Why waste space for desktop computer and pay additional cost for a computer-screen when your existing LED TV can do this for you. Piixl Jetpack is an upcoming compact computer which allows you to do exactly that. Aimed to be an gaming PC powered by upcoming SteamOS, the PC will also be able to run your favorite flavor of Windows or Linux operating-system. Featuring an expandable chassis supporting "Open PC Architecture" (allowing a wide variety of hardware customization) the ultra-thin and quiet Jetpack will be mountable directly to the back of a television screen or under a table via standard VESA mount specifications. No price information is yet announced but since Piixl Jetpack is not the only one joining the revolutionary "Computer behind TV" concept powered by SteamOS, consumers will surely get a worthy deal in near future.

hdparm is a powerful command-line utility for Linux and Windows operating systems to set and view ATA hard disk drive hardware parameters. The utility also allows users to test disk read/write performance with cached and buffered modes. The utility allows users to view and change SATA/IDE disk-drive hardware parameters like drive caches, sleep mode, power management, acoustic management, and DMA settings which are generally set to suboptimal conservative defaults to their optimal settings for best performance. Checkout the example output below for disk information command followed by disk performance test.

root@myserver:~#  hdparm -I /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:

ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number:       WDC WD2002FYPS-02W3B0
        Serial Number:      WD-WCXXXXX64757
        Firmware Revision:  04.01G01
        Transport:          Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5,                  SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
        Supported: 8 7 6 5
        Likely used: 8
Configuration:
        Logical         max     current
        cylinders       16383   16383
        heads           16      16
        sectors/track   63      63
        --
        CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
        LBA    user addressable sectors:  268435455
        LBA48  user addressable sectors: 3907029168
        Logical/Physical Sector size:           512 bytes
        device size with M = 1024*1024:     1907729 MBytes
        device size with M = 1000*1000:     2000398 MBytes (2000 GB)
        cache/buffer size  = unknown
        Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 5400
Capabilities:
        LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
        Queue depth: 32
        Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
        R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16  Current = 0
        Advanced power management level: 128
        Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
        DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
             Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
        PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
             Cycle time: no flow control=120ns  IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
        Enabled Supported:
           *    SMART feature set
                Security Mode feature set
           *    Power Management feature set
           *    Write cache
           *    Look-ahead
           *    Host Protected Area feature set
           *    WRITE_BUFFER command
           *    READ_BUFFER command
           *    NOP cmd
           *    DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
           *    Advanced Power Management feature set
                Power-Up In Standby feature set
           *    SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up
                SET_MAX security extension
           *    Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
           *    48-bit Address feature set
           *    Device Configuration Overlay feature set
           *    Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
           *    FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
           *    SMART error logging
           *    SMART self-test
           *    General Purpose Logging feature set
           *    WRITE_{DMA|MULTIPLE}_FUA_EXT
           *    64-bit World wide name
           *    IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
           *    WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
           *    {READ,WRITE}_DMA_EXT_GPL commands
           *    Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
           *    Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
           *    Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
           *    Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
           *    Phy event counters
           *    Idle-Unload when NCQ is active
           *    NCQ priority information
           *    DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
           *    Software settings preservation
           *    SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
           *    SCT Long Sector Access (AC1)
           *    SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
           *    SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
           *    SCT Features Control (AC4)
           *    SCT Data Tables (AC5)
                unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)
                unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)
Security:
        Master password revision code = 65534
                supported
        not     enabled
        not     locked
        not     frozen
        not     expired: security count
                supported: enhanced erase
        424min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 424min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.                 
Logical Unit WWN Device Identifier: 50014ee25b269017
        NAA             : 5
        IEEE OUI        : 0014ee
        Unique ID       : 25b269017
Checksum: correct

root@myserver:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing cached reads:   27130 MB in  2.00 seconds = 13583.27 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 312 MB in  3.02 seconds = 103.42 MB/sec

aria2 is by far the best download accelerator for Linux, now you can enjoy the acceleration power of this multi-threaded downloaded utility for your apt-get package installations and upgrades.apt-fast is a shellscript wrapper to apt-get/aptitude which utilizes the more efficient and powerful aria2 download accelerator to fetch binaries from multiple mirrors with multiple connections in parallel per package resulting in drastically improved download times.

When it comes to perfect backup's, RAW disk-images are the choice for safest form of backup and restoration of fully functional operating-system installations. We have shared two methods of using the same to backup Raspberry Pi SD Card from Windows as well as Hot Backup's from RPi itself using Linux DD disk imaging utility. Once created we can also Mount these backup images with full read-write access for various tasks like Data recovery (For example imaging an corrupted disk and accessing the disk-image from another working computer to recover data).

OSFMount is a free Windows utility which allows you to do that, the software enables users to mount local disk image files in Windows with a drive letter which can be accessed like any other partition. The images can be mounted in read-only mode as well as write-enabled mode, OSFMount also supports creation of RAM disks (See What are RAM Disks and How they can be used to make use of non-addressable wasted RAM on Windows) which offers a huge speed boost over using disk-based images.

There are numerous web-services like Speedtest.net which allow users to simply open a web-browser and benchmark their internet connections upload and download throughput with ease. However, if you need something similar for your server which does not have an graphical interface here are a few options to check network throughput from terminal/console. One can simply check download speed by using something like the command below at the terminal,

wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip

But for a thorough check with option for outputting beautiful shareable badge like the one on the right, we will use the "Speedtest" command-line utility as shown below.

We recently shared a story showing the versatility and power of open-source computing with Linux, further strengthening the claim, Linux has now got another feather in it's cap when Ubuntu became the OS which is now not only powering Desktop, Laptops, Netbooks and mobile devices but also Self-driving Google Cars as unveiled by the following Google presentation at the embedded Linux conference.

As detailed by Google, they are using a customized version of the Ubuntu Linux OS optimized for real-time usage in their driver-less cars, the video also shows how Google modified the Ubuntu operating system for these particular usage needs and achieve exactly what they needed.

Shell's and terminal emulators are dull and boring, but this is going to change with the new age terminal emulation utility Final Term. This beautiful and powerful emulator lets you take full control of the command terminal in Linux with it's super-utilitarian hardware-accelerated user interface and easy to use "never seen before" features like "Semantic text menus" which are smart enough to know which pieces of terminal output represent like filenames, PIDs, web URL, IP's etc. providing context-relevant commands for each of them with text file-based plug-in system for extension and personalization, "Smart command completion" with algorithmic sorting so you get the most appropriate command at the top in drop-down list and "ASCII art scrollbars" which automatically show GUI scrollbars for progress from commands like Wget, allowing you to monitor progress while the output is scrolled away to name a few. Do watch the video and grab it for your flavor of linux from the links shared after the "Read more" jump below.

Cloud computing has made massive computing resources to be available instantly to users with a single command. The always available, on-demand computing infrastructure comes specially handy for developers as it allows them to create and destroy development instances easily. One of the major benefit of cloud computing is you only pay for what you use, so when you are not working on a cloud-computing instance it can be powered-down and no computing cost will be charged. One drawback/annoyance of using this strategy is that the "publicly addressable" IP address will change with every reboot, to get past this we will show you how to use an automatically updated free dynamic dns system so you don't get bothered about the changing IP address anymore.