Over on Ed Leafe’s ProFox list, Bill Arnold describes the struggles with trying to get VNC to work on Vista and points to this step-by-step guide.
Archive | Technology
TheOpenCD updates to version 07.02
TheOpenCD 07.02 – “The OpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of OpenCD 07.02, which is now ready for download and purchase. 07.02 contains twelve updated versions including the milestone OpenOffice 2.1, along with latest releases of both Firefox and Thunderbird…”
A slew of good, freely distributable, Windows software. This is worth keeping two CDs in your bag: one for you and one to give to each needy client, customer, friend, neighbor or family member.
DLSLUG, March 1st 2007: 50 Ways to Run Your Programs
Bill McGonigle announces the March meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, featuring “50 Ways to Run Your Programs” presented by Bill Stearns. Sounds like a great meeting!
“At this meeting Bill will explore ways to change how programs run. He will cover ways to change a program’s priority, where it runs, when it runs, debug new and running applications, and much more. Attendees are welcome, and encouraged, to bring their own laptops and try new techniques that will help them tap the power of a Linux environment.”
“William Stearns is a network security researcher and instructor for the SANS Institute, teaching the Linux System Administration and Perimeter Security tracks. In his spare time he maintains a major antispam blacklist and assists the technical community as a volunteer incident handler for the Internet Storm Center. His articles and tools can be found in SysAdmin magazine, online journals, and at http://www.stearns.org.”
Seacoast Linux User Group tonight: Rob Anderson on MP3
What : MP3 file handling under Linux
Who : Robert E. Anderson
Day : Mon 12 Feb 2007
Time : 7:00 PM
Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH
This month’s meeting of the Seacoast Linux User Group will feature Robert E. Anderson talking about MP3 file handling under Linux. Talk to include:
- MP3 vs OggVorbis
- Ripping a CD collection using KAudioCreator.
- Playlist formats PLP vs M3U
- ID3 tags
- udev and autofs
- Amarok
- VFAT and special characters
- rsync
Further details can be found at http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/slug-meetings/mp3-file-handling-under-linux/
For directions and related web links visit the http://slug.gnhlug.org website
Hosstraders no more
Sad news from the organizers of the spring and fall Hosstraders ham radio festival: they have chosen to end the event. No more Hosstraders. I very much enjoyed the last four or five I attended. The GNHLUG has manned a booth there for quite some time, and it was a great opportunity to do some outreach to like-minded technically adept folks. We gave away a lot of Linux distributions, sold off personal surplus equipment and picked up lots of neat gadgets. I’ll miss Hosstraders. USD 1.3 million was raised for Shriner’s Children Burn Centers. GNHLUG leader maddog expresses his appreciation here.
MonadLUG notes: 8-Feb-2007: uniq and Joomla!
Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order promptly at 7 PM and cracked his whip to stick to his streamlined agenda. Brief announcements (“find GNHLUG events on www.gnhlug.org”) were followed by Ray Côté’s presentation of uniq. Ray explained the function and then introduced an increasingly complex set of examples, one building on another to show how uniq could remove duplicate lines from a sorted file, display various counts of duplicates and so forth.
Guy Pardoe was the main presenter. After the requisite wrestling with the projector, Guy talked about Joomla! Guy had hoped to be showing version 1.5, but it is still in early beta (beta 1 with beta 2 due rsn), so he didn’t feel it was ready to talk about for production sites. Guy explained when he volunteered for the presentation he thought 1.5 would be available, and promised to return when 1.5 was available and he had some experience in using it for production work. He briefly reviewed Barrie North’s presentation from DLSLUG last year (registration required) (and our notes from that meeting). Guy then showed us the Joomla! 1.0 correction: 1.5 install he had done that day, highlighting the basic features of the CMS and the ease of use of the administrative interface. It appeared to be a very open and accessible system. Templates and CSS files could be edited from within the interface and they appeared to be XHTML and CSS2 compliant.
A general Q&A followed. General concerns on the security of the core framework. Concern about the timeliness of the 1.5 release. General discussion of what CMS could do and what the target market was.
After the main presentation, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Maddog announced that he and Bill Sconce had met with faculty at the New Hampshire Technical Institute and that a plan to hold a series of MythTV Installfests was proposed (see the -org list for details).
Answering another question that has come up on the discusssion list, I came across this post while I was looking for Barrie’s presentation. While he is advocating for Joomla!, of course, he may be pointing out that WordPress would meet some peoples needs as well.
“Why you want to use Joomla! instead of WordPress”
Thirteen attendees were at the meeting. Thanks to Charlie for running the meeting, Ray and Guy for presenting, Ken and the Monadnock SAU for providing the facilities, and to maddog and all attendees for participating!
I’m Blogging This…
Live from FUDCon Boston 2007 at Boston University’s Photonics Center. Wifi provided by the Fedora group, beautiful facilities. The Unconference format got presenters to do a 2-minute elevator pitch for their sessions. We took a break and voted on the sessions we wanted to attend, and the organizers shuffled the large and small rooms and time slots and I’m sitting in the first sesion on Mugshot.
Got to see a neat piece of hardware presented by an foaf as we got coffee. The Pepper Pad is a lightweight Linux-based, AMD Geode-based handheld Etch-A-Sketch sized device with full video capabilities, wireless networking, USB, and lots of features. It’s based off Fedora Core 4 with their own yum repositories. Nice form factor, major cuteness factor.
Tag: fudconboston2007
Livingston: Upgrade Vista with Vista
In Brian Livingston’s “Windows Secrets” newsletter, Brian writes, “Windows Vista, in my opinion, is a big improvement over Windows XP in many ways. But the new operating system is distinctly overpriced.” and “But I’ve tested a method that allows you to clean-install the Vista upgrade version on any hard drive, with no prior XP or W2K installation — or even a CD — required.” While this is good news for all who want to upgrade their hardware while installing Vista, it points out a way to buy the cheaper Upgrade version and get the same effect as the more expensive Full version.”
If you choose to dance with the devil, you need to pay the devil his due. A far better choice to send a message to Microsoft that their software is overpriced is by purchasing a Mac or installing Ubuntu or Fedora or Red Hat or SuSE or Debian or just sticking with the software you have. That’s how the market works. Using Microsoft’s software in violation of their questionable licenses just puts you in a bad position. I’m surprised to see Brian presenting it this way: it’s a handy tip for upgraders (and a best practice for getting a stable system), but it’s not the right path for people building new machines. I wonder if Microsoft will be able to patch this behavior to detect this kind of “upgrade” or whether they’ll change their installer to prevent it.
Florida to scrap touchscreens; convictions in Ohio recount-rigging
Ars Technica: Florida to scrap touchscreens; convictions in Ohio recount-rigging
Rumor has it that Florida governor Charlie Crist will announce tomorrow that his state plans to scrap tens of millions of dollars worth of touchscreen voting equipment and move to a system based completely on optical scan ballots. The Miami Herald claims that the total tab for overhauling the states electoral system could be as high as $35 million.
I hope the rumors are true. Optical scan means that voters can see what they voted and mechanical and manual recounts are possible. While there’s still a danger of someone tampering with the optical scanner software/firmware, there’s at least a possiblity of audits.
On the vote rigging, it’s worth reading the entire original article to hear how lame-brained it was. It’s sad to think that the higher officials who ordered/sanctioned/approved or were oblivious to this behavior when they shouldn’t have been, got away scot-free. While the vast majority of voting officials are hard-working honest folks, everything they do has to be transparent and above-board to avoid scandals like this.
Free Linux Device Driver Development
Greg Kroah posts an open letter to all device manufacturers, offering free development of Linux device drivers through the new Linux Foundation (formerly Open Source Development Labs) here:
“The driver will be written by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over 1500 strong and growing). This driver will then be automatically included in all Linux distributions, including the “enterprise” ones. It will be automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux kernel API changes. This driver will work with all of the different CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.”
Awesome! Read the entire post here