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica causing people suddenly to think more seriously about their data and what they share on social media. In fact, the threat against personal data has been an important theme for the year. We’ve seen breaches at companies such as Marriott (in December) and British Airways (September) and Under Armour (March). What’s interesting about these is that the criminals seem to be targeting all levels of the stack, from the enterprise backend to the web app to the mobile app on people’s phones.

And once data is leaked, it will be put to use. There’s been an enormous rise in extortion attempts based on account data allegedly used on “adult sites” and hijacked webcam footage. This brings us inexorably to cryptocurrencies. Besides being the payment method of choice for criminals, cryptocurrency has also suffered this year, with a $13.5 million wallet compromise at Bancor in July. Bitcoin has seen huge peaks and troughs as confidence in the currency has oscillated.

Another story that won’t go away is hardware. Bloomberg Businessweek published a much-disputed story suggesting that a Chinese military agency convinced or forced Supermicro to insert tiny chips on motherboards for companies such as Apple and Amazon. Whether the story is true or not, it has opened people’s minds to the realisation that we have less control over the supply chain than we thought we did. Alongside that was another realisation: chip-related security issues such as Meltdown and Spectre, which were revealed at the very beginning of January, are likely to be joined by a never-ending set of similar or related vulnerabilities that the average user has little capability to mitigate.

With all that said, we’ve had numerous articles on Opensource.com to help you secure your passwords, containers, and more.

Reset a lost root password in under 5 minutes

Here’s how to quickly and easily reset a root password on Fedora, CentOS, and similar Linux distros.

3 password managers for the Linux command line

We all want our passwords to be safe and secure. To do that, many people turn to password…

A sysadmin’s guide to SELinux: 42 answers to the big questions

42 answers to the big questions about life, the universe, and everything else about Security-…

7 open source tools for rugged DevOps

Use these tools to build security testing into the software development process.

Just say no to root (in containers)

Even smart admins can make bad decisions.

How to manage your passwords with Bitwarden, a LastPass alternative

Do you ever feel you have more passwords than you can keep track of? It’s probably more than just a…

Source

Zabbix is very popular, easy to use, fast monitoring tool. It support monitoring Linux, Unix, windows environments with agents, SNMP v1,v2c,c3, agentless remote monitoring. It can also monitor remote environment with a proxy without opening port for remote environments. You can send email, sms, IM message, run sny type of script to automate daily or emergency tasks based on any scenario.

Zabbix 4 is the latest version. New version supports php7, mysql 8, encryption between host and clients, new graphical layout, trend analysis and many more. With zabbix you can use zabbix_sender and zabbix_get tools to send any type of data to zabbix system and trigger alarm for any value. With these capabilities Zabbix is programmable and your monitoring is limited to your creativity and capability.

Installing from Zabbix repository is the easiest way. In order to setup from source file you need to setup compilers and make decisions about which directories and features get used for your environment. The Zabbix repository files provide all features enable and ready to go environment for your needs.

If you had the chance to use the setup we have select xfce for desktop environment. If you have not rest of the installation steps will perfectly work even if you had minimal setup environment which is the cleanest environment you find for Debian.

Security First!

Login to the root user and add the guest user to soders file simple adding.

Username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Into the configuration file /etc/sudoers

You can also use

To directly edit the file with the default text editor (nano in my case)

Install Mysql

Once you create the guest user and give root privileges we can login to the user with

and start to add sudo in front of the commands to send root commands with control.

Install Mysql with following command

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Press ‘Y’ in order to download and install.

Right after the installation add mysql to the startup sequence so when system reboots your mysql server will be up.

$ sudo systemctl enable mariadb

$ sudo systemctl start mariadb

You can test if mysql is up with the following command

You should be able to login to the database server without entering a password.

Type quit to log out of the server

Install Zabbix from Repository

Once the database server installation has finished we can start installing zabbix application.

Download apt repo package to the system

$sudo wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/4.0/debian/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_4.0-2+stretch_all.deb

$ sudo dpkg -i zabbix-release_4.0-2+stretch_all.deb

$sudo apt update

Lets install Zabbix server and front end packages.

$ sudo apt install zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-frontend-php zabbix-agent

Add Zabbix Services to Startup

Once all packages are installed enable Zabbix services but don’t start yet. We need modifications on the configuration file.

$ sudo systemctl enable apache2

$ sudo systemctl enable zabbix-server

$ sudo systemctl enable zabbix-agent

Create Database and Deploy Zabbix Database Tables

Now it is time to create database for Zabbix. Please note you can create a database with any name and a user. All you need is replace apropirate value with the commands we provided below.

In our case we will pickup (all are case sensitive)

We create zabbix database and user with mysql root user

After creating database and users we create the Zabbix database tables in our new database with the following command

# zcat /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql*/create.sql.gz | mysql -uzabbix -p -B Zabbix

Enter your database password in next step

Process may take about 1-10 minutes depending on your performance of server.

Configure Zabbix Server

In order to have our Zabbix server start and get ready for business we must define database parameters into the zabbix_server.conf

$ sudo nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

DBHost=localhost
DBUser=zabbix
DBPassword=VerySecretPassword
DBName=zabbix

Time zone needs to be entered into /etc/zabbix/apache.conf file in order not to face any time related inconsistency in our environment. Also this step is a must for a errorless environment. If this parameter is not set Zabbix web interface will warn us every time. In my case the time zone is Europe/Istanbul.

You can get full list of PHP time zones here.

Please also note there are php7 and php5 segments here. In our setup php 7 was installed so modifying the php_value date.timezone in the php7.c segment was enough but we recommend modifying the php5 for compatibility issues.

Save the file.

Now stop and start services in order to have all changes in affect.

$ sudo systemctl restart apache2 zabbix-server zabbix-agent

Setting up Web Server

Now database and Zabbix services are up. In order to check whats going in our systems we should setup web interface with mysql support. This is our last step before going online and start checking some stats.

Welcome Screen.

Check if everything in ok with Green color.

Define user name and password we defined in setting up database section.

DBHost=localhost
DBUser=zabbix
DBPassword=VerySecretPassword
DBName=zabbix

You can define Zabbix-server name in this step. You want to have it called something like watch tower or monitoring server something like it too.

Note: You can change this setting from

/etc/zabbix/web/zabbix.conf.php

You can change the $ZBX_SERVER_NAME parameter in the file.

Verify setting and press Next Step

Default username and password are (case sensitive)

Now you can check your system stats.

Go to Monitoring -> Latest data

And select Zabbix Server from Host groups and check if stats are coming live.

Conclusion

We have setup the database server in the beginning because a system with already installed packages can prevent any version or mysql version we want to download because of conflicts. You can also download mysql server from the mysql.com site.

Later on we continued with Zabbix binary package installation and created database and user. Next step was to configure Zabbix configuration files and install web interface. In later stages you can install SSL, modify configuration for a specific web domain, proxy through nginx or directly run from nginx with php-fpm, upgrade PHP and such things like things. You may also disable Zabbix-agent in order to save from database space. It is all up to you.

Now you can enjoy monitoring with Zabbix. Have a Nice Day.

Source

Btrfs or B-tree file system is the newest competitor against OpenZFS, arguably the most resilient file system out there. Both the file systems share some commonalities such as having checksum on data blocks, transaction groups and copy-on-write mechanism, making them both target the user groups. So what’s the difference and which one should you use?

1. Copy-on-Write (COW) Mechanism

Both the file systems use copy-on-write mechanism. This means that, if you are trying to modify a file, neither of the file systems will try to overwrite the existing data on the disk with the newer data. Instead, the newer data is written elsewhere and once the write operation is complete, the file system simply points to the newer data blocks and the old blocks get recycled over time. This mechanism allows both the file systems to have features like snapshots and cloning.

COW also prevents edge cases like partial writes,which can happen due to kernel panic or power failure and potentially corrupt your entire entire file system. With COW in place, a write has either happened or not happened, there’s no in between.

2. Pooling and RAID

Both the file systems intend on eliminating the need of a volume manager, raid and other abstractions that sit between the file system and the disks. This is more robust and reliable than having a hardware RAID controller, simply because it eliminates a single point of failure — The RAID controller itself.

OpenZFS offers a stable, reliable and user-friendly RAID mechanism. You can mirror between drives, use RAIDZ1 which spreads your data across 3 or more disk with one parity block. So it can withstand upton 1 disk’s failure per Vdev. Similarly, RAIDZ2 can use 4 or more disks and withstand upto 2 disks failing and similarly we have RAIDZ3.

Btrfs too has these features implemented, the difference is simply that it calls them RAID, instead of RAIDZ and so on. Some more complicated RAID array setups like RAID56 are buggy and not fit for use, at the time of this writing.

3. Licensing

One of the reasons OpenZFS came so late on the GNU/Linux ecosystem is because of its license incompatibility with GNU GPL. Without getting into too much details, Btrfs is under GPL which allows users to take source code and modify it, but the modifications should also be published under GPL and stay open source.

OpenZFS on the other hand, is licensed under CDDL which is much more permissive and allows users to modify and distribute code with a greater degree of freedom.

4. Communities and Companies Behind Them

OpenZFS has a massive community behind it. FreeBSD community, Illumos community and many other open source projects rely on OpenZFS and thus contribute back to the file system. It has grown several fold in terms of code base, user base, features and flexibility ever since its inception. Companies like Delphix, iXsystems, Joyent and many more rely on it and have their developers work on because it is a core component of their business. Many more organizations might be using OpenZFS without our knowledge, thanks to the CDDL license, they don’t have to come forth and say out-right that they use it.

Btrfs had Red Hat as one of the main steward of its community. However, that recieved a major blow a while back when Red Hat deprecated the filesystem this means you won’t be seeing it in any future RHEL and the company won’t provide commercial support for it out-of-the-box. SUSE, however, has gone so far as to make it their default and their is still a thriving community behind the file system with contributions from Facebook, Intel and other 800 pound gorillas of the Silicon Valley.

5. Reliability

ZFS was designed to be reliable right from the beginning. People have zpools dating back to the early 2000s that are still usable and guaranteed to not return erroneous data silently. Yes, there has been a few snafus with files disappearing on for OpenZFS on Linux but given its long history the track record has been surprising clean.

Btrfs, on the other hand, has had issues right from the beginning. With buggy interfaces to straight up data loss and file corruption. Even now, it is bit of a laughing stock in the community. Make of that what you will.

6. Supported OSes

Btrfs has had its origin has a file system for Linux while ZFS was conceived inside Sun, for Solaris OS. However, OpenZFS has long since been ported to FreeBSD, Apple’s OS X, open source derivatives of Solaris. It’s support for Linux came a little later than one would have predicted, but it is here and corporations rely on it. A project for making it run on Microsoft Windows is also making quite a bit of progress, although it is not quite there yet.

Conclusion: A Note on Monocultures

All of this talk may convince you to use OpenZFS to keep your data safe, and that is not a bad course of action. It is objectively better than Btrfs in terms of features, reliability, community and much more. However, in the long run this might not be good for the open source community, in general.

In a post titled similar to this one, the author talks about the dangerous of monocultures. I encourage you to go through this post. The gist of it is this — Options are important. One of the greatest strength of Open Source software (and software, in general)is that we have multiple options to adopt. There’s Apache and then there’s Nginx, there are BSDs and Linux, there is OpenSSL and there is LibreSSL.

If there is a fatal flaw in any of these key technologies, the world will not stop spinning. But with the prevalence of OpenZFS, the storage technology has turned into something of a monoculture. So, I would very much like for the developers and system programmers who are reading this, to adopt not OpenZFS but projects like Btrfs and HAMMER.

Source

In early 2019 we will see the first stable release of GCC 9 as the annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection that is bringing the D language front-end, more C2X and C++ additions, various microarchitecture optimizations from better Znver1 support to Icelake, and a range of other additions we’ll provide a convenient recap of shortly. But for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance is looking, here are some fresh benchmarks when benchmarking the latest daily GCC 9.0 compiler against GCC 7.4 and GCC 8.2 atop Clear Linux using an Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-X system.

Similar to the few other tests we’ve done at different times throughout the years and on different hardware, this article is a last look as we end out 2018 to see how the GCC9 performance is looking on Intel x86_64 compared to the past two major releases. When the formal GCC 9.1.0 compiler release nears its debut around the end of Q1-2019, I’ll be back with plenty more compiler benchmarks on different CPUs. Of course, there will also be benchmarks of the upcoming LLVM Clang 8.0 release that should be out roughly around the same time as GCC9 stable.

All of this testing was done when building GCC 7.4 / 8.2 / 9.0 from source on Clear Linux and the compiler releases configured using “–disable-multilib –enable-checking=release” and keeping the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS the same throughout building all of the open-source benchmarks used for evaluating the performance of the resulting binaries. Going back further than GCC 7 was not possible on this system due to Glibc issues. The Phoronix Test Suite was used for automating this process, as always.

Source

Port scanning is a process to check open ports of a PC or a Server. Port scanners are often used by gamers and hackers to check for available ports and to fingerprint services. There are two types of ports to scan for in TCP/IP Internet Protocol, TCP(Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP(User Datagram Protocol). Both TCP and UDP have their own way of scanning. In this article, we’ll look at how to do port scan in Linux environment but first we’ll take a look at how port scanning works. Note that port scanning is illegal in often countries, make sure to check for permissions before scanning your target.

TCP Scanning

TCP is stateful protocol because it maintains the state of connections. TCP connection involves a three-way handshaking of Server socket and client-side socket. While a server-socket is listening, the client sends a SYN and then Server responds back with SYN-ACK. Client then, sends ACK to complete the handshake for the connection

To scan for a TCP open port, a scanner sends a SYN packet to the server. If SYN-ACK is sent back, then the port is open. And if server doesn’t complete the handshake and responds with an RST then the port is closed.

UDP Scanning

UDP on the other hand, is a stateless protocol and doesn’t maintain the state of connection. It also doesn’t involve three-way handshake.

To scan for a UDP port, a UDP scanner sends a UDP packet to the port. If that port is closed, an ICMP packet is generated and sent back to the origin. If this doesn’t happen, that means port is open.

UDP port scanning is often unreliable because ICMP packets are dropped by firewalls, generating false positives for port scanners.

Port Scanners

Now that we’ve looked at how port scanning works, we can move forward to different port scanners and their functionality.

Nmap

Nmap is the most versatile and comprehensive port scanner available till now. It can do everything from port scanning to fingerprinting Operating systems and vulnerability scanning. Nmap has both CLI and GUI interfaces, the GUI is called Zenmap. It has a lot of varying options to do quick and effective scans. Here’s how to install Nmap in Linux.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install nmap -y

Now we’ll use Nmap to scan a server (hackme.org) for open ports and to list services available on those ports, its really easy. Just type nmap and the server address.

To scan for UDP ports, include -sU option with sudo because it requires root privileges.

There are a lot of other options available in Nmap such as:

-p- : Scan for all 65535 ports
-sT : TCP connect scan
-O : Scans for operating system running
-v : Verbose scan
-A : Aggressive scan, scans for everything
-T[1-5] : To set the scanning speed
-Pn : In case the server blocks ping

Zenmap

Zenmap is a GUI interface of Nmap for click-kiddies so that you won’t have to remember its commands. To install it, type

sudo apt-get install -y zenmap

To scan a server, just type its address and select from available scan options.

Netcat

Netcat is a raw TCP and UDP port writer which can also be used as a port scanner. It uses connect scan that’s why it is not so fast like Network Mapper. To install it, type

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt install netcat-traditional -y

To check for an open port, write

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ nc -z -v hackme.org 80
…snip…
hackme.org [217.78.1.155] 80 (http) open

To scan for a range of ports, type

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ nc -z -nv 127.0.0.1 20-80
(UNKNOWN) [127.0.0.1] 80 (http) open
(UNKNOWN) [127.0.0.1] 22 (ssh) open

Unicornscan

Unicornscan is a comprehensive and fast port scanner, built for vulnerability researchers. Unlike Network Mapper, it uses its own User-land Distributed TCP/IP stack. It has a lot of features that Nmap doesn’t, some of them are given,

• Asynchronous stateless TCP scanning with all variations of TCP Flags.
• Asynchronous stateless TCP banner grabbing
• Asynchronous protocol specific UDP Scanning (sending enough of a signature to elicit a response).
• Active and Passive remote OS, application, and component identification by analyzing responses.
• PCAP file logging and filtering
• Relational database output
• Custom module support
• Customized data-set views

To install Unicornscan, type

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install unicornscan -y

To run a scan, write

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo us 127.0.0.1
TCP open ftp[ 21] from 127.0.0.1 ttl 128
TCP open smtp[ 25] from 127.0.0.1 ttl 128
TCP open http[ 80] from 127.0.0.1 ttl 128
…snip…

Conclusion

Ports scanners come in handy whether you are a DevOp, Gamer or a Hacker. There is no real comparison between these scanners, none of them is perfect, each of them has its benefits and drawbacks. It completely depends upon your requirements and how you use them.

Source

Being a systems administrator is not an easy job. Sysadmins often have to design, build, monitor, and maintain a large array of disparate services running on a patchwork of platforms. Most sysadmins come into the field by happy accident, so they sometimes lack formal, organized training on the toolsets.

With these high demands and uneven starting points, it’s no wonder that many of 2018’s top sysadmin articles on Opensource.com take a look at tools sysadmins may already be familiar with. Most Linux admins already have some familiarity with the Bash shell, but it has a lot of configuration options. Who has time to explore them all? And most sysadmins know networking, but there’s always something new to learn there, too.

But this year’s articles aren’t just about leveling current sysadmins’ knowledge. The abstractions provided by containers and serverless environments mean that developers sometimes end up being their own sysadmins. This year’s best articles are valuable whether you’re a developer learning to administer your environment or a sysadmin looking for more insight on the cutting edge of modern computing.

Top 10 sysadmin tools, guides, and how to’s

10 killer tools for the admin in a hurry

Administering networks and systems can get very stressful when the workload piles up. Nobody really…

A sysadmin’s guide to containers

What you need to know to understand how containers work.

A sysadmin’s guide to network management

A reference list of Linux utilities and commands makes managing servers and networks easier.

How to use Ansible to patch systems and install applications

Learn how to save time doing updates with the Ansible IT automation engine.

A sysadmin’s guide to Bash

Tips and tricks for making the Bash shell work better for you.

4 open source monitoring tools

Here’s what you need to know about time-series data and metrics aggregation tools.

A sysadmin’s guide to Ansible: How to simplify tasks

There are many ways to automate common sysadmin tasks with Ansible. Here are several of them.

7 open source platforms to get started with serverless computing

Serverless computing is transforming traditional software development. These open source platforms…

3 open source log aggregation tools

How is metrics aggregation different from log aggregation? Can’t logs include metrics? Can’t log…

How to be the lazy sysadmin

Work smarter, not harder, and still do your job well.

Source

On Christmas Eve marked the long-awaited release of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha and with that new version of the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived operating system came an AMD Zen “Znver1” optimized Linux build. Of course that caught my interest and I was quickly downloading this first Linux distribution with an AMD Ryzen/EPYC optimized binaries to see how it compares to its generic x86_64 operating system installation.

The AMD Zen optimized version of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 caters its compiler flags to these latest AMD processors and other tuning to try to improve the experience. (There are some more details on the design changes with their Znver1 build in our forums.) This AMD Zen optimized build not only has the stock OS image rebuilt for Zen but a copy of its entire package archive re-built with Zen optimizations as an alternative to their generic Intel/AMD x86_64 package repository. It perhaps would be interesting if they pursued Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) and other compiler techniques for optimizations moving forward. But for users, simply download and install the OpenMandriva Znver1 image and if you are off to the races with AMD Zen optimizations by default.

The concept of an optimized Linux OS build catered towards a particular CPU microarchitecture is not new, but the first time we are seeing a major Linux distribution offer such for AMD Zen. On the Intel side the most prominent example is Intel’s own Clear Linux platform out of their Open-Source Technology Center. With Clear Linux they take performance to the extreme of just not catering the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS and other basic tunables towards recent Intel microarchitectures but with their engineering resources they have also worked on various patches to the Linux kernel, Glibc, GCC, and other key open-source components. The Intel OTC work also ends up landing back upstream in the respective projects but for finding the leading Intel Linux performance is generally first found on Clear Linux. In our comparisons where putting Clear Linux up against a variety of other major Linux distributions, it can usually beat out the competition at least 60% of the time in multi-way Linux OS comparisons when running on recent Intel hardware but even its performance on AMD hardware tends to pack quite a punch too. Thus with seeing the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha 1 having a Znver1 build made me quite anxious to run some Christmas day benchmarks.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha 1 has the Linux 4.18 kernel, KDE Plasma 5.14.4, X.Org Server 1.20.3, Mesa 18.3.1 and EXT4 by default. But not all of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 tunables are in the name of performance as for example on both Alpha 1 builds they are defaulting to the CPUFreq conservative governor, which tends to be slower than the likes of CPUFreq performance or even ondemand.

For this initial OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 benchmarking, an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X system was used for this testing powered by the Phoronix Test Suite.

Source

VirtualBox is a free virtualization solution from Oracle. VirtualBox can virtualize Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 10, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and many other versions of Linux, Solaris, some BSD variants etc. Recently, VirtualBox 6.0, a major update of VirtualBox came out. In this article, I will show you how to install VirtualBox 6.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This article mainly focuses on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but this article will also work for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and later. So, let’s get started.

Enable Hardware Virtualization:

Before you install VirtualBox 6.0, make sure hardware virtualization is enabled. If you’re using an Intel processor, then you have to enable VT-x or VT-d from the BIOS of your computer. If you’re using a AMD processor, then you have to enable AMD-v from the BIOS of your computer. This is very important. Without hardware virtualization enabled, your virtual machines will perform very badly.

Adding VirtualBox Package Repository:

VirtualBox 6.0 is not available in the official package repository of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. But we can easily add the package repository of VirtualBox on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and install VirtualBox 6.0 from there. To add the official package repository of VirtualBox, run the following command:

$ echo “deb https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -cs) contrib” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

Now, type in your login password and press <Enter>.

The official package repository of VirtualBox should be added.

Adding VirtualBox Public PGP Key:

Now, you have to add the public PGP key of VirtualBox official package repository to APT. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use the VirtualBox official package repository. To add the public PGP key of the official package repository of VirtualBox, run the following command:

$ wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –

The public PGP Key should be added.

Installing VirtualBox 6.0:

Now that the official VirtualBox package repository is ready to use, we can install VirtualBox 6.0. First, update the APT package repository cache with the following command:

The APT package repository should be updated.

Now, install VirtualBox 6.0 with the following command:

$ sudo apt install virtualbox-6.0

Now, press y and then press <Enter> to continue.

The required packages are being downloaded.

VirtualBox 6.0 should be installed.

Running VirtualBox 6.0:

Now, you should be able to run VirtualBox 6.0 from the Application Menu as you can see in the screenshot below.

VirtualBox 6.0 dashboard.

As you can see, I am currently running VirtualBox 6.0.0. Note the VirtualBox version because you will need it when you will install VirtualBox Extension Pack.

Installing VirtualBox Extension Pack:

VirtualBox Extension Pack enables support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for intel cards and many more. It is a must have tool for any VirtualBox user.

You have to download VirtualBox extension pack from the official website of VirtualBox and install it yourself in order to use these extra features in VirtualBox. First, to visit the official FTP directory of VirtualBox at https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.0.0

Once the page loads, click on the “Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.0.0.vbox-extpack” file as marked in the screenshot below.

NOTE: Here, 6.0.0 is the version of the VirtualBox you installed. If it’s different for you, then replace 6.0.0 in the URL with the version you have.

Your browser should prompt you to save the file. Select Save File and click on OK.

Your download should start.

Once the download is complete, start VirtualBox 6.0 and go to File > Preferences…

Now, go to the Extensions tab.

From the Extensions tab, click on the add icon as marked in the screenshot below.

A file picker should be opened. Now, select the VirtualBox Extension Pack file you just downloaded and click on Open.

Now, click on Install.

Now, you have to accept the VirtualBox License. To do that, scroll down and click on I Agree.

You need super user privileges in order to install VirtualBox Extension Pack. Type in the password for your login user and click on Authenticate.

VirtualBox Extension Pack should be installed.

Finally, click on OK.

Now, you can start using VirtualBox 6.0 to create and run virtual machines of your favorite operating systems. So, that’s how you install VirtualBox 6.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Thanks for reading this article.

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How to install Django on Ubuntu 18.04

Install Django on Ubuntu 18.04

Django is the most popular web framework which is designed to develop fully featured Python Web Applications. By using Django you can build secure, scalable and maintainable dynamic web applications. In this tutorial, you are going to install Django on Ubuntu 18.04 using Python Virtual Environment. The best thing to use Python Virtual Environment is you can create multiple Django Environments on a single computer without affecting other Django projects. It also will become easier to install a specific module for each project.

Prerequisites

Before you start to install Django on Ubuntu 18.04. You must have the non-root user account on your system with sudo privileges.

Install tree command to use it in further tutorial for better understanding.

sudo apt install tree

Confirm Python Installation and Install venv

Python 3.6 is by default installed on Ubuntu 18.04. Confirm the Python installation and check the Python version by typing following command.

python3 -V

Output should be as give below. Note version number may vary.

Output:
Python 3.6.7

By using venv module we can create virtual environments in Python 3.6. To get venv module we need to install python3-venv package to do so enter following command.

sudo apt install python3-venv

Now we can create Virtual Environment for Django Applications.

Create Virtual Environment

Create a new directory for your Django application and go inside the directory.

mkdir new_django_app && cd new_django_app

Now create virtual Environment by running following command. It will create directory named venv which includes supporting files, Standard python library, Python binaries, Pip package manager.

python3 -m venv venv

To start using the virtual environment we need to activate it. To activate the virtual environment run following command.

source venv/bin/activate

Now your path will change and it will show the name of your virtual environment (venv)

Install Django

Now install Django by using Pip (Python Package Manager).

pip install Django

Confirm the installation and Check the version typing following command.

python -m django –version

The output should be as given below. NOTE: you can get slightly different output.

Output:
2.1.4

Creating Django Project

Create a Django project by using django-admin utility named newdjangoapp. Enter following command to create new Django project.

django-admin startproject newdjangoapp

Now newdjangoapp directory will be created. Check the directory structure by using the following command. This directory has manage.py file used to manage the project and other Django specific files about database configuration settings, routes, and settings

tree newdjangoapp/

Output should be

newdjangoapp/
|– manage.py
`– mydjangoapp
|– __init__.py
|– settings.py
|– urls.py
`– wsgi.py

Now go inside newdjangoapp directory.

cd newdjangoapp

Now we need to migrate the database.

python manage.py migrate

Output should be:

Operations to perform:
Apply all migrations: admin, auth, contenttypes, sessions
Running migrations:
Applying contenttypes.0001_initial… OK
Applying auth.0001_initial… OK
Applying admin.0001_initial… OK
Applying admin.0002_logentry_remove_auto_add… OK
Applying admin.0003_logentry_add_action_flag_choices… OK
Applying contenttypes.0002_remove_content_type_name… OK
Applying auth.0002_alter_permission_name_max_length… OK
Applying auth.0003_alter_user_email_max_length… OK
Applying auth.0004_alter_user_username_opts… OK
Applying auth.0005_alter_user_last_login_null… OK
Applying auth.0006_require_contenttypes_0002… OK
Applying auth.0007_alter_validators_add_error_messages… OK
Applying auth.0008_alter_user_username_max_length… OK
Applying auth.0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length… OK
Applying sessions.0001_initial… OK

Create administrative user running following command.

python manage.py createsuperuser

NOTE: Above command can prompt you for Username, Password and Email Address for your user.

Testing the development server

Run development server using following command.

python manage.py runserver

The output should be:

Performing system checks…

System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
December 27, 2018 – 18:26:02
Django version 2.1.4, using settings ‘mydjangoapp.settings’
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

NOTE: If you are using the virtual machine then you need to add your server IP address inside settings.py file.

Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser you will get following page.

django home page

You can go to admin page by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ page.

Enter username and password we have created recently after successful authentication you will be redirected to the administrative page.

django admin login page

Stop the development server pressing Ctrl+C in terminal.

Django home for admin

Deactivate The Virtual Environment

To deactivate virtual environment after work run following command.

deactivate

Conclusion

You have successfully learned how to install Django Web Framework on Ubuntu 18.04. If you have any queries please don’t forget to comment below.

NOTE: You can create multiple development environments repeating above steps.

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