Tag Archives | Linux

I love the Radio News Aggregator as a way to collect the news of the day, but the only thing it doesn’t give me is more hours in the day. I’ve got 11 tabs open in Mozilla with articles I want to read, and by the time I’ve gotten around to finishing an article, and deciding if I want to blog it, it’s rolled off the end of the 100 articles in the aggregator. Not a big problem for Radio fans, you simply reset the number of articles here (Note: link only works if you run Radio). However, there are still too many articles for my brain to capture, even if my computer can. Here are a couple I missed blogging before they scrolled:

• CNN discovers blogging: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/10/bloggers.ap/index.html
  
• Clay Shirky on Social Software: http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html
  
• Google and Branding by Mark Hurst: http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/03/0305.brand.html
  
• Essay on the Mozilla site on browser innovation: http://www.mozilla.org/browser-innovation.html
  
• Massachusetts Department of Revenue considers Linux: http://www.masshightech.com/displayarticledetail.asp?art_id=62051&cat_id=3
  
• David Weinberger continues to blog the SxSW conference: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/001283.html

Whew! Drinking from a fire hose!

Postscript: And did I mention that Radio rocks? Having changed my settings from 100 to 300 articles, all of those articles above that had scrolled now appeared. No time delay waiting for the queue to fill up. What a well thought-out piece of software!

Struggled for a couple hours last night to get a Belkin f5d6020 wireless PCMCIA 802.11b card to work with Redhat 8.0, either with the wlan-ng drivers or the orioco-cs drivers. No joy. (Disclaimer: I am a clueless Linux newbie, but follow directions well and use Google a lot to RTFM). Belkin provides no support on their site for anything other than Win?? drivers. Hope they get a clue.

Finally swapped it out to one of the Windows machines and swapped in a LinkSys card I’d got working earlier.

Next step was to get access to the Linux box on the DSL from my WinXP laptop, and hopefully, secure access from the rest of the world. SSH is the right answer for that, and I set up PuTTY as my SSH client on the WinXP box. Connected in without a problem – pretty slick. The next step was to use VNC to connect graphically (as a newbie, a GUI is easier to fumble around in than a terminal). I’d already set up the VNC server on the Linux box when it was on the same LAN (there’s a bit of a glitch with RedHat 8.0 and Gnome with VNC, solved by a web search of ancient messages), but now I need a secure way to use it over the Internet (VNC does not encrypt its stream). The VNC site does include instructions for using SSH, but it’s not entirely clear how they translate to the PuTTY GUI. The Answers Are Out There. One Google search later, I find the answers at http://freesco.no-ip.org/VNC/, the first of 2030 hits Google provides.

DSL was installed, up and running, in 45 minutes this morning, by MCT Telecom’s ace lineman, John. Steve and I confirmed it was working and set the DNS entries to update. I’ve moved the http://www.tedroche.com domain to the new DSL, but need to convert it to the new server. It’s currently running on a beater P-166, and needs to be updated. But it works! We installed the Win2K server, a Linux workstation and a WinXP workstation on the network, and have installed WallWatcher on the WinXP box to watch the packets hit the router. A few dozen tries, mainly at port 137, but a hit or two at 1434 (SQL Server) and others as well.

Blogging live from FoxCon Toledo. This rocks! The great guys at Geeks and Gurus (G2) provided the router and wireless AP, Bob Ruple, the conference coordinator, arranged for POTS dial-out (the only option for the hotel), and I provided a Linux server for a few utilities and a Twiki web site running under Apache. And it all works!

With phrases like “it’s become clear that this one size fits all productization of open source technologies no longer addresses these markets effectively.” and “As we worked on Red Hat Linux 8.0 we realized that Red Hat Linux’s lifecycle no longer made much sense” I’m afraid this response from Jeremy Hogan of Red Hat may confuse and inflame rather than clarify. RH 7/x was a great leap forward, to coin a phrase, and 8.0 rocks – solid, simple, clean – but to assume from the last three data points that everyone is now going to abandon the Linux way and completely rev their machines each year is brain-dead.