Linux users were unable to enjoy, popular on-demand internet multimedia streaming service Netflix as it requires Microsoft Silverlight plugin, and the Mono-based 'Moonlight' implementation of Silverlight for Linux does not support the "Silverlight v 5 DRM".

With true spirit of Linux geekry, the developers of project "Pipelight" spun a Netscape plugin hack which allows Linux users to run windows only plugins inside any Netscape Plugin compatible web-browsers. Currently they have got Silverlight working with its core features like watching DRM protected videos.

While trying to use git clone on my CentOS server, I encountered fatal: HTTP request failed with error description showing something being wrong with my SSL CA Root certificates as shown below. To resolve this error simply follow any one of the solution posted below.

error: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed while accessing https://github.com/........

We demonstrated how to use Raspberry Pi as an home-automation server with voice commands using SiriProxy earlier, since Apple Siri (and SiriProxy) needs an good active internet connection to convert speech-to-text for recognizing commands this failed due to limited bandwidth availbility when using Raspberry Pi as an 24x7 downloading server. After a lot of research, I made a simple shell script which prioritizes our SiriProxy traffic over others only when needed, utilizing full-bandwidth for downloads when not in use.

Combine the awesomeness of Apple's Siri voice recognition capability with ability to tap into it using SiriProxy, and our favorite hacker friendly mini Linux computer Raspberry Pi and we have an excellent voice controlled home automation system which runs 24/7 waiting for voice commands to do assigned tasks. To get this super-geeky project working we need to install and configure SiriProxy on our Raspberry Pi setup, follow the instructions shared below to install SiriProxy on the official Raspbian “wheezy” distribution.

Moving ahead with it's goal to converge the desktop and mobile computing environment, Canonical the developers behind the popular open-source, Linux distribution "Ubuntu" have now launched the crowd-funding for the first-phone to feature their Ubuntu Mobile OS announced earlier.

Named "Ubuntu Edge" the gadget is backed by some powerful hardware specifications like fastest available multi-core processor, at least 4GB of RAM, and massive 128GB of storage the phone will also feature elegantly finished textured amorphous metal casing made from a single sheet, a 4.5 inch screen with amazing dynamic range and color accuracy for maximum clarity protected by nothing else but a pure sapphire crystal glass which is so hard that only diamond could scratch it. On the software front the phone will feature dual-boot between Ubuntu Phone OS and Android, and will convert into a fully integrated Ubuntu desktop PC when attached to an external screen. Don't miss the "Ubuntu Edge" teaser and introduction videos posted below.

The wonderful, multi-utility, mini-computer Raspberry Pi can also be used as an web-server. While you can't expect it to handle massive traffic, it can easily handle decent amount of static web-page traffic and can also be used as an web or mobile front-end for controlling RPi connected devices, services and GPIO for home automation. We have quite a few choices of web-servers to install on Debian, amongst the contenders we have apache, nginx, lighthttpd, Monkey web-server and quite a few others suitable on limited resources of Raspberry Pi. We will be installing the light, fast and well-supported nginx webserver with PHP support on Raspberry Pi as it behaves well with the mini-computer and takes only 5 minutes to get installed and working using the tutorial shared below.

Since we are supposed to do a lot of tweaking and tinkering with our Raspberry Pi installations, it is always a good idea to backup the working SD card image before venturing for any experimentation. One way to do this is to take the whole SD card out and use another Windows/Mac computer to backup and restore the full sd-card image as demonstrated earlier. To save you with this much hassle, here we are with another method to perform automated "hot backups" from a Raspberry Pi itself to an external USB disk drive or remote storage. Simply use the provided Shell script and enjoy fast, efficient and automated RPi backups.

Amazon offers some excellent cloud computing services, but being self-managed at the basic level it can be a headache to diagnose and fix errors. I recently encountered a similar error where all my attempts to login into the EC2 instance failed with cloud-init: runcmd Caught exception reading instance data: http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/security-groups as shown in the Amazon EC2 instance console system log below.

Making life easier for Raspberry Pi users, the core team has announced a new, feature packed "Raspberry Pi Recovery System" aptly named New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS). The utility allows users to select and install operating systems for the Raspberry Pi on an SD card without technical details like partitioning or card imaging.

The Recovery system creates a FAT partition on user supplied SD card with highly-compressed versions of various supported OS images like Raspbian, RaspBMC, Pidora, OpenELEC, ArchLinux and RiscOS. Just like recovery apps for Mac OS X the RasPi recovery allows users to press SHIFT while booting to launch it and use features like ability to easily reinstall the existing OS, install a different one, launch web-browser for online support or edit config.txt file using a handy editor for troubleshooting.

Many Linux distributions including the official Debian based Rasbian distro for Raspberry Pi makes uses of X11 or XServer windowing software to render the user interface, the problem is X11 is not optimized to use the graphics core of RasPi efficiently resulting in degraded lagged window composition. The Raspberry Pi core team has now decided to bypass X11 completely and move over to the open-source Wayland composition protocol.

The overall results are really exciting, while still in development the team prepared a video demonstration comparing the two and results are really promising. The video comparison and links to details including how to install the technology preview on Raspbian are shared below (click Read more).