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TrixBox 2.0 Beta released

By on October 26, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

LXer reports trixbox 2.0 released. “Trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality's first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox.”

I've seen TrixBox 1.0 demoed at MonadLUG in June by Tim Lind and it was an impressive piece of software. Looking forward to seeing what improvements are available in the 2.0 version. Tim's doing an Asterisk presentation in December at CentraLUG; perhaps he'll show off 2.0 there.

Oracle Linux v. Red Hat Linux

By on October 26, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

An interesting development. Oracle has announced they will be selling and supporting their own distribution of Red Hat, with base prices lower than those offered by Red Hat. This is perfectly legal, of course, as long as they follow the rules respecting the trademarks and copyrights associated with Red Hat's logos and names. It's already done by CentOS, which offers an “upstream” version of a well-known branded distribution. This is one of the points of Open Source: building on the works of others. The licenses make it clear that while you can build, you can't steal; many licenses require you share back your improvements you make, improving the lot of everyone.

I'll be interested in hearing how this works out. I don't know if it will prove economically feasible to Oracle. I applaud their innovation.

Others don't see it this way. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols decries “Oracle's Red Hat rip-off: “Here's the truth of the matter. Red Hat does a darn good job of supporting its Linux, and charges a fair price for it.” I think that's true, and I think it will be borne out by the marketplace: some big Oracle shops may switch to “Oracle Unbreakable Linux” (hah!), but most shops will be more comfortable staying with the Red Hat vendor they know. And trying to undersell Red Hat on price? Oracle customers are generally not thought to be too price-conscious.

Time will tell. I see it as another endorsement of Linux as a valid platform for mission-critical line-of-business applications. That's a win.

MacBook random shutdown problems due to bad sensor?

By on October 25, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Technology

In MacBook Shutdowns: Case (Finally) Closed?, Harry McCracken documents his trials and tribulations with getting his MacBook fixed. Apple doesn't seem to have been very forthcoming in admitting there was a problem. It appears the problem was with a defective sensor in a heatsink, but initial repairs were replacing the heatsink and the motherboard. Thousands suffered. Rumor mills flourished. Even a class-action lawsuit was started. It's so much better to get ahead of the press in admitting you've discovered a problem than to leave users in the dark. Some people get cranky.

Apple shipped their new MacBookPros this week, with Core 2 Duo processors, right along with Lenovo showing the Core 2 Duo CPUs on their ThinkPads. Which to pick? The “Think Different” company that make beautiful machines, or the tried-and-true-Blue Thinkpads? Sure, both ThinkPads and Macs burst into flames. It's not how you fail that matters, it's how you recover. (Links via Dan Gillmor’s Blog)

Making RSS feeds nicer to view directly

By on October 25, 2006 in Technology

Instead of displaying an ugly and intimidating page of XML when visitors click on the RSS feed icon on your site, provide them with an easy to read page that tells them what RSS is, how to work with it, and display the posts in your RSS feed in readable form. It's relatively easy to do by using a little XSL to style the display of the RSS. In “Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds, ” Benoit Marchal shows how.

The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online

By on October 24, 2006 in Security

Byte.com features “The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online” from the folks at http://www.darkreading.com/. “Online” is kind of a funny thing to tack on the end of this article title. Reading email might occur on- or off-line, but for most of us, does it really apply any more?

Printing a man page

By on October 23, 2006 in Linux

As I'll eventually get tagged to present a “Man Page of the Month” at the MonadLUG meetings, I thought I'd study a bit in advance when I found one I needed. 'top' seemed like a good candidate. But the man page is extensive, exhaustive, cross-referenced and difficult to read. So, I thought I'd print it out to scratch some notes in the margin and see if I could boil it down to a simple one-page quick reference. But how to print a man page? Well, you Google it, of course. The answer I found gave me the links I needed, even though their page neglected to display the key pipe symbols. Here's the trick:

zcat is a synonym to gunzip to pull the man page out of the .gz where it's stored. groff -man -Tps formats a file using the 'man' macro and outputs Type PostScript. Open the .ps file with the editor of your choice, and print it, convert it to PDF or whatever. So the entire command is:

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/top.1.gz| groff -man -Tps>top.ps

CentraLUG, November 6: Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques

By on October 23, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM.

Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.

For November’s meeting, Andy Bair will present “Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques.” Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.

In December, Tim Lind of Computerborough will present TrixBox, the Linux distro for running the Asterisk PBX software, formerly known as “Asterisk @ Home.”

January’s meeting falls on the first, so we’ll likely skip the month’s meeting. However, stay tuned for some exciting meetings coming up in 2007! More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.gnhlug.org.

New toy, day two…

By on October 21, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

A little more study on the ThinkPad T40 leads to the great Linux On Laptops web site with some specific advice on the T40 models and a tremendous amount of details on setting up the millions of little devices – mouse buttons, touchpad, IR, video, sound, modem, ethernet, power management, volume control, wireless – whew! – that make a laptop such a pleasure to use.

After setting the hidden non-partition to “Secure” so that no application would attempt to overwrite it, I used an Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD to resize the WinXPPro NTFS partition down to 18 Gb and set up a boot, root, and swap partition and then install Ubuntu. I set up all the optional repositories that Ubuntu comes with, update the local machine with 200Mb of updates and reboot. Up and running and current. Pretty cool.

Restarting in Windows, WinXP started CHKDSK, since the partition size had changes and it completed and forced a reboot. On the second start, Windows cheerfully reported it had “installed new devices” and needed to restart. What new devices? Hmm. Restarted again. Sheesh.

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