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Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.

Hardware upgrades at TR&A…

By on July 1, 2006 in OpenSource, Technology

I upgraded Laura's laptop's hard drive capacity from 30 Gb to 80 Gb in an overnight operation using FOSS. I used the System Rescue CD to boot into a LiveCD version of Linux, amazingly quickly. (Hint: use the framebuffer options when working on laptops.) Using an external Western Digital 250 Gb hard drive we picked up on sale at Staples, I made a mount point and mounted the external drive there:
mkdir /mnt/external
mount -w /dev/sda1 /mnt/external
I copied the hard drive contents (with compression) from the internal to external hard drive using partimage, following the onscreen prompts. Before removing the old hard drive, I copied the Master Boot Record from the internal drive to a file on the external drive using a tip I picked up from Knoppix Hacks, using the 'dd' command to copy the sector. Removing the old hard drive and installing the new was easy: one screw hold the hard drive carriage in place, and four screws the hard drive to the carriage. Booting into System Rescue CD again, I used QtParted to create a partition matching the old one in size. (Yes, real men can partition the drive using the command-line parted, but since I had the GUI available, I took advantage of it.) Then, I ran partimage again to copy the external image back to the new hard drive, the dd command to restore the MBR and qtparted to activate and resize the partition to the full capacity of the drive. When the machine rebooted, Windows 2000 forced a CHKDSK as the partition size wasn't what it last saw, and it completed without error. Whew! Up and running! About six hours clock time elapsed, but only ten minutes of keyboarding or so.

I wish all the hardware upgrades went this smoothly!

SCO continues to fail in court

By on June 30, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols rejoices that “SCO hits iceberg,” but, while I'm relieved no poor judgement was rendered, this shouldn't come as any surprise. Most people felt SCO had no basis for their lawsuit, and that the entire process was targetted as a chilling effect, deterring the more risk-averse from trying or deploying Free and Open Source Software solutions. The question I have is this: did the SCO suit have the effect that SCO (and those who funded the effort) desired?

Novell executive changes

By on June 30, 2006 in OpenSource, Technology

ComputerWorld reports “Update: Novell board ousts CEO Messman: COO and President Ron Hovsepian will take over CEO duties” I hope this turns out to be a good thing for Novell. Their SuSE distribution has a great reputation and their plan to merge Novell server technologies into their Linux offering is a promising avenue.

New web site to bookmark: CMSMatrix

By on June 21, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Python, Technology

I never fail to pick up at least one great tip or idea from every meeting I attend, and the Upper Valley Computer Industry Association was no exception. This tip: CMS Matrix, a site comparing the features of a huge number of competing content management systems out there. Like that other Matrix, the problem with Open Source is … choice. Not too many choices, but many. This site helps narrow it down.

Accompanying me on the trip: an audiocast of Doc Searls' wrap-up at the Syndicate 05 conference. Good stuff!

Time to Switch?

By on June 18, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, OpenSource

Over at ongoing, Tim Bray asks Time to Switch? and cites Mark “Diving into” Pilgrim's recent series of blogs where Mark has chosen to walk away from decades of Apple development and move to an Open Source platform. Full disclosure: Tim works for Sun MicroSystems but his voice is his own, as is Mark's, who's an IBM employee, and I own both a ThinkPad and an iMac, invest in all of these companies, and am divided if my next laptop should be a ThinkPad or MacBookPro. If you're considering replacing your current machine, there's lots of food for thought in these articles even if you aren't considering an Apple machine. Some of the most insightful comments were in Marks second post where he expresses legitimate concerns about being able to access documents over a long period of time, when the hardware is long gone, the DRM may not be supported, the applications that wrote the original data are nowhere to be found. Long Now Thinking is worth considering.

Tim's post follows:

Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote at length about switching to Ubuntu. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now John Gruber’s written And Oranges, a fine excursus on Mark’s piece. I’m pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick, physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email—the record of my life—away in a proprietary undocumented format. I’ve had this happen once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear a funny sound? That’s a camel’s back, breaking.] …

UVCIA Panel 21 June: FOSS: Are there options for your business?

By on June 14, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

I'll be speaking on a panel next week at the Upper Valley Computer Industry Association. The panel is entitled “FOSS: Are there options for your business? How can the use of FOSS software supercharge your enterprise” and will be moderated by Bill McGonigle. Here's the blurb:

“Please join a panel of local Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) experts for a discussion of what's new in the field. Each panelist will briefly describe how he uses FOSS software to supercharge his enterprise. After that, the panel will discuss a series of issues that are frequently asked about Free/Open Source Software, and will help the audience understand these questions:

  • What is Free/Open Source Software?
  • Why would I want to use Free/Open Source Software?
  • How can I improve my profits by using Free/Open Source Software?
  • What's changed in the past few years?

“The panel will then switch to a Q&A session, answering questions and engaging discussion with the audience members.”

The other panelists include:

The meeting will be on Wednesday, June 21, 2006, 7:30am – 10:00am, at The Fireside Inn. Admission costs $45, which includes breakfast. Details at http://www.uvcia.org — hope to see you there!

XAMPP

By on June 9, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

I've been involved for a couple of years in developing Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python apps for various clients. During most of that time, I've used in-house Linux servers for prototype, development and testing, and Linux servers deployed at the client site or a hosting provider for production work. Recently, I wanted to spin off a second copy of an application on a local Windows laptop to test some radical changes while the rest of the development team continued to work away on the dev server. Ideally, I wanted to install the entire LAMP set on my local workstation without a lot of work, configuration, downloads, HowTos, and so forth. XAMPP offers free, prepackaged installation modules for Linux, Windows, OS X and Solaris, bundled with a dozen handy utilities like PEAR and phpMyAdmin. Installation was a click, click, click, done! process. Reading a few READMEs got a few non-standard settings like enabling InnoDB data storage. Slick!

If you need a quickly set up XAMPP stack, you'll want to check this out.

MonadLUG meeting last night

By on June 9, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource

Tim Lind put on a great presentation of TrixBox 1.0 (the renamed and renumbered successor to Asterisk@Home 2.8) to ten attendees at tonights MonadLUG meeting. Tim brought nearly the entire system from his Computerborough offices: a salvaged PIII-700, a Digium card card with two daughterboards: FXS and FXO, a couple of cordless phones, an IP phone, and his laptop, and showed us the entire setup. Tim uses the machine to take incoming POTS calls and route it through a digital attendant to one of several phones, ring groups or voice mail boxes. Day and nighttime setups have different rules. In addition, he can route to his cell phone, process faxes, send voicemail messages via email, and a mind-boggling combination of the above and more. With graphs. Wow! Very impressive presentation. Asterisk could be a great solution for nearly any size business, and an inexpensive way to bring a PBX to the small business world.

Next month, July 13th Charlie Farinella will show us how he works with the ‘screen‘ command – a utility for supporting multiple remote terminal sessions on a single connection. Sessions started within a screen session can be backgrounded, suspended, and recovered after a disconnection.

On August 10, Mark and Tim from Computerborough will return again and show us around SugarCRM.

Thanks to Tim for a great presentation, Guy for MC’ing the meeting, and Ken for the facilities!

Thursday, June 8th MonadLUG: Tim Lind presents Asterisk

By on June 5, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, June 8th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent's Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough. For directions and other information, visit http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MonadLUG

Tim Lind presents on Asterisk – the Open Source PBX!

Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux, BSD and MacOSX and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

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