If you liked the link yesterday to making RSS feeds more approachable by using an XSL stylesheet to present the RSS in a human-readable form, here's a two line change to the RSS2 module in WordPress to implement it. Add the XSL to your current template directory. You can see an example here.
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Ubuntu releases Edgy Eft
LXer points to Ubuntu 6.10 Released. “The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed “Edgy Eft”. This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures.”
Just when you thought you had caught up! Now, unlike some other OS platforms, this doesn't mean you have to drop what you are doing and try to switch to a new OS. Edgy is evolutionary and not revolutionary. News GUIs are add-ons to existing ones. Most packages are updates that you can get for your existing OS. The Ubuntu folks have stated that the last version, 6.06, “Dapper Drake” is the “Long Term Support” version, so the intent is the next couple with be edgier, more beta-like versions. So, if you want to play with cutting edge stuff, Edgy Eft is for you. If you want the staid and stable version, stick with the Drake.
TrixBox 2.0 Beta released
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
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.
Fedora Core 6 is out
Red Hat Magazine is Introducing Fedora Core 6. “Fedora Core is here (and his name is Zod).”
Printing a man page
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
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…
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.
OOBE as it was meant to be…
By Ted Roche on October 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security, Technology
I've been holding off on purchasing a new laptop until IBM/Lenovo had a Linux-compatible ThinkPad T61p with the Merom (“Core 2 Duo”) CPU installed. “End of October” is the latest estimate, but knowing how long Real Soon Now can get to be, I elected to pick up a bench spare laptop Just In Case. My primary machine (“Lucky”) had a dead LCD, fried USB ports and a flaky wireless card. My older beater laptops have about bit the dust. I shopped around the BigBox stores and they were selling consumer junk. I looked at the Apples; they're sweet machines, but the software's still proprietary. If I was going to go for an Apple, I'd want to pick up a monster machine, and the budget doesn't allow that. So, for a while I was stumped. Finally, Laura suggested I look at a lower-model ThinkPad to tide me over.
IBM/Lenovo has a site for refurbished machines. I shopped over a couple of days. Keep an eye on the site, as inventory is changing often. I finally selected a T40, Pentium-M 1.5GHz, 256 Mb RAM (with a free upgrade to 512), 40 Gb HDD, WinXPPro, 1024×768 and CD-RW/DVD for just under USD $700.
With UPS ground shipping, it took less than a week to get here. The Out of Box Experience was perfect. Clean and well-packaged, the machine looked new. Other than a couple scratches on the serial number label, you'd think this thing had been vacuum-packed since it was manufactured in June of 2003. The HDD was a clean install of WinXP, and the “preinstallation” process took about an hour to install XP, forty million patches, IBM custom tools and drivers. A couple onerous registration forms (Yes, I want to register, no, I don't want you to have your “partners” send me mail) and I was up and running. First, a trip to Windows Update. A “new version” of Windows Update (the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage check — I passed! Whew!) and I was up to date. I was surprised to find that Windows Firewall was not running — I had forgotten is was off by default, and was glad I was within a reasonable safe network as I raised the shields.
Next, a backup before I broke things. Booting onto a Knoppix CD, I followed the same process I used in July to upgrade Laura's hard drive: with the machine off, plug in an external drive and Knoppix, boot, Ctrl-F2 to a root console,
mkdir /media/target mount /dev/sda1 /media/target partimage
and in eleven and a half minutes, the 4.5 Gb is backed up. Magick!
I was suprised to see that the recovery partition isn't a partion at all, according to the machine, but unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. That makes it a bit more difficult to make a backup copy for the inevitable hard disk drive failure. IBM's help file tries to explain how this is a feature to keep you from mis-laying a Recovery CD (You'll have to order one from IBM when the hdd fails, it explains. Of course, it will be a little difficult to read the help file on the hdd to discover this once it's failed.) Google, of course, will point you to solutions that can work around pretty much any “feature” the vendor throws in there.
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the machine, and it will work great as a stopgap between Lucky and the next machine, and at a good price. Now, off to tinker some more…
PySIG: 26-Oct-2006 SciTE, meld, subversion, lambda expressions
Bill Sconce announces:
The monthly meeting of PySIG, the New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group, happens on the fourth Thursday of the month, starting at 7:00 PM. Beginners' session starts at 6:30 PM. Bring a Python question!
At this meeting we'll begin the often-requested “Python development
series”, with the specific topics of source-code differencing (using
meld – an excellent development tool in its own right, written in
Python!), how to integrate tools such as meld into the SciTE editor.
In other words, one way to start complementing and moving beyond the
interactive Python window. Time permitting, we'll demonstrate similar
integration of revision control: Subversion checkins and Subversion
diffs. Presented by Bill Sconce (recovering Eclipse user).
Kent's Korner (Module of the Month) will be lambda expressions, hosted
this month by Mr. Python, Lloyd Kvam of Venix Corp.
The full announcement can be found here