June 28, 2006

Hacks for geeks

Kind of a redundant title, I know, but there's a new book out, Ubuntu Hacks which provides a lot of good information for both Linux newbie and guru alike. See if the following looks like something you'd be interested in:


Co-authors Jonathan Oxer, Kyle Rankin, and Bill Childers detail exactly 100 "hacks" you can use to set up a printer, tweak the GNOME or KDE desktops, rip and encode DVDs, connect multiple displays, or post a blog. If those don't interest you, perhaps some of the 96 other good bits of advice will.

The book is organized in 10 chapters:
Chapter 1 -- Getting Started
Chapter 2 -- The Linux Desktop
Chapter 3 -- Multimedia
Chapter 4 -- Mobile Ubuntu
Chapter 5 -- X11
Chapter 6 -- Package Management
Chapter 7 -- Security
Chapter 8 -- Administration
Chapter 9 -- Virtualization and Emulation
Chapter 10 -- Small Office/Home Office Server

Topics covered range from simple tasks such as test driving Ubuntu on your hardware using the live CD, installing and configuring a permanent install on your hard drive, and using typical applications; to installing and configuring file, web, email, proxy, dhcp, and domain name servers; to advanced system hacks and tweaks.

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June 23, 2006

The Nerd-force is strong in this one

Interesting little article entitled Top 3 Linux distros you've never heard of. Either the title is overkill, or I'm even more pathetic than I thought: I was familiar with all of them before. However, there's one particular distribution that is, I believe, a perfect match for the Kos kids and the rest of the reality-based community: Tinfoil Hat Linux. I kid you not. Excerpt:



tfh.jpegTheyÂ’re going to get me for telling you guys about thisÂ…


Are you ridiculously paranoid? Do you worry about the toaster listening in on your phone calls? Do your walls have ears/eyes/mouths/noses?


Tinfoil Hat Linux is the OS for you. It runs entirely from a 1.44MB floppy image, is compiled from static libraries and contains absolutely no network stack at all (thatÂ’s how they get you).


This distribution started as an experiment in encryption, initially intending to provide a secure operating system for encrypting files, and transporting GPG keys. In the words of the creators “at some point it became an exercise in over-engineering.”


If youÂ’re really concerned about the safety of your data, this could actually be useful for you. It could, for example, be installed to a USB drive (giving you more space to work with) and then transported around to places where you needed to encrypt data. Want to keep IT out of your secret pr0n folders? This wonÂ’t help you much. Want to keep them from opening your documents after youÂ’ve left the company? Now youÂ’re talkingÂ…


IÂ’ll leave you with a quote from the Tinfoil Hat Linux readme.txt:


“If at all possible, boot THL on a laptop & disconnect all external cables, including the power & mouse. Turn off nearby radios, including cell phones and microwaves. Put yourself and the computer in a well grounded opaque copper cube. Download your tinfoil hat plans from http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html. Boot the floppy….”


Be safe. Be sure.


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June 20, 2006

Extra! Get your extra(packages)!

Read all about it here:


If you are looking to enhance your Ubuntu and Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake installation with extra packages from external repositories, this web log post is the most comprehensive list of available software for Dapper we've seen. It includes repositories for the Opera browser, Penguin Liberation Front packages, the latest KDE, KOffice and amaroK, up-to-date packages for VLC, Compiz, Skype, Freevo, MythTV and other popular software, as well as a number of unofficial and experimental repositories created by volunteers all over the world. As always, these packages are unsupported and some might even break your system, so proceed with caution. But if you absolutely need a package for your Ubuntu or Kubuntu system, getting it from the repositories listed in the above-mentioned link might be a better option than compiling the required package from source code.

Remember: you break your OS, you own it.

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June 19, 2006

Sure, I want my children to run screaming from my office

Who thought that this little gadget was a good idea?

teddy_usb_big.jpeg

"Daddy, what are you doing to Teddy?"

"Don't worry son: he won't feel a thing." : OP::

"TEDDDEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
=======================================

I'd be willing to bet that I have a sicked sense of humor than most people, but even I'm not this freaking demented.

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June 16, 2006

Looking for a good deal on a laptop?

Check out this link at Fat Wallet. Excerpt:


OD is having the 3-day technology sale events from 6/15 - 6/17. I noticed that they have the Compaq Presario V2615US for sale at $680 (in store price) after $80 instant saving. On top of that,they have a $200 OD MIR and $30 Manufacturer MIR. So the math will be $680 - $200 MIR - $30 MIR = $450 AR. Very hot price.

Specs below:
Presario Notebook computer with Mobile AMD Sempron processor 3000+ with PowerNow technology
512MB memory
60GB hard drive
Burn & Play DVDs & CDs
Integrated 802.11g wireless LAN networkability

You can make it a better deal if you order online and select in store pickup (delivery price is $760, and pickup price is $680). Then you will be able to use the $30 OFF coupon (01534523 .

Very cool deal. Now I might wipe the PC and install Linux instead of using the pre-installed Windows OS, but that's just me.

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June 15, 2006

3-D web browsing?

I dunno. It looks kind of cool, but I'm still not sold on how this will revolutionize my browsing experience. Excerpt:


What ever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the web? Back in the late 90s, all the hype was about VRML—Virtual Reality Markup Language—which would turn the web into an immersive environment that you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here to tell you that the reports of the 3D web's death are greatly exaggerated. As evidence, we present three 3D browsers that will use that graphics card for something other than gaming: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer.

As further proof that the 3D web isn't dead, an XML format called X3D—a free run-time architecture that can "represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects using XML"— is starting to take hold. You can find more info about it from The Web3D Consortium which is very active in its efforts to add one more dimension to the web as we know it. There's even a mobile browser for X3D, so that you could, for example, navigate around a city you're visiting on your handheld PC.


And of course, as with everything to do with PCs these days, there's the Vista factor. Vista's DirectX 10 will change the landscape for 3D browsers. The Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codenamed "Avalon") and XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) will allow 3D apps such as browsers to be programmed more easily than ever. For more on the Windows presentation foundation and its relationship with DirectX, check out Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) FAQ.

While X3D and Vista technologies may be the future of the 3D web, today we'll tackle a more modest goal—evaluating browsers that use some aspect of 3D right here and now. In a future article, we'll look at some VRML and X3D browser plug-ins that let you do cool things like enter virtual chat worlds such as 3D Planets. Meanwhile, join us in doing what you do all the time—browse the web—but this time in three glorious dimensions.

I think that I could save a lot of money by putting my monitor on an oscillating platform, first moving towards me and then moving away from me. Bingo, 3-D on the cheap, with no CPU slowdown. Sure, my eyes will likely give out soon, but I think that the blinding headaches will kill me first, so no biggy.

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June 12, 2006

We're from Microsoft and we're here to help you

Oh really? Pull the other dear: it's got bells on it. Excerpt:


Who wouldn't trust a company that hid built-in spyware on every Windows-based PC in the land?

It turns out that Microsoft's Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is also keeping daily tabs on Windows users. Who knew?

Well, until a few days ago, nobody outside of Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., knew.

According to an Associated Press report, David Lazar, director of the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) program, Microsoft was doing this as "kind of a safety switch."

A safety switch?

Because, Microsoft told 'top Microsoft reporter in the known-world' Mary Jo Foley that "if Notifications went amok on Microsoft's side, Microsoft wanted a way to terminate the program quickly."

Amok? On Microsoft's side?

Help me out. I'm a little confused here. Microsoft wants my Windows PC to phone home everyday so that if Notifications went 'amok' on their servers, it would turn my local Notifications component off?
...
I don't mean to be paranoid, but when someone tells me that, oh, by the way, they've been checking on my XP and Windows 2000 PCs every day since July 2005 when Microsoft made WGA mandatory or you couldn't download patches, I get a little concerned.

Still, it's not like Microsoft would actually collect more information and then use it against such competitors as Firefox would they?

Oh wait, come to think of it, didn't Microsoft once cause Windows to produce fake error messages if a user was running DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS?
[Editor's note: DR-DOS was the best DOS on the market at the time]

While they never admitted to it, they did finally end up paying Caldera Systems, one of the ancestors of today's SCO, approximately $60 million to make the resulting lawsuit go away.
...
Here's the point. For over a year, Microsoft has planted a program on every modern Windows-powered PC that reported home every day. They don't have an intelligent reason, never mind a good one, for this move. And, they never told anyone that they were doing this.

I guess it must do a darn good job of hiding itself from firewalls and network monitoring tools too since we've only now found out this daily checkup call after tens of millions of PCs have been phoning in for almost a year.

Maybe you can trust your computer, your livelihood, your home finances, your kids' games, everything you do online, to a company that would do that, but you can count me out.

I've been using Linux for my main desktop for years, and it's revelations like this one that makes me damn glad that I do.

I really don't have anything else to add except this: Ubuntu's latest release is very, very cool. Pretty damned user friendly, too.

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June 08, 2006

Carputer: an idea whose time should never come

Unfortunately, it's already upon us.

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June 06, 2006

Beginner's guide to Linux?

Yahoo! has a pretty solid article today about people who are thinking about making the switch from Windows to Linux. It's worth reading in its entirety, but I'll excerpt some of it to give you a flavor:


Love it, hate it, heard lots about it, but still don't have enough of a handle to form a firm opinion? Then we must be talking about Linux, the open-source operating system that's alluring because it's heavy duty and it's free. Simultaneously, it's intimidating to newbies because it's typically more difficult to install and configure than Windows.

However, now is an opportune time to get past those concerns. Interest in Linux is expected to spike throughout the year, thanks to Microsoft's delay of its consumer version of Windows Vista. The hang-up could cast a pall on the year-end PC sales season. Perhaps that's one reason the mainstream media is discovering this "revolution" in software that's nearly 15 years old.

So if you've ever planned on giving the open-source operating system a whirl, but, like the Georgia bride-to-be, got cold feet at the last minute, we've ferreted out six useful facts that'll ease your path when you decide to take the plunge.

1) How many versions of Linux are there?

Lots. At least 350, according to the list maintained by the enthusiast site DistroWatch.com. The site skews toward smaller distributions, with current flavor of the month Ubuntu listed as the most popular among the site's readers. Ubuntu has gained traction recently, garnering an endorsement from Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz.

Ubuntu also appears to be gaining legitimacy via heavy grass-roots support. User-spawned Web resources include a blog devoted to the distro, a quick-start guide for dummies and a more advanced (how to install anything!) manual. (However, as What PC? points out, despite its funky name, Ubuntu is not noticeably simpler to get going than any other implementation of the OS.)

Ubuntu has a great back story: Its development was funded by South African Internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an outgrowth of his efforts to offer improved educational opportunities to his nation's young people.

Another distribution much in demand is SUSE, available for free under the OpenSUSE.org program sponsored by Novell or in a for-pay version that comes with end-user support from Novell.

Originally developed by German vendor SUSE Linux, the software has been heavily marketed to enterprise users ever since SUSE was acquired by Novell in 2004. Since that time, Novell has positioned itself as the main alternative to Red Hat, which is widely considered to be the leader in the enterprise Linux market. (In that regard, Novell CEO Jack Messman predicts that his company will emerge as one of the two dominant corporate suppliers of Linux, alongside Red Hat, as the market for paid open-source shakes out over the next two to five years.)

Other popular distros include Mandriva, Debian, and Fedora. (The latter is a free offering spun out of Red Hat. Don't forget Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo, Mepis, and others too numerous to mention.)

For those disinclined to deal with challenging installs, the easiest path may be Linspire. The eponymous company was founded by billionaire Michael Robertson, who made his money with the early Internet download service MP3.com. Robertson has positioned Linspire as consumer-friendly Windows alternative that costs a lot less -- it's $50 -- and is bundled with many drivers and a bunch of applications.

...

6) You've given me lots of facts, but not much advice. How do I get started?

One pain free way to go (OK, it'll set you back $16, plus shipping) is by reading Test Driving Linux. The book, by David Brickner, includes a CD that allows you to boot Linux on a Windows computer without destroying the Windows install. On the downside, the book's Linux is, like the title says, a "test drive" that runs only off the CD; it won't permanently install the OS to your hard drive. (A further caveat is the CD is a bit fussy; it won't run if you can't get your PC to boot first from the CD drive. It didn't like my old Compaq desktop, for reasons unexplained, but it ran like a champ on an HP Pavilion laptop.)

If you're ready to give Linux a more permanent whirl, go back to Question 1, above, or to this list of distros. (The Wikipedia offers a "Which distro is right for you?" quiz.)

Worthwhile article to give you a jumpstart into the Linux world.

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