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Parallels Virtual Machine for Mac OS X Intel

By on April 8, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft, Technology

The surprise earlier this week was the Boot Camp software to dual boot Intel Mac machines into Windows XP. I knew there were already hacks out there to do it, but didn’t expect official support. But Apple and Microsoft seem to be behind it. The problem with dual-boot (or treble-boot: my ThinkPad offers WinXP, Kubuntu {dapper drake rocks!} and CentOS) is that it seems you’re never in the OS you want to be. Need to switch to Kubuntu to print some labels in gLabels? Shut down Windows (3 minutes), boot Kubuntu (2 minutes), load the labels and print. The next thing you need to do? Probably in one of the other OSes. The right answer is to run all of the OSes as Virtual Machines – all running and idling, or able to start and stop as needed without losing the already booted OS. VMWare is one of several companies doing this.

Linux also has a real contender in Xen, a native virtualization engine.

At LinuxWorld Boston this week, I visited the very low-key Apple booth and heard that something similar is on its way for the Mac: Parallels for Mac OS X is in beta and will allow simultaneous VMs running Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or other OSes run on top of the host OS on the Intel Macs. That’s the ticket! Toggling between the OSes sounds like the right solution. Looking forward to seeing these products mature.

Virtual new Reality

By on April 4, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

From Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog: “VMWars. Microsoft announces that it will give away Virtual Server. VMWare’s response? Not only are they giving away VMWare Player and VMWare Server Beta free, but they just opened up the specs for their Virtual Machine Disk format. *rubs hands gleefully* Ooh, this is gonna be good… hope VMWare’s smarter than Netscape was. 🙂 (Thanks to the /. folks for the pointer.)”

Over at Linux Watch: “One of the ironies of Microsoft’s PR move (giving away Virtual
Server) is that it really makes no sense to run a virtual machine on
top of Windows. Windows, as the forthcoming bloatware called Vista
shows to an extreme, takes up a lot of resource. As David Berlind
points out on his ZDNet blog, “One of the great advantages of Linux is
how, when you’re setting up a system, you can strip all of the bloat
except for only those components that you need to support whatever you
plan to run on the box.”

Looking forward to meeting the Xen folks at their booth at LinuxWorld this week!

LinuxWorld Boston this week

By on April 2, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in The LinuxWorld Rumor Mill: “I could tell you what you will see at LinuxWorld Boston this coming week, but what’s the fun in that? Instead, here are some of the rumors I’ve been hearing about that may come up at the show.”

Don’t miss Booth #1035 where the Greater New Hampshire Linux Group will be back-to-back with the Boston Linux-Unix Group and across the aisle from Linux Journal, Wyse, and Apress in the midst of the conference floor. Here’s a detailed PDF of the expo floor. Lots to see, lots of folks to meet. Hope to see you there!

Printing color business cards with Kubuntu, Officejet d145 and glabels

By on March 30, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

Beta-testing the “Flight 5” beta of “Dapper Drake” (gotta love the code names!) of Kubuntu (the KDE variant of Ubuntu) and I wanted to print some business cards using the awesome glabels program. My printer is an HP OfficeJet d145 using the optional HP jetDirect 200m network print server. While the distro does support and recognize the JetDirect standard, my particular printer model isn’t on the supplied (and extensive!) printer list. A quick Google points to the printer definition file at LinuxPrinting.org. Start the print dialogs with System. Administration, Printing off the menu, specify the JetDirect interface and IP address, and pick “Install” to specify the printer model. A couple more clicks and a test page prints successfully. Awesome! Hi-res color printing, support for the network interface, the duplexer and all. How hard can it be?

Dabo Runtime Engine For Windows 0.6.2 released

By on March 30, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, Python

Ed Leafe announced today: “The Dabo Runtime Engine for Windows is a self-contained environment that allows you to run Dabo on Windows without having to first install all of the requirements. It comes with its own version of Python 2.4.2, wxPython 2.6.3.0, MySQLdb 1.2.0, kinterbasdb 3.2.0a1, ReportLab v.2463, and several other modules used in Dabo.”

Check out dabo at http://www.dabodev.com. Dabo is a rich-client application framework for data-centric applications. Written in Python, it provides multiple database support, WinTel, MacOSX, Linux front ends, and some remarkable capabilities. While the entire dabo projects is at version 0.6.2, Ed says that the visual tools are around 0.5 while the actual framework is 1.0+.

CentralLUG, 3 April 2006: MS Office Docs to PDF

By on March 27, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on this map. Further directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature David Berube of http://www.berubeconsulting.com presenting techniques to extract content from MS Office documents. From David:

“Microsoft Office documents are ubiquitous. However, the Microsoft Office suite is not available for all platforms and comes with a prohibitive cost attached to it. While a variety of open source readers are available to read the MS Office suite formats, you can‰t always count on the user having installed one these readers. On the other hand, PDF viewers are common, freely available, and have a much smaller footprint than an office suite. This presentation will show you how to programatically convert Word and Excel documents into PDF, using open source tools and PHP.”

More details at about the group are available at http://www.gnhlug.org.

Should be a great presentation. Hope to see you there!

How Important Is Certification?

By on March 26, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

SysAdmin magazine asks “How Important Is Certification?.” I’ve pushed certification for years and think that certification is what you make of it: a marketing move, a means of self-validation, a way of determining a basic knowledge level, an indication of a self-starter. Paper Tigers abound in all fields. Certification is no panacea. But it’s a start. Eventually, a professional certification and licensing process like that for Engineers is inevitable, providing a balance of both legal protection and legal liability.

Fedora Core 5 isos available – grab the BitTorrent while it flows!

By on March 21, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Slashdot post: Fedora Core 5 Available. Jan Slupski writes “New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page.” Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.”

Cranked up Azureus to download and share the ISOs for the FC5 DVD and 5-CD set(!) (plus rescue CD). If you like the Red Hat Way and like messing with some of the more experimental stuff out there, Fedora will show you what to expect in Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the next version. For workstations, I’m using a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu. For servers, I set clients up with one of the RHEL flavors. In-house, we’re pinching pennies with Fedora and CentOS.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.