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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.

Is Desktop Linux going the wrong way?

By on June 28, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, Technology

Via OSNews, Jem Matson asks “Is Desktop Linux Distros Headed in the Wrong Direction?.” “The impending release of Windows Vista with its fancy Aero Glass special effects, along with the hasty addition of the similar XGL and Compiz technologies to the latest SUSE Linux release makes me think that programmers have a warped idea of what desktop computing is about. For some reason, many GNU/Linux users are concerned about competing feature-for-feature with Vista, while Apple and Microsoft struggle to add more graphical extras to their already graphics-intensive desktop OSes. It's gotten so that you need a serious 3D video card (with proprietary drivers) and a fairly fast computer just to keep up with desktop environments. Whatever happened to being productive and having fun?”

Many of us dissed Windows XP when it shipped with the Candyland theme and the Teletubbies hill as a background. A little 3d shading and a shiny thing or two is fine, but eating up half your processing power creating a glittering frame for your black-and-white text is pretty silly.

I've recently installed the Xubuntu desktop package onto a couple of older machines running Kubuntu and I'm delighted with the snappy performance I'm getting out of 5 year-old hardware. The Xfce desktop is plain, clean simple and fast. While I'll ooh and ah as much as the next person over glassy transparent effects, they don;t do a lot for my day to day coding (in text), email (in text) and blogging (in text). Hmmm. Maybe someone should consider better looking… text.

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!

Lenovo flip-flops on Linux support

By on June 8, 2006 in Linux

Slashdot post: Lenovo Backtracks on Linux Support Statement. After a report that the company would not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs, morcego writes “Looks like Lenovo decided Linux is a good idea after all. From the article: 'Lenovo executives Monday backtracked from remarks last week that the company would not support Linux on its PCs, saying it would continue to pre-load Linux onto ThinkPads on a custom-order basis for customers who purchase licenses on their own. In addition, they said, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company was working behind the scenes to boost its Linux support in conjunction with the expected July release of the next version of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.'” Cool!

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.

Lenovo not offering Linux

By on June 5, 2006 in Home Page

Slashdot post: Lenovo To Shun Linux. dominique_cimafranca writes “CRN reports that Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs.”

That's a disappointment. However, I never looked to IBM for support of the various RedHat, Fedora and Ubuntu installations I've installed on the laptop. Sites like Linux-laptop.net are great for getting the various non-standard laptop devices working. And if I was searching for a pre-installed version, I'd likely go to Emperor Linux for a fully-installed and -configured machine.

Even though I've beat the daylights out of it, my ThinkPad A31p has been a great laptop. Laura swears by the TrackPoint navigation and after fumbling with it for the first few weeks, I don't notice I'm using it any more, either. Lenovo still seems to be making the ThinkPad line with the red TrackPoint navigator, but we'll have to snap one up quick if they decide to discontinue them. Sadly, it doesn't appear that anyone else offers them.

It's getting to be time for me to start thinking about a new laptop, as the ThinkPad will be celebrating it's 4th birthday this summer. I've managed to flash-fry the wireless mini-PCI card, shear off one of the lid hinge screws, overheat it with a second 7200 rpm drive, short out the USB ports and just recently lost the backlight. Like the one-eyed, three-legged dog joke, I think I'll nickname it “Lucky.”

So, the next machine? I'm shopping…

Microsoft announces another dropped feature: PDF?

By on June 4, 2006 in Microsoft, OpenSource

InfoWorld: Top News posts Microsoft to pull PDF, XPS support from Office 2007. “Microsoft Corp. has decided to delete from its next version of Office an automatic way to save documents in PDF (Portable Document Format) after Adobe Systems Inc. threatened to take legal action.”

How strange. There must be more to this. PDF output is included with Apple's OS X. OpenOffice.org has the option to save files as PDF on Linux, OS X, Windows and everywhere else it runs. PDF output is free for anyone willing to dig around for it, from the free Ghostscript to PDFCreator.

Either Microsoft was infringing on Adobe's extensions to the basic PDF, or something else was in play here. I'm looking forward to some followup article that might shed more light here.

Another day, another Microsoft announcement of a dropped feature. Boy, the company is building an impossibly difficult hurdle to shipping new products.

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