If you want some real (and probably more insecure) fun:

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

You just need ssh + Python on the remote end firewall (or port forwarded device).

No udp, but it does a hell of a job in a pinch.

heh, one of those is collecting dust in my cupboard too.

What ever happened to the Risc line of things I know Wikipedia has the EOL as the RiscPC in 2003, but I thought it would have lived on in some form past that.  My old Agenda VR3 needs a new use :-)

Schweet.  Have fun with your cube.

the cobalt cube 2 is starting to harmonize with its new inner self: the cubie board with a notebook HDD.

an old usb HDD board is providing the power.

Getting the old buttons & the LCD to work would be cute.... lets see.

at least the LED bar in front will have to be iluminated again; however, i'm not shure whether its going to be yellow again...

the cubie board has arived, and its cute :]

Vegas has existed for ages though, unless their interface has changed massively since the Sonic Foundery days.  What I do know is Sony did an amazing job after that buyout, taking one of the best real time editors in existance for speed and ease of use, and making it into something almost unusable due to uncompedatively slow rendering, cluttering the interface, and lowering the stability.  I'm certainly happy open source video editing is catching up so quickly.  Another case where once there were few good alternatives, but that is no more.  I'll still probably stick with windows for editing and rendering for now though, especially as more often then not if I'm editing video, it's video game capture.

The bad part is my net upload is far too bad for me to be willing to deal with recording video much, I can edit and render videos pretty quickly, but I don't like the crazy wait it takes to put a resonably high quality video on to the web.

I'm guessing someone at Sony, since the user interface of their Vegas video editor is similar looking.

Rendering video is one of the few things I refuse to do outside of windows.  I built my computer specifically to give me access to quicksync, so you'd better believe I'm going to use it.

just purchased a cubieboard; looking forward to its arival.

a little more powerfull then the pi, plus a SATA connector.

Ubuntu is the new Red Flag Linux eh?  Interesting.

heh, seems as if many more then just IG shout a "close the door when you leave" to de icasa...

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/77492.html

csh & tcsh is a pita and schould be avoided, unless for the pure  masochism; in that case I would sugest trying digitals vms also, which has a real weird commandline interpreter.

ksh is known for its sophisticated and very dense syntax; once mastered you can get pretty quick in it i've heard.

zsh seems to gain traction on professional admins; its the default shell grml.org will give you.

Tue Mar 12 2013 03:18:37 AM EDT from the8088er @ Uncensored

Its worth noting that in FreeBSD if you launch 'su' in say, bash, your superuser shell will also be in bash. This is in contrast with just about every other *nix I've used and reduces the frustration associated with keeping the default root shell (as you should not change root's default shell!) or having some silly 'toor' login instead.

Is that your experience with "su -" as well?

I preordered an Ouya, if I can't replace Androd (or better yet dual boot) with desktop linux, I'll be moderately annoyed.  Partially because android sucks, partially because their neutered android sucks more, mostly because a 100 dollar tegra 3 rubix cube desktop seems like a good thing TM.  Also, it should be low powered enough to be always on, and powerful enough for all my webserving needs.

Yes and no. There is always ccache (fairly easy and tremendously effective after a while) and distcc (never used it and my attempts with icecream failed). The slowest hardware I ever used gentoo on was my old PentiumV laptop, 256mhz and 64mb of ram. Kind of a pita, but if you have time...

I did use it on i586 and i686 hardware with 500-800mhz, but that was around 2005 where this was not yet the specs of a mobile phone cpu....

Today, I use my server in the basement to compile the packages for my netbook and only install the binpackages.

Afaik, there are public binpackage servers, too. Or you could use Sabayon, which does both: Provide a set of prebuilt packages and still offer the portage features.

I am still too lazy to fool around with any BSD :(

Debian and me never got along well. My first attempts of installing them failed due to unbelievably stupid install media. (A netinstall cd-rom which didn't load any network modules, etc, etc.) Atm, I have the second long running server which I upgraded to Squeeze and now Samba is failing in mysterious ways after it run fine for about 3 month after upgrading. The last one just fubar'd totally, this one only misbheaves indeterministically without proper errors.

I am using CentOS/ClearOS on most of clients systems in order to avoid distupgrading too often. At home I only use Gentoo, because the installations simply won't die. *knocks on wood*

Just joking. I know lots of people who are sick of windows, won't/can't afford a mac and are not interested in deeper linux knowledge. They are all using ubuntu and most of them use an android phone. I guess they would like a Ubuntu phone too. Especially when it gets an equal integration as apple does with its devices.

QED

There are enough fanboys of Ubuntu around...

oh, and canonical dislikes they would have to port proprietary android drivers for their new devices.

mir will just happily use the native android drivers...

there have been talks about wayland being ready to replace X, plus allowing X protocol access.

and there are even some developers working on both, disliking the architecture of x, xorg in special.

long live the dead!

Does the frame buffer count?

Tue Mar 05 2013 11:29:59 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Here we go again.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec

Ubuntu announces a new display server called Mir, which replaces Wayland, which was supposed to have replaced X11 if they had ever gotten around to finishing it.

So far, projects to replace X11 have had a success rate of 0%.

Less talk. Write something good and see if it sticks.

GGI at least made it to become cairo nowadays...

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/SSHD+rootkit+in+the+wild/15229

RPM based distro anyone?

Tue Jan 15 2013 04:54:47 AM EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Why not a Chromebook? The truth is, most people aren't running "specialized" software anymore. That's why phones and tablets are useful. Expect a gradual merge of Chrome OS and Android at some point.

Chromebook can start as a companion device for media consumption and casual Internet access, but I could see an enterprise version taking hold eventually.
Bigco's love to encrypt laptops which contain company data. But why put any data on the laptop at all? All the mobile worker needs is a laptop that acts like a phone/tablet but with the comfortable form factor of a full size laptop.

Internet access is everywhere, and phone tethering is easily accessible too.

Bigco's also love to save money and as such, don't want to pay for extraneous data access or phone tethering plans. They also don't always trust available VPN solutions (with good reason in a number of cases), so transmitting data over the air isn't quite as palatable.

Fact is, though, that there are still plenty of places and situations where mobile internet access is not available or isn't sufficiently fast enough to make working remotely with centrally stored data feasible from an employee productivity/efficiency standpoint.

Another reason is storage costs. Storage at the PC/laptop level is still relatively cheap. Storage at the SAN level is not, by comparison, not to mention the additional storage needed for backup/recovery of that data. Depending on the size of your workforce and the amount of data they generate/maintain, centrally managing/backing up that storage can be daunting from a financial perspective.

Then, of course, there's the point that most Bigco's (and many Smallco's and Mediumco's) don't (or, for that matter, can't) trust their staff to be productive when working from remote (I have had to manage a number this type of employee), or prefer/require that their staff be in a company provided location (even if it would be less expensive for the company to let those employees work from home, saving the employer the facilities costs associated with having larger office spaces).

http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-top-selling-laptop-doesnt-run-windows-or-mac-os-it-runs-linux-7000009433/

chromebook 4tw!

Sun Dec 16 2012 08:43:34 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Ok, so how about removal of '486 support? Anything based on that design still in use?

Not that would not be better off being off net and running a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel.

Sat Dec 15 2012 07:51:04 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

The existence of things like ELKS and Minix3 suggest that perhaps eliminating i386 support wasn't going quite far enough.

If they ripped out all code supporting any IA-32 processor older than an i686 (P6) ... would anyone really notice? How many people are still trying to run Linux on any Intel machine older than a Pentium Pro?

We still have a few AMD Geode processors in use.  I would not mind moving on, but costs are not simply based on replacement of the device.  Some of the issues are with access to the locations in which they run :-)

Sun Dec 16 2012 01:51:04 CET from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

If they ripped out all code supporting any IA-32 processor older than an i686 (P6) ... would anyone really notice? How many people are still trying to run Linux on any Intel machine older than a Pentium Pro?

This depends on wether you count CMOV as belonging to the i686 spec. If you do, I really would notice.

Why boot the current mainline Linux when we still have Elks?

http://elks.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

You can fire up your old 8088 and run your 386 in real mode for some good old  clickety clack keyboard / floppy seeking fun.

Cool!

Iggie,

So HOW was that done exactly?  I tried to verify what you said by doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.10, getting it fully updated and then I installed gnome-panel and rebooted.  Then I logged in again and I got Unity still... or at least it looked exactly like Unity.  I didn't stay there long.

I logged out and looked at the login screen to see if there might be something related to session selection to pick something other than Unity but I didn't see anything... so HOW EXACTLY did you switch from Unity to something else... and what exactly was that something else?

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Greetings,

I wrote a blog post the other day in which I detailed the scenerio where someone gave me a hand-me-down webmcam that was a few years old... and since it just worked in Linux... I wondered if I could make it work in a remote KVM virtual machine too... since KVM and the SPICE protocol do support USB.  For more info see:

http://www.montanalinux.org/video-usb-webcam-inside-kvm-vm-2012112.html

-- 
TYL, Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

A lot has been written about the delays in the upcoming Fedora 18.  They decided to completely redo the installer and are working on an offline updated (ironically named fedup).  I don't mind the delays.  I'd really dislike if they rushed it and released it before it is ready.  In any event, I've been working on my remix and it is actually looking quite good.  I made a 9 minute video that shows the install, first boot, and couple of the newer desktops and apps.  If interested, you can find it here:

http://www.montanalinux.org/video-montanalinux-f18-beta-boot-install-run.html

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

I wholeheartedly agree with Scott and dothebart. Since  about ten years I am only using netinstall CDs, the last install I made with the traditional many cds approach was SuSE 7 or 8. They basically could have been what Ubuntu is now, if they hadn't fecked up in between and had a better PR department.

I quit SuSE only because it was that type of "Nanny distro" that Ubuntu is now: If you made manual changes and used Yast to configure your system, Yast always killed your changes (in dhcp and samba for example). So I left and changed to Gentoo. There were other reasons too, but they are boring geek stuff.

Anyway, today, if you have a decent bandwith (and I would count  ISDN as decent enough) I would go with the net install. Choose a distro based on the following criteria, in that order:

1. Management tools for the services you run and packagemanagement. At least on a Desktop, most of the time "Out of the Box" or "as is" suites your needs. If you run a server and are mostly clueless, try ClearOS or Zentyal or some other Linux "Small Business Server" with a gui.
2. Software you need (include 3rd party repos in your search!)
3. Hardware support (if there are any real differences today.) Does only really matter if you have quiet recent or special hardware.
4. The Desktop look and feel. As said earlier, most distros include all of the popular ones and some odd and nerdy ones. On my last SuSE install, I first used WindowMaker and then enlightenment16 because my hardware didn't agree with KDE.

Switching distros because something minor (and I include the desktop environment here) doesn't really suite you is probably waste of time. The hard tools you use to manage your daily tasks are what counts. So the package manager and the provided software packages are probably more important than interchangeable UIs.

Debian ought to rename their repositories.  "stable" should be called something related to long term support, and "testing" should be called "current" or something like that.

Thu Nov 01 2012 03:03:47 PM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

Debian: Why so many damn CDs? Ubuntu was nice, one CD. Or I could download something to a bootable USB stick.

SUSE: Tried it many years ago, but I believe it was the KDE install. Didn't like it.

The single-cd model that was popularized by Ubuntu really has dumbed down everyone.  The whole seperate single-cd for each desktop environment seems to have lead people to believe that if they want a certain desktop or a certain set of applications their single-cd builds contain... that they have to download and install from that CD.  In reality a typical distro (that is binary package-based anyway) has one or more software repositories with tens of thousands of packages in it.  If you installed from a single CD and it only has desktop XYZ but you want apps from another desktop... or you'd like to install desktop ABC, just use your package manager.

I don't know if graphical package managers are good at showing meta packages but from the command line it is easy.  What is a "meta" package?  It is a package that is a placeholder for a lot of other packages.  So for example, in Fedora (and this applies to Debian and Ubuntu and a lot of other distros too) if I'm on a system that has GNOME 3 but I'd also like to have KDE, I can just run yum with the needed privledges to install KDE as well:

yum install @kde-desktop

or

yum groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces"

That latter one is from a pre-release Fedora 18 system and I think Fedora has been altering the names some so it is worthwhile to get a list of what groups are available by running:

yum grouplist

If the group name has spaces in it, you need to put them in quotes like I did above.

The Fedora remix I make each release includes GNOME 3, KDE, LXDE, XFCE... and now with Fedora 18... MATE and CINNAMON... as well as openbox, blackbox.. and a handful of other window managers... and a lot of desktop and command line applications.  It's about 6.3GB of software compressed down (with xz) to a 2GB iso that fits on most 2GB USB thumb drives.  It works like a LiveDVD and is installable.  From the graphical login manager just pick what desktop environment you want to use at login time.  Want to swtich, just logout and login again picking the desired session.

To address your comment on why Debian has so many CDs... it is because they provide media for all of their packages... spread across a large number of CDs.  Since they have so much software, just taking a look at the current release, it looks like that is 53 CDs.  If you want DVDs, it's 8 DVDs.  Of course that varies release to release.  Do you need to download all of those?  Of course not.  The way they allocate the packages across the CDs, the most popular packages start on CD1 and the very lesser popular packages would be on later discs... going from most popular to least popular.  If you just want the default desktop environment with the basic set of applications, CD1 will probably be all you need.  Like others have said, if you just want a small download the netinstall disc is the way to do because it just has the installer and lets you get all of the packages online during the install... so you only end up downloading what you install.

To address you comment about SUSE... like most other distros, they offer all of the desktop environments.  I think their preferred default is KDE but that doesn't mean if you use SUSE you have to use KDE.  Just install whatever you want and use it.  If KDE gets there by default from the install media and you want to free up some disk space because you aren't going to use it, you can probably remove it with the package manager.  That isn't something I've tried.

In the history of Linux, Live media is relatively new.  Before live media you used to have to download a series of 1 or more install CDs (very early on it was floppy discs rather than optical media) and boot from CD1 to get the installer... from which you'd pick the packages (or groups of packages) you wanted to install... then it'd install those along with dependencies... and ask you to put in the needed CD that contained the packages.  The end result was you could pick what you wanted and get that.  That sort of tradition has continued with the netinstall media and any install-only (aka non-live) media provided by distros.  Fedora offers both as does Debian.  Ubuntu does also with their DVDs I think but I haven't used one of those in a long time so I'm not certain.

I think Ubuntu has muddied the water some because their various spin makers do more customizations and as a result installing multiple desktop environments on Ubuntu might lead to the display manger changing to whatever the last one installed perfers... or changing an underlying theme used... so your milage may vary.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Thu Nov 01 2012 03:03:47 PM EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

What doesn't work in Fedora?

My mouse curser will disapear in applications such as Xsane and others.
I don't remember the name of the program but it allows me to right click on a file and resize it. That disapeared from the
menu.
Other odd things.

Did you look for existing bug reports on the issue(s) and join in if they existed... or if not, file a new bug report?  That's what I do.  With tens of thousands of software packages there are going to be hundreds of thousands (or more) bugs.  Switching distros because you ran into a bug is futile even with the large number of distros we have.

When you say right-click on a file and resize it, what does that mean?  Are you resizing graphic files?  If some piece of functionality is missing, perhaps an additional package or two needs to be installed.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Wed Oct 31 2012 11:40:54 PM UTC from the_mgt @ Uncensored

Thats the thing I never understood about debian. Nobody uses stable because it is from the stone age. If I want "stable and tested" on a production server, I go to centos or another RHEL derivate,  becaue of the longer support time for example.

+1

Thu Nov 01 2012 15:03:47 EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

Debian: Why so many damn CDs? Ubuntu was nice, one CD. Or I could download something to a bootable USB stick.

whut? why any cds?

boot the debian netinst iso, and apt will pull all the rest from the net directly.

Last thursday, a system which I succesfully pulles through two distupgrades fubar'ed itself after a reboot. After the third distupgrades some month ago I maybe forgot a reboot, I am not sure. But there were bind9 and isc-dhcp in the default rc, which I definetly disabled in favour of dnsmasq. I am pretty sure I even removed them from the system a year ago. Anyway, samba simply wouldn't resume normal operations and so I retired the system and switched to RHEL based ClearOS for that server. And it is a joy, only vpn needed some manual intervention, samba+openldap worked right out of the box.

I also learned that using nfs to serve data to a vm which then offers this data as samba shares is a bit of a PITA, but solvable.

i've been using debian testing on my laptops for allmost a decade now, and everything was working fine most of the time.

i've also used debian sid on machines; afair its been around 3 times in ten years that they broke X11 login, all the rest was fine.

I've been hearing lots about mint debian, which might also be a viable alternative.

oh, and there also was sidux around (named aptosid or sidicius these days?) which uses sid package snapshots. So bleeding edge without stuff like the X11 breakage.

What about Fedora isn't working right?

I've been working on my Fedora 18-based remix and it is coming along fine.

-- 
TYL, Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Thats the thing I never understood about debian. Nobody uses stable because it is from the stone age. If I want "stable and tested" on a production server, I go to centos or another RHEL derivate,  becaue of the longer support time for example.

For a desktop, I would give Sabayon or Arch a try, maybe even Zenwalk.

In general, I need to test SuSE again, I liked it before I switched to Gentoo, 

Stable is considered "stable" because it's been tested over a long period of time. If you're using Ubuntu, you're already using Debian's "testing" packages. They're targeted toward different markets - Debian towards servers, Ubuntu towards end-users. If you're looking for a happy medium, try Xubuntu. Wonderful XFCE interface that replaces Unity, and very much Debian-like in actual use (but with Ubuntu base, of course). Or just use wheezy sources in Debian. I'm running wheezy on 3 servers at work, and haven't had a single issue so far. Stable is most stable, testing is stuff in testing for the next stable, unstable is bleeding-edge.

Sun Oct 28 2012 15:13:48 EDT from zooer @ Uncensored

I am not using Debian, the latest they had on their webpage was 6.x, which had older versions of everything. I wasn't impressed and I did
not try the testing. I was using Fedora 17, which seems to have a lot of odd problems. Fedora is still installed but I tri-boot and I am
back with Ubuntu 10.4. I was going to go with Ubuntu or Xubuntu 12.4 when I felt like installing it.

You realize that wheezy has the newer packages that you're looking for, right? Debian is, by default, built for stability by using packages that have been tested over long periods of time. If you want newer ones, vi /etc/apt/sources.list, :%s/squeeze/wheezy/g, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade. Shiny new packages.

Interesting.

I used to be a Crossover Office user...but I didn't wind up really needing it for much, and then the few things for which I did need Windows, I wound up going with WinXP in a VirtualBox VM.

http://www.codeweavers.com/about/general/press/20121029/

How do I most painlessly migrate users from tdbsam to openldap based authing in samba? I searched the web, but most guides seem to be from around 2005. Did one of you ever do something like this? Did it work out? Did you suffer while trying? The closest thing I found is http://nickportertech.blogspot.de/2008_05_01_archive.html which itself names tools hinting to https://gna.org/projects/smbldap-tools/ 

I will be switching distros at the same time, so I will not really operate on a live system

I agree about the password expiration stuff, but I guess that is not a direct fault of LDAP as a method, more of the implementations. As far as my expiriences go, almost all externally authed services have totally useless error messages. "Wrong password" can mean anything from "I misparsed your special chars", "The LDAP Server is down", "I was just too stupid to look up your user but I do not dare tell you." to "Lizards are forcing me to keep you logged out."

What I do not get is your remark about SSO and website stuff: Are you referring to the seamless login you can have with IE on Microsoft products? I agree partly, but with Samba4 using LDAP and Kerberos, you should be able to overcome these problems with a certain Firefox plugin. I think there is also something for Apache and at least dokuwiki would be able to handle this. I think thats SPNEGO.

You might be right there, but on the other hand, actually seting up SSO stuff in linux manually is a bit of pain. Samba  does a pretty good job here, I either use kerberos tickets (for things like libvirt) or the ldap user for manually entering usernames and passwords across almost all of my local services: trac, apache, dokuwiki, citadel, windows vms, etc. In theory, spnego should work with firefox plugins or IE, but I do not use either of them.

I wrote this about Samba4 http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Samba4_as_Active_Directory_Server if you like something different. That's basically the AD system I am using with citadel. They also have a release candidate for Samba4 out there. Not alpha, not beta, but real rc! My system is basically the same since alpha11, but there are only about 5 machines in the domain.

well, the judge told oracle to continue h-pox and itanic support - gut I guess yes, its fading away.

It's not Solaris anymore; it's Oracis now.  Sun's vision for Solaris was to build and maintain an industrial grade workhorse of an operating system.  Oracle's vision for Solaris is for it to fill a box and make money.

Not that there's anything wrong with making money, but the show is no longer being run by people whose primary drive is a love of technology.

Not to worry, though: HP/UX will be the first of the remaining commercial unices to fade into oblivion, especially now that Oracle has discontinued any further development of its products on that platform.  AIX will cross over into that same immortal netherworld (Valhalla is only a few miles from Armonk, after all) where i/OS and z/OS already are.

The data center of the late 201X's and early 202X's will be Linux and Windows.  For all practical purposes most data centers are already there.  That's excluding bare metal hypervisors, of course, but whether VMware and Microsoft admit it or not, there's no such thing as a "Type 1 Hypervisor."  ESXi won't run without help from Linux, and HyperV won't run without help from Windows.

Tue Sep 11 2012 08:55:20 AM PDT from the8088er @ Uncensored

I had no idea Oracle was doing a Linux distribution.

What about Solaris? is there indication that they're going to end that?

Technically, their distribution is nothing more than repackaging RHEL, but they do some custom kernel compilation, I believe.

Slackware -current?

Ha.

they started doing so before buying sun.

Mon Sep 10 2012 11:07:03 PM PDT from dothebart @ Uncensored

try oracle unbreakable linux.

LOL!!!

CentOS, like Oracle Linux, is basically Red Hat Enterprise Linux...go with the 6.x series.

try oracle unbreakable linux.

since whomeveer I pass over my netbook these days (be it with pics displayed, or some browser) starts touching the tft and wipes over it (regardles of the (un)-technical background of that respective person)..

I guess the acceptance factor of Machines without at least some sort of direct screen content manipulation will quickly decline.

So either camera/kinnect like interfaces or touchscreens will shurely take over the pc-world in the next two years or so.

And I guess "we" (yes, me and you nerds) are also going to work with these devices in our spare time more and more.

Maybe some booring workstations remain mouse/keyboard only, but BYOD also brings these touch devices massively into professional environments.

I'd give 5 years here for that change to happen.

No, Microsoft aren't early to that party... and... yes, as in the browser they did pretty much to get it right and win that battle... and yes, their approach is clumsy... but I guess they will have at least some success with it. And... while apple has multitouch input devices available for their notebooks/desktops, its not yet point/touch screens.

or... get a linux kernel > 3.4 and try running the android userland next to your traditional linux userland

http://cubieboard.org

cute, with sata connector. and a little more steam then the pi.

I wouldn't run a debian stable on a desktop.

testing usualy is stable enough (unless the first 2 months after stable is released...)

there are also backports, if you like to install more modern software on the aging stable stuff.

Why not use a real rolling distro like Arch or Gentoo (where the package maintainer is currently procrastinanting with other stuff instead of updating the ebuilds..... ;)? I don't know if there is an arch... build script or something, but could be done, I think.

The other way of dealing with this stuff is using a LTS version of a distro. As a conservativ debian (and derivates) hater, I chose centos for some of my servers. Centos6 is going to stay for a while. On the other hand, I am considering ClearOS as an alternative for more SBS like installs.

Fri Nov 04 2011 07:36:24 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Oooh, I like the idea of a "rolling" distribution. It's definitely not for everyone, but the idea of simply getting constant updates instead of ever having a Big New Version (tm) seems attractive for an end user.

Let us know how that works out for you.

Just remembered to let you know, LMDE XFCE 64bit worked out just fine, as near as we can tell.

No problems yet, anyway.

Just revisited this as we are upgrading our backup to the new 201204 version to get the Citadel 8.14 in place.

Seems ok so far.

LMDE turns out to be more of a 'lurching' adventure than a rolling distribution as the updates are generally waiting on

clusters of upgrades to make it through the vetting process before getting into the updates arena.  A debian characteristic of sorts.

The heartburn of worrying about whether everything will hold together after an upgrade

 is probably just about as focus-intensive as a full bare-metal reinstall but the thought is that

 everything remains more or less in the same place each time without those moments

 where you discover that some of your key software no longer works at all because

someone decided to remove all the wheels, for no particularly urgent reason.  (I also use SeisUnix, which has had moments)

This business of improving software by cyclically adding unrelated functionality seems to be a disease with no cure,

 as the saga with KDE and now GNOME seems to illustrate.  A global epidemic?

They should have forked off with their grand ideas and left the train on the same rails (I do use KDE4 now sometimes, but....)

If you cannot just upgrade in place, and are required to re-Frakking-install each and every time the basis iterates,

  there is a fundamental problem in someones 'big picture' program.

-- 

TheOneLaw

have a look at

http://citadel.org/doku.php?id=installation:start

hello harry!

Have you had a look at http://citadel.org/doku.php?id=installation:start ?

Which flavour of linux are you running? Getting the telnet part up and running should be fairly easy. 

 I am new to linux, fleeing Windows, and want to host a linux-based BBS.

 In thhe past, I have run a Windows-based Cit BBS, but I don't want to do so now.

 I'd like to download a simple linux-based Cit program that can handle telnet users.

 I know that this BBS code can do a whole lot more than that, but, for now, I just

 want to support the telnet side of things at first. Apache and the web side can come later.

 I have a linux-based server to run the Cit on. I just need a download webpage

 for this or any other Cit BBS that can hhandle telnet users that runs native in linux.

 Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

 Thanks in advance,

 Harry.

Yes, SCO shurely was a test animal to burn while making software patent negotiations a working business.

And, I guess it paved the land for lots of other things which are going on in the legal sector right now.

But, we also see, judges aren't as clueless as we always might think, and some meanwhile are getting more encuraged to slapping the offender.

I hope this trend continues.

if only nokia had purchased ximian, and novell trolltech...

the opensource world would be much better off.

Thu Jul 26 2012 14:37:01 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: Metro for the masses

(in Android, the app at the bottom of the stack falls off when the operating system needs more resources for what's up front; I imagine Apple does the same).

IOS? Multitasking of any kind? which planet do you live on?

you can merely implement a callgate to the apple push notification service to awake your app for notifications, which is right now closed in europe due to motorola patent wars.

Thu Jul 26 2012 02:37:01 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: Metro for the masses

I don't think the new UI's suck because they are search based. They suck because they are optimized for touch even on non-touch devices. They suck because they assume the user is operating with the short attention span associated with mobiles, even when seated at a desk.

I'm not sure if you were referring specifically to the Linux desktop environment updates or not... or perhaps more generally... and I have seen this claim aimed at Gnome 3, etc... but I don't think it is completely accurate.

What touch devices are running Gnome 3?  The only ones I know of are the higher end tablet PCs that are enhanced laptops with twist/flip around screens with touch features usually using a stylus.  Ubuntu is definitely going after touch-based mobile devices, but again, I don't know of any that exist now.  If none exist, why and how would they be optimized for touch?  Some of the refactoring is probably to accomodate touch... so that one interface would be usable for both.  I think that is better than having two different codebases but opinions on that differ.

A lot of focus with Gnome 3 has gone into hotkeys so that applications are easily launched via keyboard... without requiring the mouse.  That is definitely not touchscreen related. Switching tasks via keyboard has been improved (alt-tab and alt-`) Some of those features aren't exactly obvious to non-hotkey fanatics but they are there.  I also like control-alt-up/down arrow for switching between virtual desktops.

What does Unity and Gnome 3 do that makes it so hard to use on the desktop?  Let's look of the changes I can think of.

1) They got rid of the task bar and took most of the taskbar functionality and merged it with a dock.  Gnome doesn't always show the dock and Unity used to be that way too but with the most recent Ubuntu release I don't think they auto hide it by default anymore.  This change isn't really touchscreen related.  If you don't have a taskbar, you don't really need to minimize things... because where would they minimize too.  For those who really want minimize, they have tweeks to add it back.  I added it back but found I don't really minimize things anymore.  I have been using the window snapping feature alot though.

2) The dock basically replaces the portion of the panel that was dedicated to aplication launchers.  You mentioned that clicking on a running application icon in the dock takes you to that application's window rather than starting up a second copy of the application... and that you could right-click to start another... but there are other ways to start up another copy of the application.  I'm sure you are aware but I thought I'd mention that most applications have an "Open new window..." feature one or more places... in a File dropdown, via a right click menu... or by dragging a tab off.  I find myself using mostly tabs in applications that offer them rather than new windows.  The web browsers made tabs so popular.  For terminal windows I add screen and/or tmux for panes / side-by-side views.

3) Gnome 3 auto-manages virtual desktops (and vertically stacks them) and I'm not sure what the reason for that its... other than perhaps helping new users understand what virtual desktops are and how to use them.  I think Unity is limited to four virtual desktops but I'm not sure.  This doesn't seem touchscreen related.

4) No icons on the desktop.. I didn't use them much.  Oddly most touchscreen environments are lots of icons all over the screen so their move in this direction seems opposite from touchscreen.  Of course you can add and remove launcher icons from the dock so that functionality is still there.

5) Search oriented application launcher... again, not what the touchscreen environments are doing... which is screen after screen of icons.  While you can do that too on Gnome 3 and Unity, the search interface is strongly encouraged... and the icon system is painful... on purpose it seems.

6) Universal menu - That's a Unity thing that they borrowed from Mac OS X which isn't a touchscreen feature.  I am NOT a fan of it.  Gnome 3 does have a universal menu but there isn't much there and they still retain the traditional application menubar thank goodness.

7) Systray-ish icons... are basically still there just moved around some.

Other than those changes... everything is pretty close to the same as before.  Personal preference is a big touchy (no pun intended) subject so I don't really expect anyone to agree with me completely. :)

Now having said all of that, I primarily use KDE at work and Gnome 3 at home.  I like KDE because it does a fanastic job of session restore.  KDE also has activities which I conceptualize as being able to have multiple sessions to restore to and switch between.  Activities are more than I need so I don't use them much.  At home I typically have less applications open so restoring them upon login isn't as big of a deal... and most of the applciations I care about (web browsers) have session features of their own.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

I agree with your assessment of Windows 8 from one perspective... that of Windows literate users.  From the perspective of computer novices, Metro is more usable.  I think Microsoft realized that the iPad (and other smartphone derived user interfaces) was winning with people who found more traditional computer interfaces intimidating.

The desktop computer UI is very much filesystem oriented with a file manager being important... as well and item selector dialogs (mini-file managers) within applications.  Apple decided to go the other way and make it application focused by providing screens of application icons and letting the applications themselves act as proxy file managers doing their best to eliminate the need to understand storage concepts.

Microsoft with Metro has adopted a hybrid approach.  Metro is somewhat application oriented but they don't use little icons... Metro is more content oriented.  The application icons are replaced with larger solid color rectangles whereby when the application is used and configured and content is available, these rectangles will preview content.  It is really an application oriented interface but they are presenting it a little differently so they can say they didn't rip anyone off.

The "desktop" is still available in Metro but they have gotten rid of the start button.  No, scratch that... they have NOT gotten rid of the start button, they just have a new start button that is part of the Metro interface which is very search oriented... and they want you to use the new design rather than the desktop oriented one.  Conceptually it really isn't that different but since the start button isn't where it used to be... and is different... many desktop literate users are freaking out.  Microsoft is trying to guide them slowly to the new system but as people start to get to use it they will slowly forget the old way and the new way will become THE way.  After a year or two of the new way, going back to the old way will seem weird and oddly painful... and yes, even clunky... but it is hard to see that from now / here.

This is very similiar to the switch from a menu driven applications menu to a search driven system that we have seen with the Gnome 2 -> 3 switch, the Gnom2 -> Unity switch, and the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 switch.  Having used both Gnome and KDE for many years, at first the search oriented system was painful but eventually I got used to it and it is second nature now.  Why did the desktops switch from menus to search, because the Internet did long ago... and people were used to searching rather than going through tree structure type catalogs and directories of topics for finding information on the Internet.  The search indexes were fairly primative at first but over time they got better... and the shear amount of information exploded and the old way couldn't handle it anyway... and finally Google's searching got so good that whatever it was you were searching for was usually at or near the top of the results.

I believe Metro, iOS merging with Mac OS X, and the newer Desktop Environments on Linux will eventually win over the majority of people.  I primarily use Linux and at first I was rebelious towards the changes in the Linux desktop systems but finally I saw the light. :)

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

hm, the calendaring page looks a little like what sunbird grew up from.

but nice weird thingabob.

Greetings,

I just ran across a computer brand named Telikin that is designed for novice computer users.  They currently offer two all-in-one systems with touch screens, keyboard and mouse.  They run Linux... a fork of Tiny Core Linux... but the user interface that is on it isn't anything that you'd recognise.  It almost seems like a webpage because there is a menu on the left fifth of the screen and the applications take up the rest of the screen... and the menu always shows.  I wonder if they borrowed any code from existing FLOSS applications or they if they did everything completely from scratch?!?

Anyway, check it out if you have any desire.  It is an interesting concept... although I'd like to see the software available separately.  http://www.telikin.com/

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Wow, you're mad that Stallman came up with an alternative name for Secure Boot.  Get over it.  He always comes up with alternative names for things and he always will.  He has a right to do so just as much as everyone else does.  Remember, modern communications is all about "framing" just ask David Frum.  If memory serves he renamed the "estate tax" the "death tax".  Another Stallman framing thing was DRM.  Digital Restrictions Management vs. Digital Rights Management.  I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.  Yes I have seen a number of sqeaky wheels get upset about some of the FSF's PR compaigns saying they were stupid and/or unaffective... but it isn't like they spend 1/100,000 as much as Apple or Microsoft does on one of their product campaigns.  That is to say that given the cost, they are fairly effective... just not as effective as fighting fire with fire.

Regarding the political labeling of RMS and ERS and saying that one has won and one has not or whatever... sorry, but I'm not following you.  Free Software is a winner.  Open Source is a winner.  To me neither term has won out over the other... and they are often clumped together as FOSS or FLOSS.  Both seem to still be legitimate terms that have a decernable meaning... and are somewhat incomplete by themselves.  Free Software is just as important now as it ever was.  In fact with so much stuff going "into the cloud" and the big companies using FLOSS to construct proprietary services, that war we thought we had won has clearly taken an unexpected turn.

I'd like to expand this discussion into hardware too.  We need a free hardware foundation.  Maybe there is one and I'm just not familiar with it... or maybe the FSF has a branch on hardware as well.  Someone please inform me. Here are two presentations that I think are very well worth viewing that show why we need some organization looking out for us on the hardware front.  Maybe the EFF is?

Bruce Perens' Linux.conf.au 2012 Keynote: http://www.montanalinux.org/video-lca2012-keynote-bruce-perens.html

Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

My guess is that you are already familiar with them.  The whole Restricted Boot... cough... I mean the UEFI Secure Boot issue plays into the "closed hardware of the future" narative setup by those two videos.

So far as who seems to be more active in the community these days... RMS is still going like the Energizer Bunny although he has had some recent health issues.  I haven't really heard much from ESR in a few years.  The last thing I recall hearing from ESR was when he lambasted Fedora for not abandoning their principles and giving people all of the patent encumbered codecs that they want.  Perhaps I'm paraphrasing in my own unique way.  My guess is that ESR has continued to be active but that I've somehow missed it.

So far as calling it I.T.F Linux... I call my distro either "Fedora Linux" or "MontanaLinux"... but until everyone switches over to LLVM/clang and all BSD licensed tools, RMS does have a reasonable arguement.  I myself do not call it GNU slash Linux and yes I realize that a Linux distro comes from thousands of places... but RMS was on a mission to build a free OS and he had most everything but the kernel... and Linux filled the bill there.  Of course we have the BSD licensed systems as well but I don't see so many people clamoring to them.  They definitely have their following and use cases so please no one take offense.  I prefer the GPL over BSD/MIT.

While I certainly love to talk politics, I really don't like to ues political views as analogies for the software/tech industry.  They just don't map very well... and when I try to think in those terms... my head hurts.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

I strongly disagree with your rant.

The EFF and the FSF serve completely different missions although sometimes, I guess, their missions might have some overlap.

Lots of people complain about the FSF and the antics of RMS.  I'm not one of those people.  RMS needs to stay the uncompromising jerk he has always been because that is his role.  He is fairly unique in that role.  If it wasn't for him and his purity, we'd all probably be running a lot more proprietary software on top of our free systems... because there would be less free software.  While the FSF doesn't pay people to develop software anymore (to the best of my knowledge, but I'm fairly ignorant on the topic), they do act as a clearing house for lots of free software projects and as far as I know, they have new projects join them all the time.

I have also personally interacted with a number of people (over the years and recently too) that have gotten into free software and Linux because of RMS... as a result of personally seeing him speak.  Yeah, Richard does pretty much say the same things over and over and over... and doesn't have a lot of new material... but there are still a large percentage of people who are completely unfamiliar with his speal... and since he speaks so much, especially overseas, he does still bring a lot of new people into "the movement" even if his message hasn't changed much in the last two decades.  I imagine he will continue to do so.  The EFF, not so much.  See, they have different missions and both the EFF and FSF are good resources.

So, what was it about the FSF that angered you?  I would assume it was something specific and not just the general concept.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

I use rsync for stuff I don't need history on and rdiff-backup on stuff I do.

A lot of people seem to like BackupPC.  It is based on rsync but has its own perl front end that does something similiar to rsnapshot (I think) and also does dedup.  It also offers a web-based interface for your users so they can service themselves and retrieve any backup files they want.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana/

How to do it: http://www.eff.org 

How not to do it: http://www.fsf.org

3279393@Uncensoredhttp://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Linux?start_reading_at=3279139Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:34:59 +05003279139@Uncensored

Agreed that doing a snapshot with LVM or something is faster / more complete, but you might find you need to set aside a bit more in CPU and or filesystem (if it changes quickly during the backup) than you might think.  I have done LVM snapshots for a while, but found you can get in to cases of Uninterruptible Sleep (D) State for failed copy processes and the like.  I would love to hear what you come up with though if you are willing to share IG.

If you are using rsnapshot already, you might give duplicity a look:

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It has had some growing pains over the last few years, but has grown to be a decent solution for me.  The best part I have found using duplicity is the ability to change out the back end by simply rsyncing the store to another back end and changing the backup url scheme.

The part I did not like is figuring out how to script it.  There are convenience scripts out there that wrapper duplicity, but I don't trust them yet.  If you want I could share what I have so far and what I have written for a wrapper for duplicity.  It is quite flexible for doing backups where you have different backups to run (especially if you need to backup parts of filesystems on a different schedule as you can split a backup in to parts).

I was using the symantec backup solution for some of my consulting clients for a while....but that may be overkill for a single server.

So I have this customer with one fileserver and I have rsnapshot installed as a backup system, but I am totally unhappy with it.

We currently have incremental backups each day and keep a weekly snapshot. The users there tend to delete or overwrite files quite often, so in the future I want to use something different. They are architects, so mostly some very recent files change often, but when the building is finished, files dont really change but are kept for reference, etc.

I want to keep the incremental daily backups and probably four weekly backups, also about 6 monthly incremental backups on the harddisks. But I also want to keep a full backup of the last four weeks on tape seperately or maybe one tape for each whole month. I really haven't set up something like this before.

This is what the disk usage is currently, data isn't really growing much and could be reduced if long time archive tapes or similar would be established.

/dev/mapper/vg_data 493G 269G 199G 58% /srv
/dev/mapper/vg_backup 739G 388G 314G 56% /mnt/backup

rsnapshot doesn't give me the granularity I need, Amanda does not seem to do on-disk backups the way I need them: Users should be able to retrieve files from the on-disk backup via a comfortable samba read-only share.

So, do you have any recommendations? Should I combine some backup tools? Like something for the on-disk backups and amanda for the tape stuff?

Thanks for reading so far

I would like to actually have something like Secure Boot, but in a way that I can trust it. I boot most of my machines with a kernel and an initrd which contains some cryptsetup/luks stuff in order to open my encrypted containers via password. So I need to trust that noone tampers with the initrd in the meantime. (Using passwdfiles instead of manually entering them doesnt improve this situation very much.)

But with SecureBoot the way it is realised, I need to trust whoever certified the bootloader. And since both stuxnet and flame hat official certs and Verisign got broken into and my general paranoia assures me that at least the NSA or the Aluminium Bavariati have general "All Area" tickets, this whole system is broken by design and possibly the main idea is what IG says.

But like dothebart says, almost no copyright mechanism has ever protected a product from pirates. Especially not mainstream software and when it comes to gaming platforms. I predict that the SecureBoot2 will require your machine to be connected to an onlineserver in order to check if your account is allowed to use it, this time providing real protection!

WRT to the Hollywood issue: Do not even pirate their shyte, do not even ignore it and do not finish reading this sentence! Watch asian movies, they are the opposite of Hollywood movies: The actors all look alike but the plots are pretty unique.... Even the greeks make interesting movies these days (Dogtooth for example.) 

remember css? or the ps one? or the wii? or the xbox? or the iphone? or blueray? or in special the PSIII?

as long as they give the hackers the opportunity to play (a way to turn it off, or like redhat sign bootloaders) its going to survive.

When Sony took away the "other OS" - option for the psIII, it was half a year for their protection to be broken.

while the "otheros" option might have been commercialy questionable (people building clusters with cheap hardware intended to be fully paid by purchasing games) it was the only way for them to remain unhacked for 4 years.

I realy think the same accounts for secure boot.

I am getting mixed signals, but I heard it is going to VeriSign instead of MS:

And with Flame being around for years now, both of them are as trustworthy as a granddad carrying his credit cards pin along with him in his wallet...

Greetings,

I've seen a few articles today railing against Red Hat for their support of Fedora buying a key from Microsoft / Verisign so that in the future, Fedora will be able to boot on hardware certified for Windows 8 without having to dig into the BIOS and turn off secure boot.

The issue isn't whether or not secure booting is the silver bullet for security issues... of course it isn't.

The issue isn't that the key thingies cost a fortune, they don't.  If I understand correctly, it's about $99 per Fedora release.  That's $198 a year.

The issue is that everyone is pissed because this involves Microsoft... and Red Hat is seen as somehow giving in to Microsoft.  Red Hat isn't giving in to Microsoft any more than they gave in to Akamai Technologies Inc when they bought the SSL certificate for www.redhat.com... or when they gave in to GeoTrust for the SSL cert for the fedoraproject.org website.  In each case case a work around is available but they are just trying to spare users and customers a little bit of hassle.  That's all.

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Wed Jun 06 2012 12:01:35 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Where are we now with regard to btrfs?   Is it considered stable enough to run on a production system?

I don't have any personal knowledge / experience with it other than having played with it briefly about a year ago.  Here is the best article I have found on the subject if you haven't already read it:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Btrfs-ready-for-production-in-new-Oracle-Linux-kernel-1471706.html

From that I gather either Oracle's marketing has gotten ahead of its tech or they are happy enough with it to support it.  Perhaps they have added some extra special to their special sauce that is an Oracle-ized RHEL kernel.  SUSE has a track record of adopting a little early.  They did that with Xen... but perhaps others disagree.

In related news, Chris Mason (lead btrfs developer) is leaving Oracle to work for Fusion-IO (https://lwn.net/Articles/500738/)... but he will still be working on btrfs even after the move... and Oracle still plans on moving forward with btrfs in their flavor of Linux.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

(Reincarnating an old thread here)

Wed Aug 31 2011 04:40:05 PM EDT from LoanShark @ Uncensored

Sounds fishy. I think you may not get a time-consistent snapshot of the guest filesystems that you're backing up unless you perform xfs_freeze (or its equivalent under ext4 4, write_super_{un,}lockfs) in the *guest* 

After nearly a year, I am finding that my methodology of snapshotting the LV's and then rsyncing the snapshots to a backup location is still working flawlessly.  However I still need a better solution for my off site backups.

Where are we now with regard to btrfs?   Is it considered stable enough to run on a production system?

btrfs has the ability to do in-place snapshots.  I'd like to create snapshots and then rsync my application directories to an offsite server, rather than rsync the live data like I do now.

youtube-dl is just a single python script.  You can get it here:

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/download.html

Mon Jun 04 2012 11:53:46 PM EDT from maraakate @ Uncensored Subject: Re: How To: Download Kid's Educational Shows from YouTube in a free format

No apt-get for debian :(

Maybe they call it something other than youtube-dl.  Did you do a search?  I believe it is a python script so if you can't find it in your package manager, you can manually install it.  Debian is known for having a very deep package repository so I'm surprised to see Fedora have something that Debian doesn't.  I hate to manually install things myself.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Mon Jun 04 2012 01:22:06 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Subject: Re: virt-viewer-0.5.3 for Windows officially released

spice://hostname?port=xxxx

...because it was important to throw away two decades of URI syntax convention and avoid spice://hostname:portnum at all costs. ^_^

My guess is that it can now or will in the future... accept additional parameters in the form of key=value pairs and they decided to go with one style for all of it rather than one style for the port value and a second style for everything else.  I haven't dug down deep into the protocol but I can imagine that under certain conditions it can take things like monitors=N, resolution=NxN, colordepth=N, etc.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle, Belgrade, Montana

Thanks Scott.  Will give that a shot later in the week.

Thu May 31 2012 04:37:29 PM EDT from ax25 @ Uncensored

Just playing around with it and I guess I don't know what uri syntax it wants.

If you run the GUI it has a dialog box where you can put in the hostname and port.  If you are running it from the command line, it takes a URI like:

spice://hostname?port=xxxx

Let me know if that works for you or not.

-- 
TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Just playing around with it and I guess I don't know what uri syntax it wants.

Just thought I'd mention that the developer has decided to let more people use it now and announced its availability:  virt-viewer-0.5.3 for Windows.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/spice-devel/2012-May/009406.html

-- 
TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

2008 R2 working fine on a few installs with me (KVM/Libvirt).  Mostly using as file / print servers, but had run 2010 Exchange on 2k8r2 as well.

Wed May 30 2012 03:37:22 PM EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

Unfortunately, I have to have the occasional Windows Server install on it, if just for testing, and KVM's didn't look all that great (mostly looking here: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status#Windows_Family).

I say give KVM a try with Windows VMs.  Looking at those reports most of them seem to be using Ubuntu Server 9.04 as their host node.  I wouldn't call that a modern system... so those are either dated reports or not really the prefered setup.  To me running KVM on Red Hat-based systems (RHEL, RHEL clone, or Fedora) seems to be the way to go because Red Hat (since they merged with Qumranet) really is in the drivers seat.  They are also the developers of all of the userland stuff (libvirt, virt-manager, SPICE, etc).  They are also reponsible for about 12-17% of every kernel release being the top company sponser since measurments started being done several years ago.

Red Hat is also pioneering cgroups to offer finer grained resource management of KVM VMs.  They have also been doing a lot of work with the virtio drivers, benchmarking, and fine-tuning.  Their engineers have given many presentations on how to tune KVM and when done properly, it seems to be winning the benchmarks... but you know what they say about benchmarks.

Now having said all of that, I'm NOT an advanced KVM user myself.  I don't get into the nuts and bolts of performance.  I only run a dozen or so VMs... with only a small handful of them being production stuff... and I'm not in a low resource environment where I'm trying to squeeze out as much performance as possible.  I just use virt-manager and mostly go with the defaults... and don't get into CPU flags nor pinning.  The tuning stuff still seems to be a black art but that is definitely changing as KVM matures.  Just remember that the first version of VMware came out in 1999... and that KVM is still rather young... although it has come a long way in a short amount of time by comparison.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Wed May 30 2012 12:16:05 PM EDT from roue @ Dog Pound BBS II

I miss Xen's xm console, but with VNC it's not too bad. I know you can set up a serial console but I've never managed to get it working.

If you are doing desktop / GUI stuff in your Linux VMs or running Windows, you should give SPICE a try.  If the distro you are using doesn't offer SPICE support, you are using the wrong distro to run your KVM VMs on.  While SPICE is still under active development and their progress on client apps has been lagging, if you know where to look, it actually is pretty good... well... on a LAN.  WAN support is still on their radar but it has a way to go.

Need a SPICE client for Windows?  Look here:

http://elmarco.fedorapeople.org/     (See virt-viewer-0.5.3.exe and what it ads to the Start menu)

For Linux, spicy is pretty good.  spicec still works ok but they are moving away from the widget set that was written with and spicec is darn clunky.  If you want to use URLs on a webpage to load your client (and there are sample HTML pages to go by), install spice-xpi (currently Linux-only).

No Mac client yet.  There was one but I don't think it works anymore.

Mobile clients?  Not that I know of although supposedly there are a few user-built ones floating around.  I don't have a tablet nor smartphone so I haven't looked for them.

USB redirection was added fairly recently with an addon package but I haven't tried that yet.  I haven't really had a use for it yet.

Sound works fairly well and A/V sync is pretty good.  Microphones have worked fine for me but I haven't used them a whole lot.  Can't do any of that stuff in VNC.

The thing I like about KVM is that I can have my desktop VMs use DHCP and get private IPs but I can access them from a port on the host node.  I've connected to VMs on local host as well as remote ones.  Works great as long as you are suffering from a resource shortage on the client or the VM host.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Wed May 30 2012 10:44:52 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

I really think that with the advent of hardware-assisted virtualization, there is no practical difference in performance between "type 1" and "type 2" hypervisors.

I think there is a big difference between type 1 and type 2... mainly with the install.  As you surely already know, with the type 1 hypervisors you can just install them on the bare-metal.  With the type 2, you have to already have an OS installed and install the virt product just like an app.

I know, I know... you were saying that there isn't much difference with regards to performance.  I have no real data on that but I would love to see some... and believe that bare metal ones should come out on top... although yeah... by how many percentage points I'm not sure.  VMware USED to require a Linux install to manage it but they got rid of that with the ESX.  VMware is supposedly a standalone hypervisor OS with a management API/service running on top of it.  We use it at work but I don't have to work with it so perhaps I'm just ignorant.  Xen is very much like you described.  While in reality it is a thin hypervisor OS with its own device drivers... it does require Linux running in dom0 to manage the other domains.  I guess Xen (since 3.0 added fully virtualized VMs) is a lot like VMware.  I don't know much about HyperV but I'm guessing it is to Windows like KVM is to Linux.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Thanks!  Probably will get to it in the near future ...  Time is not on my side. (singing in my head).

Never having used ESX, I don't know what VMWare did to cause ESXi to suck. And so far it's working, so no complaints (OK one - the VSphere console blows). Basically, I didn't want to install a full blown OS, install KVM (or other) on it, then decide I didn't like it.

Unfortunately, I have to have the occasional Windows Server install on it, if just for testing, and KVM's didn't look all that great (mostly looking here: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status#Windows_Family).

Meh, it's a choice. It's doing what I want. It's saving me a bundle on having to replace a bunch of systems at once.

Wed May 30 2012 01:19:25 AM EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

I know a bunch of you like other VM hosts, but I'm kinda interested in playing around with different distros, and I don't have to worry about trashing the base OS.

I have no issues with you picking whatever virtualization platform you want... but I did want to clarify what I believe to be a perception you have from your statement.  Installing some virtualization products can "trash" your distro... if by trashing you mean they use a third-party module that hooks into the kernel... and that module has to be recompiled (or updated via a binary package) every time you change your kernel.  Pretty much all hosted (aka a Type 2 hypervisor) virt products are that way.

ESXi is a bare-metal (aka Type 1 hypervisor) that doesn't trash your distro because it is an operating system unto itself.

KVM is kind of a hybrid.  I guess technically it is hosted but I consider it to be Type 1.5... a hybrid between type 1 and type 2.  KVM is three stock Linux kernel modules (kvm, kvm_intel or kvm_amd) that have been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20... so it is a no-brainer... because it can't trash your system... it *IS* your system. Of course you do have to install some additional (almost always packaged/provided by your distro) userland pacakges like libvirt and virt-manager to use it... and KVM requires hardware support for virtualization be present in your CPU (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/FAQ#How_can_I_tell_if_I_have_Intel_VT_or_AMD-V.3F) but other than that it is 100% natural and totally organic. :)

Then again, I don't mind poluting some of my systems with a third-party kernel patch for better quality containers (OpenVZ), but that is another topic.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

You can find it here:

http://img.cs.montana.edu/linux/montanalinux/

I rebuild it and rev the number usually every week or two... as updates come out.  Our network sucks sometimes so I recommend using "wget -c [URL]" from the command line to downloadi it... so if it times out you can continue it.  Of course that assumes you have Linux already.  Building a Fedora spin or remix is actually very easy and the scripts used to build MontanaLinux are included in /root/livecd-creator/MontanaLinux/.  KDM/KDE are the default but of course you can pick what you want from the session selector button that is part of the login screen.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Installing Slackware 13 on ESXi - bring back a lot of memories. I know a bunch of you like other VM hosts, but I'm kinda interested in playing around with different distros, and I don't have to worry about trashing the base OS. And Slackware because I kind of feel like my Linux mojo is rusty, and this is what I learned it on, and seems like a good place to re-learn.

First task after my install is completed (later) is to move my Citadel installation over.

I would be interested.

Greetings,

Since I'm a Fedora fanboi I thought I'd mention that Fedora 17 was released today.  I started using it shortly after the beta came out several weeks back.  I have made a remix that includes GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, and a few others... and lots of desktop apps... and Flash, Google Chrome, and a few other things.  I've been remixing it since like Fedora 9 but I haven't really registered it with DistroWatch... because do we really need more distros?    Also I haven't really done any true customization... I've just added a few extra repos (rpmforge and google) and pre-installed all of the software I like on my machines.  I call it MontanaLinux.

If anyone is interested in it, please let me know and I can share the URL.  It is a LiveDVD that is about 1.8GB (dowdle@montanalinux.org)

-- 
TYL,
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

It seems a lot of children's educational shows have been posted to YouTube. It isn't up to me to decide if them being there is a violation of someone's trademarks or copyrights. If they are there, I can use youtube-dl to download them.

Want "Magic School Bus" season 1? Many Linux distros provide a package named youtube-dl. I went to wikipedia and looked up the Magic School Bus episode titles for season 1 and then I searched for those on YouTube. Then I made a text file and put in the URLs like so:

youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBp68rhT_Sg'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkqSapSsLvc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeV7BtP18N8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tCXnvTnzZc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaf59CuWFuQ'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z91RU4wBm8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idEEIXsqPYA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuMh0FavfE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mIxsGlNhhc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670eR6_UOFA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOKB6B6ROZE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta34lJ_G54A'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFV5Y9ljyBg'

Don't forget to chmod 755 that text file and then you can run it from the commandline. I hope you have some disk space. Each episode is about 130 MB or so. You'll get the webm flavor. Most everything on YouTube is available in several flavors including webm.

I haven't looked for all of the other episodes yet but will soon. You can also find a lot of episodes of PBS' Arthur show. My 6 year old really likes that one.

The quality of these videos is not really that great when played back on a computer monitor with high resolution or an HD TV... but playing them on my Nintendo Wii (with Homebrew's WiiMC application over a samba share) on a standard def. TV, they look just as good as anything else. We do not yet own an HD TV.

youtube-dl is a fantastic program and it can even download complete YouTube channels and/or playlists.

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
Belgrade, Montana

Hi Scott!

Thanks for your insights.

My problem right now is, that things as Proxmox and Opencloud and whatnot are whole distributions for the single purpose of getting  many VMs up and running. You'd need to add more infrastructure for other tasks, probably requiring more hardware.

I am often confronted with (very) small businesses, run by really miserly people: architects, dentists, you know those people with a very low income...  They need some fileserver, some other comfortable things (Outlook sync, other fine things you get for free on linux) and the odd networked tool running on a windows "server" (XP Home edition...). 

So, basically I need a host linux which is long term supported, can run some stuff like apcupsd, openvpn and kvm. Now this is all possible, but in a heterogenous environment where every user runs windows, I need some small graphical frontend for the VMs so that the windows dude can restart a VM. virtmanager for windows is cli only, X11Forwarding via putty and XMing a little tiresome.

And the web based guis are rather huge or inexistant. But after some digging around I found:

http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/ 

http://karesansui-project.info/ for KVM/Xen (tarballs are oooold, but git seems active with recent commits)

I will test the latter soon, will give feedback then. 

Greetings,

I used BBSes from 1982 - 1996 or so on Atari 8-bit and Atari ST.  I was on here a few years back but the account had gone away.  I listened to the fairly recent Security Now audiocast and decided to get back into Uncensored/Citadel.  For my hobby and work email I've been running the OCS version of Zimbra for the last 5.5 years.  I wasn't aware of the modernized Citadel when I got into Zimbra.  I hope to use my own instance of Citadel at some point in the future.  I'm a long time Red Hat (1996) fanboi and prefer RHEL/clone on servers and Fedora on desktops.

For virtualization, I prefer OpenVZ when it is appropriate for the task.  Then comes KVM if the machine in question has VT in the CPU.  If it is a 32-bit only system with no VT then VirtualBox.

The most OpenVZ containers I've had on a single machine is 1,000 but that was just testing.  So far as containers that have actually been used... about 50 or so.

The most KVM VMs I've had on a single machine was about 40... all desktop Linux systems accessed via SPICE.  That was for a sysadmin class.

oVirt is basically the upstream project for RHEV.  I tried RHEV when it required Windows 2003 Server, IIS, and MS SQL server and Internet Explorer to run and use the management interface.  Most of that changed in 3.0 and more is coming in 3.1.  The design is too clunky and requires too much fancy hardware for me.

I like Proxmox VE but I'm not a Debian user.  It seems kind of strange that PVE is based on Debian because Red Hat is king of KVM and OpenVZ bases their stable kernels on RHEL kernels.  The PVE developers aren't familiar with rpm-based distros.  Their choice of perl and not using libvirt was also fairly radical too... but I respect them for it.

I only have a few dozen VMs to worry about and don't really need any of the fancy features so vzctl and virt-manager work well enough for me.  I'd love to see Proxmox VE made available for rpm-based distributions, based on libvirt, and support the SPICE protocol... but I won't hold my breath.

TYL,

Scott Dowdle, Belgrade, MT

my last fiddlings all have been about the RFKill and friends...

is the device up, is the radio enabled, is the whole card disabled by rfkill, sometimes rfkill even switches bluetooth & wifi with the same pushbutton cycling through them.

and... for shure... are the binary firmware packages installed.

 First rule of WIFI under Linux: If it doesnt work out of the box, replace your WIFI card.

Second rule: Feck all the desktop specific gizmos and gadgets.

I use plain old wpa_supplicant, that is what is run under the hood probably by all other managers too.

And it actually has a gui and a tui: wpa_gui and wpa_cli. 

The way you put it, IG, it totally makes sense.

I got a question now myself:

I need to run two VMs (Linux Server (probably ClearOS) and definetly WinXP) on a server. Since it is mainly Windowsland out there, I need a way to manage (restart, etc) them via a webinterface or vnc/rdp. Also, there should be a desktopish non-network way to manage them directly at the host. There will be mouse/keyboard and tft attached.

The site were it runs is a commercial fascilty and they are the worst misers in the world, so should be totally FOSS. Any recommendations for the underlying OS (should be flavour of linux/bsd) and the virtualisation software?

(Is there a windows tool for libvirtd around yet?!) 

Still my vserver provider moved me from openvz to xen. I hear lots of people prefering xen for things which needs to be closer to the hardware. And some other arguments which sounded worth considering. But since I already forgot them...

Anyway, my personal feeling is that xen is dead. 

Seconded on the KVM / Libvirt combo here.  I prefer virsh for all my stop / start / force reboot that damn windows server needs.  Virsh provides a nice terse interface via ssh (just the way I like it)....

Ax25

@spell binder

KVM with virt-manager is what I prefer for remote stuff, virtualbox is nice on my desktop, since it does sound and clipboard and other nice stuff.

virt-manager lets you use more than only KVM (vbox,  xen, etc) and in combination with SASL blends into an AD environment. That is not entirely documented well, but it works fine here. You automagically can SSO into the VNC of your vm, too. But releases might be buggy, as loanshark pointed out. And their error messages are quite on the kabbalistic side at times.

Would someone please explain to me why the heir apparent to Steve Jobs is a South African who is trying to turn my desktop into a cellphone?

For extra credit, you can then tell me why he wants to turn my cellphone into a desktop.

While I'm at it, will someone explain why the Stepford Wives of Open Source (refered to hereafter as 'Ubuntu Users' in the interest of brevity) descend upon anyone asking the above questions and hurl abuse? Everytime I seek answers, they storm the castle walls. Sure, their battle cries are muffled owing to their heads being crammed so far up their backsides. They still manage to derail all attempts by sheer weight of numbers.

The closest I could get to an answer was some gum-smacking kid who said, "Cuz Micro$oft". I also heard murmurs that sounded like, "It's progress. Don't be left behind". 

Ten years ago, this stuff seemed like it had such promise. What the Hell happened?

Is it just me or does every time Open Source takes aim at, "A Brave New World", it instead nails "Idiocracy" right between the eyes?

Anyway, if the Dear Abby of this place would indulge me with answers, I'd sure appreciate it. In the meantime, I have to get some code written before my CentOS desktop is turned into a teenaged boy's computer science project.

I still say that reverting machines to look like windows2k is stupid, it is effectivly as mounting a dialing wheel onto a smartphone, simply because you are used to dial like that.

I abandoned this taskbar approach and all that long ago, it wastes real estate, makes you a "bonus miles" king on mousemovement and doesnt add any usability at all. My desktop looks a bit like the unity approach, but since over 6 years or so.

IG: Your gvfs problem might come from problems with policykit and udisks. This whole replacing of HAL thing made it a paing in the ass for people not using fullblown bloated desktops with proper ?dm login managers. Read a bit here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-858965.html

If you have set this whole thing up proper (I guess debian does the config stuff for you), you want to put this into .xinitrc and use startx:

exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session /usr/bin/enlightenment_start

replace "enlightenment_start" with whatever dm you want to start.

Desktops are usually more powerful less, expensive and easier to install additional hardware in.

who needs a desktop (except for the class of machine called like that)

Ubuntu dropping support for KDE.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/02/canonical-withdraw-financial-support-from-kubuntu/

I don't really like KDE, but I dislike Gnmoe3 more than I dislike KDE, I was thinking of switching.   Still will most likely go with another distro.

Hm, longtime no Citadel.  Anyway...

You didn't mention how old your Toshiba laptop is.  What vintage are we talking about?

I got a pretty basic $400-$500 Toshiba laptop back in 2007.  With only 1 Gb of RAM, it was too weak to run Vista.  I loaded ubuntu on it at the time and used it exclusively.  The 1 Gb of RAM wasn't an issue.  Updated it once in 2008, and steered clear of updating ubuntu with all the unity stuff.

XFCE sounds good in theory, but it really isn't using that much less resources than Gnome.

Know what did it for me?  A few months ago, needing a fresh change, I put Linux Mint 11 on it.  It runs beautifully.  The Gnome interface that attracted so many to unbuntu in the first place, not messed up.  Plus, you'll be familiar with everthing if you're used to ubuntu, since it's based on it.  I am really enjoying it once again.

I had never previously heard about these: 

moonOS is a complete and fully functional operating system based on the GNOME, LXDE, Enlightenment DR17 window managers and powered by the popular Ubuntu Linux Distribution. moonOS has it own File Hierarchy System and use Appshell Framework. moonOS is perfect for any Desktop, Laptop PC or even for a Virtual Machine. moonOS's focus is on Utter Speed, Low Memory and Great Looks!

(There are three editions, each using one of the abovementioned DMs)

 http://moonos.org/about

Macpup is a small,light OS. The .Iso is only 164 MB.It runs in ram and is very fast. It is not a striped down,bare bones,basic core OS. Macpup is a full featured systemright out of the box with apps for office,graphics,multimedia,internetand much more.And it looks really cool.

Uses Enlightenment DR17. They have a youtube video preview on their page.

 http://macpup.org/

That all depends on how much pain you can withstand. There are the flux/openbox things which always look a bit retarded and nerdy to me.

There is windowmaker, which was lightning fast on my olde pentium2 with 256mhz and neomagic craptop gpu.

Then I switched to enlightenment16 because it looked better and had transparent terminals. Now I am using enlightenment17 because it looks even better and has a very low footprint. There should be a PPA for it somewhere, but expect it to be misbehaving. I roll my own on gentoo, almost always works flawless.

So, try e16, if avaiable. 

I have an older Toshiba laptop (don't worry, i got it for free, i would never pay for crappy hardware).

Anyways, I tried loading Ubuntu 11.10 on it but it doesn't have the graphics power to handle Unity and it takes forever to load the GUI for login and attempting to do anything in there is just pain of waiting.

I've resolved to do the same thing I did with my old desktop (my local web server) and install the server edition on it then install the GUI from apt-get or tasksel.

My problem is, I need a desktop that can run on near non-existant graphics power that can be added through apt-get or tasksel. I've tried xubuntu and lxde and they seem light enough, but I'm wondering if the linux guru's here have a better suggestion.

-- 
http://sdkproductions.hopto.org

use unetbootin, it offers the download of different distribution, and writing them on cd/dvd/usb/...

I'm hearing lots of good things about Linux Mint, and there is a lot of noise about it being the successor to Ubuntu in terms of easy for new users, but I haven't tried it myself because, well, I'm not exactly a newbie :)

I've tried Linux Mint 12. It's nice for new users that are just starting out with Linux. It uses the traditional desktop that Gnome3 has built-in. Very clean and easy to work with. There's very little setup you have to do manually, the desktop is nice and clean, and it's set up specifically for users that have recently switched from Windoze and want something slightly familiar, but with the standard linux twist.

I, on the other hand, prefer a custom setup. I haven't quite switched to plain ol' Debian, but I may in the future. Right now, I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.03 LTS Server Edition with xUbuntu desktop added via tasksel. I wanted LXDE, but it wasn't an option for 10.04's tasksel.

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

No because everything will happen on the flash drive.  Use Dual boot only if you want the choice of booting to one or the other.  There are advantages/disadvantages to everything.

I started off with dual boot but used Windows less and less.  Eventually I just installed WinXP as a Virtual machine inside my Linux box for those rare times I need to use Windows.  You can also use WINE on a linux box but I don't.

try unetbootin

Sun Jan 01 2012 07:16:00 PM EST from Nite*Star @ Uncensored

Help .... want to set up a 16GB flash drive (USB drive) to boot my Dell Latitude D620 into Linux. Advice/recommendations?

Is your current system linux (if so, what flavor/distro?)

There are tools for various flavors/distro's of linux to make bootable usb drives that act like either a "live usb" or an actual hard-drive boot.

(Ubuntu being the easiest...)

the evolution of debian.

http://claudiocomputing.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/infografico-do-debian/

Tue Dec 20 2011 01:54:00 PM EST from dothebart @ Uncensored

try the grml live image then.

I'll try that, and if it doesn't work, I'll try ye olde last-ditch-effort of freezing the drive.

I've come to terms with the loss and am prepared for whichever outcome. I would prefer the path of less programming resistance, but come what may.

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

try the grml live image then.

yeah, it's not boot-able anymore.

I'm just going to have to rebuild all of them from the last available backup (if any)...

http://sdkproductions.hopto.org

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

if you just have hdd failures, sdd or ddrescue are the way to go.

(they don't do retries, but treat the space as lost)

but if you're not able to boot i.e. a grml.org and get the block devices, you're lost.

not entirely sure where to put this, but this room was the nearest.

This morning, from work, I noticed I was unable to connect to any of my websites. I run a web-server from my home. I'm just using up some old hardware so I don't have to get rid of it so fast.

Anyways, It could connect to my static html-only pages, but anything that required mysql, php, or any services (ssl, vnc, etc..) were disabled.

It sat all day like this.

I had planned on running a backup of my web server tonight and possibly start moving it to a free web host of some kind. Unfortunately I have to be picky about hosting due to the nature of one of my sites and how many domains I actually need pointed to the same account.

Either way, when I came home from work to see why I couldn't connect, I noticed the HDD of my server tower was making weird noises. I tried rebooting but the HDD got worse from there and the system wouldn't get past the initial startup POST screens and junk.

Is there any recovery tools within Linux I can use to pull any available info off of the failed HDD or am I royaly screwed and have to rebuild my websites from scratch???

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

I wouldn't mind if http://uncensored.citadel.org was on the cloud

What is the cloud anyway, bunch of servers put together so that the hosts can make use of the unused, and meaanwhile charge more for what is being used as well.

nice....

I have no fears about having all my stuff on some remote server controlled by someone else and out of my reach.  Nor do I fear all the cameras the government has placed around... or tracking with cell phones and rfid chips.  What could possibly go wrong?  (he said sarcastically)

Wed Oct 26 2011 04:34:00 PM EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

Does anyone use Slackware anymore? That's what I started on (well, after SCO OpenServer); was great for learning the guts of the system.

athos-mn

I use slack.  I have read forward on the comments that folks that hold on to the past are not "with it".  What I find that makes me productive is to keep up with the crazy kids changes and then later go back and compile them on Slackware with help from slackbuids.org to tweak everything I need and make it just like I want on Slackware.  I have found that I have learned more about everything I care to lean about is best done on Slackware (mostly because I am to old / lazy - to do it on a build yourself Linux from Scratch install).  Just reading the change-log for Slackware keeps you more in the game than anything else.  Just try to email Patrick V. about why he does not include PAM support in the libs and you find out quite a bit about the Slackware philosophy!

Ax25

Ha!  I didn't see that.  I had a bunch of saved bookmarks I was going through and that was one of them. 

Not sure where I saw this originally. 
Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux, supported by a not-for-profit organisation of recognized and elected contributors.
Further than just delivering a free, secure, stable and sustainable operating system, the goal is to set up a stable and trustable governance to direct collaborative projects

http://www.mageia.org/en/

Mon Nov 14 2011 05:04:20 EST from dothebart @ Uncensored

A clever tiny shell helper:

alias tmesg='dmesg|perl -ne "BEGIN{\$a= time()- qx!cat /proc/uptime!};s/\[(\d+)\.\d+\]/localtime(\$1 + \$a)/e; print \$_;"'

 - by zarath

oops, missing to ignore the blanks in front of smaller timestamps:

alias tmesg='dmesg|perl -ne "BEGIN{\$a= time()- qx!cat /proc/uptime!};s/\[\s*(\d+)\.\d+\]/localtime(\$1 + \$a)/e; print \$_;"'

A clever tiny shell helper:

alias tmesg='dmesg|perl -ne "BEGIN{\$a= time()- qx!cat /proc/uptime!};s/\[(\d+)\.\d+\]/localtime(\$1 + \$a)/e; print \$_;"'

 - by zarath

I have had other stuff on my mind, but here is a link, How to painlessly switch from Ubuntu to Fedora
http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-painlessly-switch-from-ubuntu-to.html

It probably doesn't contain anything an experienced user couldn't figure out, but I bookmarked it a while ago.

Fri Nov 11 2011 16:59:56 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Hey, question for all you Debian d00dz.

My /etc/apt/sources.list is full of lines that look like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

If I replace the official release names (squeeze, wheezy, etc.) with
the persistent names (stable, testing, etc.) will I automatically be
treated to the next update of each version each time the distributors
change those symlinks to point to a new release?

exactly. And a simple apt-get install <some tiny package you find out to need> will lead into chaos.

for that reason, you should have the distro name rather than stable/testing/unstable in your configs.

I meant to add a link for the ubuntu smart phone interface mock-up.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/unity-phone-tablet-mockup-is-great/

Interesting thought.  I was accused of "not liking change" when I said I didn't like Gnome3/Unity.  I am still using 10.4 on my desktop.  Perhaps that not liking change is true, I went from DOS 5.5 to W2K Pro.  I had Windows 3.1 on the machines, but I only used it for a few things. 

I think the newer icon based systems is for dumbing down the user.  I remember jokes about making fast food registers with pictures of hamburgers so the person behind the counter could know what food you wanted without knowing how to read.  The simpler the interface, the dumber the user.

I have to admit that I only saw video footage of Windows8 and Unity, but I came to the conclusion that we are probably becoming too old for new concepts. Hearing that people like Raymond and Torvalds change to xfce is not a sign of progress or a legitimate protest for me, but a sign of grumpyness. The oldschool linux users (and possibly all oldschool computer users) are used to some kind of text interface on a ultra low res black/green screen with horribly usability. Display managers are only a method to them for displaying more than one program window at a time. And thats how your usual LUG screenshot section looks like: Some fluxbox or xmonad desktop, having lots of terminals open with your most antique gtk2 theme, making it look like motif was still the hippest thing you could use. This is not what your average user wants!

Now, I don't know what your usual user wants, I am not one of them. I want lots of terminals, too. But I can't stand the rectangular motif looks. I am using enlightenment17 (the desktop) since about six years, because it was the most lightweight but stylish alternative to all the retro looking resource hoggers at that time. I still use it. But I also instantly choose the Classical design on windows XP installs, because I prefer it over the candystyle of the XP default theme. And I now lots of windows users who do this in Win7 installs. These people also are annoyed by every single style or comfort feature which win7 offers. They are control freaks, too. (I know this because I am one myself when it comes to computers, most of the time).

I installed win7 for my mom and girlfriend and they were like "Oh, this looks all so odd" but now they are using it perfectly well and I get less complaints and they are asking fewer times for help. There also must be a reason for the massive popularity of Apple hardware, something they are doing right. And they have one of the most freaking complicated input method with this finder. But especially females and people from non-desing focused branches (I know lots of architects, but also some electrical engineers) like it.

So what is my point here? The point is, that we live in a time were possible most little girls can beat me in a computer game on the Wii/PS3/Xbox. Were more people have a mobile contract than landlines (15 years ago, only drug dealers and brokers had mobiles!), were CPU and GPU powers are so vast that there are almost no limits to your input interface and were touchscreens become more and more popular (if this makes sense or not). 20 years ago, the keyboard was everything and a mouse kind of a nice gift for games. Remember that you PC guys didnt own proper joysticks and gaming on the Amiga/Atari was so much more fun because we didn't need to bang at our keyboards? Now we are moving to the next input method, so moving to new interfaces is just a logical step. If we grumpy "old" men like it or not ;)

I became an Ubuntu user in 2006. I didn't want to like it - Ubuntu was marketed as a multicultural, politically correct distribution of the Linux operating system, and as a patriotic American I didn't find that appealing. But I'm open minded so I tried it anyway -- and there was no getting around the fact that Ubuntu offered a desktop that paid attention to detail, looked good, and just worked. This was what we needed, and in the years that followed, Ubuntu rocketed to the top as a favorite of both new and experienced Linux users alike.

Sadly, those heady days have come to an end -- and it didn't have to happen. The Linux that rose to the top of the heap and was going to be the consumer grade Linux on which users, ISV's, and OEM's could focus, fell from grace and became the Linux that likes to alienate its existing users. So what went wrong?

Last year, our friends at Canonical introduced Unity, a new user interface for netbook computers that seemed to make sense at the time. Unfortunately, they then decided to make Unity the primary user interface for all versions of Ubuntu, including those running on laptops and desktops with large, high-resolution monitors.

The vast majority of existing Linux users are rejecting Unity. We want desktops that look and act like desktops, not like overgrown, broken smartphones. The general consensus seems to be that the new favorite is Xfce, which ironically was designed to run efficiently on low-spec hardware. Open source luminary Eric Raymond famously switched from Unity to Xfce after a protracted rant about Unity's unsuitability for general desktop use. Another recent convert is Linus Torvalds, who knows a thing or two about the Linux operating system after having created its kernel -- he switched to Xfce after calling GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess'.

It's possible that the GNOME team may realize that they 'pulled a Vista' with the GNOME Shell and perhaps clean up their mess in the next version. I have no such hopes for Ubuntu and Unity. Unity is Mark Shuttleworth's pet project, and he is openly hostile to its critics. This seems to be the standard procedure being adopted by all Canonical employees, who habitually close threads on their message boards which attempt to discuss the topic.

I've been running my desktops on Xfce for a few months now. Helpful people in various message boards suggested that the easiest way to make Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 usable again is to type apt-get install xubuntu-desktop to install Xfce, and that is indeed the quick fix. But this raises the question: now that the formerly good looking and usable desktop has been taken away, what's the point of using Ubuntu in the first place? Other distributions have largely closed the gap in other places, and the only thing Ubuntu has an edge on right now is a slightly easier installer (particularly if your system requires non-free bits to run). I made the decision to switch to stock Debian, and upon doing so I found that most of the things that I liked about Ubuntu were simply brought forth from the Debian base.

And what of those other devices, the smartphones and tablets for whose touchscreens Unity was intended? Will any of them ever see an Ubuntu installation, other than perhaps retrofits installed by a few end users? For the mass market, we already have a version of the Linux operating system that runs on these devices: it's called Android and its place as the long-term leader is almost completely cemented at this point. There will likely be a few "looks like a tablet but it's really a PC" products, but those will be intended to run Microsoft Windows 8, and Ubuntu will find an uphill battle there similar to the one it currently faces on conventional desktop computers.

Therefore, if Unity is its future, then it is clear that Ubuntu has jumped the shark. The debate is essentially over: there is a general consensus among Linux users that Unity is practically unusable on a computer with an upright display. If this is the direction in which they are committed to continue to go, then the age of Ubuntu has come to an end. In pace requiescat!

I also have become disappointed with Ubuntu.  I could probably make the change from Gnome2 to Gnome3 but unity drove me crazy.  I heard there were people who wanted to work on a gnome2 fork but haven't followed the progression.  I tried using XFCE and seem to enjoy that but it is missing some of the features I have gotten used to in Gnome.

I am wondering what distro will be my next choice, the only one I have mildly tested was Fedora.  I am sure any other distro will be fine, but I don't think I will stick with Ubuntu.

Tis a shame, rumor has it, they were trying to move into the phone market.

Fri Nov 04 2011 15:02:10 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Heh. :)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/886305

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/ubuntu-desktop-designers-clarify-on-configurability/

You're not alone ;-)

Thu Oct 27 2011 21:38:26 EDT from Sig @ Uncensored

I went from Ubuntu to Linux Mint Debian Edition for my netbook. I still need a Windows partition for work, but day-to-day I stay in LMDE. I've been pretty happy with it for... I dunno, 6-8 months?

After 8 years of Mandriva now moving to LMDE also - I hope this turns out as well as it looks.

Although hyped as a rolling release, LMDE is (fortunately) not quite that suicidal but close enough to the bleeding edge

 to not be waiting forever for new packages.

our first test install has definitely been rock solid,

My next task is to build it into being a Proxmox VM so I can use it in a USB3 key on whichever of my different computers I happen

 to be around at the moment ( I have one at home, one in the office, one in the field, one at the labs and it seems logical

 just to carry one image around and use that instead of trying to keep each individual machine mirrored)

-- 
TheOneLaw

If what you really want is ubuntu with the other x desktop why not just install the x desktop. Save yourself all the reinstallation grief. debian doesn't buy you anything else, what's th epoint.

Quite true, and that is in fact what I have already done.  At the moment I am evaluating strategies for new installs.

But more interestingly: what's wrong with centos? Is redhat going down the wrong path of some kind?

In the couple of weeks that we've had CentOS 6, we have had a number of machines just completely blow themselves up.  Their implementation of ext4 is, for some reason, unstable under certain types of storage.  The same storage works fine with ext3 or with a non-CentOS distribution.

Add to that the fact that Red Hat has added even more unwanted crap to the "minimal" install that we have to turn off for every build.  Bloody acres of enterprise-ey daemons and services that are irrelevant in a service provider environment.  Debian doesn't give you anything you don't ask for, which for a service provider is awesome because there are no listening ports open by default, no extra services consuming memory and disk, etc.

And my big question of the day: all those ubergeeks who are working on the up and coming versions of whatever distro they're working on... what do they actually RUN on their development machines while they're doing their development. Seems to me that would be a good question to know the answer too.
If a alpha of a distro is just plain broken, they're not going to be using it wHILE they're fixing it, so what ARE they using?

They use Windows, silly.

Thu Oct 27 2011 12:57:16 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Ok, so I'm converting my primary development machine to Debian. Let's see how this experiment goes. If I like what I see then I may begin switching my desktops eventually.

I also happen to be in the market for a new server Linux, since we're not happy with CentOS 6 here.

run

dpkg-buildpackage

to get a list of all missing software to compile citadel.

well, I don't run SID on my netbook just for the shake of the many disk operations (flash you know...)

before, I did that.

my home desktop (which I access mostly via ssh..) still runs SID.

my worst scenarios were X not starting, which was fixeable by rtfm & nagging others on IRC.

my $work workstation usualy runs debian stable for half a year or so until the next testing is more stable again (theres a little rush after the freeze, you know? ;-)

my last upgrade to testing failed due to disk space, and I needed to boot it with grml since I fucked up my libc. took me some extra hours in the office that day.

The upcomming 8.10 citadel release requires bleeding edge libev; which i3wm.org (which I sometimes compile from git...) also uses.

Had a fukup with that too, required me to recompile & install my windowmanager from the commandline, roughly an hour or two without X.

You know, all these fuckups might be challanging to fix, be a bit anoying, but I prefer that over having to turn my carpet into direction Me aeh Redmond, fall down on my knees to get my box back up & running once it fails.

I thought that Ubuntu's advantage is its user community. It should be quite easy for a beginner to find help by browsing a little bit through the www.

I tried Ubuntu 11.10 here at work. Unity was quite OK, but too slow (maybe it was a broken RAM module and not unity). I'm running fedora with fluxbox now. I would have preferred gnome3 but it doesn't support my graphic card.

I fear I will burn in eternal slacklessness...

I always wanted to try it, since SuSE seems to be derived from it. But than again, it seems to involve too much compiling on your own and I can already do that in gentoo and more elegant, as it sounds to me. But I might try it just to praise the man with the pipe. 

Does anyone use Slackware anymore? That's what I started on (well, after SCO OpenServer); was great for learning the guts of the system.

Wed Oct 26 2011 09:49:45 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Well, I think one of the reasons Ubuntu picked up so many n00bs so quickly is because for the first few years, they'd send free CD's to anyone who wanted them.

I do remember at the time that Ubuntu's desktop was just so much better looking than anything else out there. Nowadays I'm not seeing much of a difference.

you probably didn't compare it to SuSE or Mandriva...

I'd guess their installer is better or at least looks better. There must be a reason why noobs switched to ubuntu by the dozens. Installer is important for those windows users who see reinstallation as a proper way of problem solving and do so every few month. Also, synaptic makes it easy for ex-windows users to get a working system. 

thats what all those angry ubuntu/debian diskussions are about anyways.

Ubuntu primarily pulls stuff more frequent from the debian testing tree, and calls it "stable"

Just make a step sideways and try Linux Mint (ubuntu based, dunno which desktop, but even more targeted at having more sophistication and ease with preinstalled codecs and whatnot) or Bodhi Linux http://www.bodhilinux.com/about.php (more minimal approach, as it seems and enlightenment 17 as desktop). Or any other ubuntu clone. As a debian hater, I'd say you try Suse or Gentoo :-)

deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian wheezy main
deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian wheezy non-free contrib
deb-src http://debian.netcologne.de/debian sid main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian experimental main
#deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-aurora

all codecs installed which are needed.

no big deal.

want xfce?

apt-get install xfce

done.

want bleeding edge? install wheezy (testing) which is what ubuntu also aggregates from.

want real bleeding edge? install sid (which may break now and then.)

other than being a n00b or wanting to helb n00bs there is no good reason to use ubuntu.

well, next to being able to help novice users, I never saw a reason to switch to ubuntu in first place.

debian has non-free & contrib parts of repos, you just need to specify it in their apt-line whether you want to install software from them or not.

me (using i3wm.org) never used any kind of desktop; I don't need filemanagers, I know howto operate bash.

I3wm is just the most effective way to manage screenspace for my GUI applications which would be:

 - XTerms (yes truckloads of them, thats why they're first in the list)

 - Iceweasel (most of my GUI stuff runs there..)

 - Emacs (also some windows to the same Editor distributed over several screens & desktops)

 - KCachegrind

 - sqldeveloper (yack java crap...)

 - jmeter (yack more java crap...)

 - soapui (and even much more java crap)

and on testing or debugging icedove or evolution, ekiga now and then... and thats it.

Because they've got it wrapped up inside a bunch of other stuff to make it not crash your browser.  The package manager can more reliably install Flash than you can do it by hand.  Trust me on this one.

It seems as if they are still pushing out 3.6.x updates, my laptop still is  on that version, since one webdesign plugin is so farkin old it won't work with anything else. 

I am using 10.4.3(LTS) because I don't feel the need to have the latest and greatest.

I use this PPA for Firefox:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu

and this for Thunderbird:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/thunderbird-stable/ubuntu

I do have the latest and greatest Firefox and Thunderbird.... only because now with the new crazy number system as soon as the newest version is released, the last version is no longer supported.  ugh.

I just found out that TRK3.4 fails totally in the virus check department at the moment. I used to use it for offline removal of virii on our windows desktops, now I need a replacement. Any recommendations? bitdefender, f-prot and vexira would be nice.

they were called sidekick, and were aquired by microsoft (and discarded like webos) a while ago.

Thu Sep 15 2011 13:13:44 EDT from saltine @ Uncensored

I think theres still a market for two-way pagers. Solves so many issues.
Company doesnt incur a huge cost; sets a barrier to help encourage work-life balance.

Yes, I agree, but there are things such as Bloover and your average mobile phone is lost or stolen easier/more often than an average windows desktop. It is all theory, though, I guess if you want to, you can steal the CAC in the first place, etc. :)

Ah, yes, thats a terrific system! Enforcing security which the users see as superflous is the nightmare of any admin... Especially if it isn't even for really classified stuff. And I can totally see people working around these restrictions.

At the university, people with access to the accounting software need a smart card too, combined with a pin code they can choose by themselves. Of course these pins are birthdates of themselves, familymembers or equally stupid numbers and the smartcard is kept in an unlocked drawer somewhere near the computer. All this because they are pissed off by the software (three letter acronym, founded by ex-IBM people, you might guess which one I am referring to) and it isn't their money in the first place.

I guess your admins should build the thumbdrive with CAC reader included (I guess it is RFID/NFC of some sort), so after booting off of it and inserting card, everything works fast and fine and nothing gets stored on untrusted computers.

Yes, but using email for this whole process is like communicating via posters on a campus and marking some sections "not to be read by students"...

SSL or not, you have the unencrypted message body lying around on a mobile phone or another unencrypted system, like your averade windows desktop, and you are allowed to choose your own email client... I would have expected something like enigmail and encryption enforcement policy for receiving devices, at least. I even expected a special locked client with paranoid security. Heck, all my linux systems have luks encrypted partitions (yes, root, too) and I am still bothered because /boot is unencrypted :)

But I do understand the concept of parapgraph/email classification now, makes sense.

But it makes sense, I was just going to ask why you have confidential ratings per paragraph in a medium as "email"... :)

did they use c-carpet again?

I thought Gnome would use "tracker" as a successor to beagle...

I use tracker outside of Gnome here and it is farking brilliant: It indexes your files as the windows index stuff does, but this time it really works. After a while, all your files are indexed, then if you search for something, you instantly get results. Fresh files and file changes are indexed via some kernel interface. I love it.

simply use rox-filer. lightningfast, and realy tiny.

anybody in california?

http://openidsummitsept2011.eventbrite.com/

hm, a meta openid/oauth/whatever anounced:

http://accountchooser.com/

except they've got tight session timeouts, they'd be real good openid providers...

Wed Sep 07 2011 17:40:06 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

I sincerely doubt that any bank (or pretty much any site that has access to your money) will ever accept OpenID. Most already require two factor authentication.

I thought that was the idea behind OpenID?

Anyway, browsers remembering passwords is fine, until you are not at your browser but want to login....

Also, recently my browser had a severe amnesia and forgot all logindata, including account names. (First time in 11 years or so, but frustrating.) And browsers sometimes stop working if homepages change their layout or whatever too much. (The "send me a new password via email" doesnt always work, either...)

But what I really do hate is the thge registering process in itself:

• No, this paricular special character for your nickname isnt allowed here
• No, we don't accept mail.ru or your special mail server
• Your password is too long, too short, too friggin blonde or whatever (I recently used a 16char password on a site which only accepts 15 chars and wasnt able to login, because you CAN enter 16 chars and the last ones don't get truncated...)
• You failed at the captcha, please try again.. 25 times in a row?
• "Your activation email will arrive soon" <- yeah, sure, two days is soon
• Why do I have to register to use a friggin search button or see some information that is absolutely not priovacy relevant?!

Even if registering only took two minutes, it is lost time. Time better spent browsing cracked.com, xkcd or pr0n!

Wed Sep 07 2011 16:00:03 EDT from Ford II @ Uncensored

I dunno... it seems to me that having a third party for authenticating

isn't a bad idea. I hate having to log into this place, then this

Sure. ONE third party so everybody can write to them. Wouldn't be so bad. But this all things for all people crap doesn't work.

its name was M$ passport, and it miserably failed.

8088, you do know that powerpc is non intel? ;-P

debian configures that stuff via /etc/network/interfaces

most probably you can set dhcp parameters there too.

This would explain why it is used by just a few sites... but after 10 years of heavy internet usage, I am sick and tired of creating accounts and registering on forums (just to use their search function or for other minor things). If all of them would just use openid or oauth or whatever is the current hip thing, it would be a blessing.

Sun Sep 04 2011 17:49:22 EDT from the_mgt @ Uncensored

Fr Sep 02 2011 16:26:36 CEST von fleeb @ Uncensored

I'm not sure if IG would want me invading Citadel with my C++-ish ways, but I probably could help interface with certain libraries.

I am a huge fan of this idea! Bring forth jingle support on the xmpp server, integrate libmapi or libsyncml! :)

or help us reading, understanding, and libev'ing that c++ openid 2 implementation.

they're doing lots of c++ vodoo in there, which goes beyound my understanding.

since our implementation mustn't be synchroneus, and should use expat, somebody being able to read that code would be nice ;-)

sending asynchroneus http requests is rather easy, we have a libev/libcurl integration in place, but preparing the post data and parsing the replies will be more complicated...

you might lears some bits about eventdriven / asynchroneous programming along the way.

Fr Sep 02 2011 16:26:36 CEST von fleeb @ Uncensored

I'm not sure if IG would want me invading Citadel with my C++-ish ways, but I probably could help interface with certain libraries.

I am a huge fan of this idea! Bring forth jingle support on the xmpp server, integrate libmapi or libsyncml! :)

Well, I found in some highprizing tools in the MS world, you pay less for the software, but more for the dongle. Around 5k€ per dongle is nothing odd here, for some CAD software or some broken piece of crappy eyetracking thing, for example. The eyetracking guys even give away their software. (And their algorythms sucks so bad, it needs several days for a two hour session to postprocess and mark eyemovement. And it doesnt use threads. And doesnt work in 64bit systems. Also not in WinXP mode on Win7 64bit. Oh and there is a free algo running in matlab which does it better. Also, their hardware is unergonomical and not really field approved. And they use DVD quality for the recorded video of what you are watching, but crappy resolution/bitrate AND only 25frames for the actual tracking of your eye movement....)

And I don't think you need a lawyer, there are so many companies (even groupware companies I never heard of until I did some research) charging ubarprized services or threatening everyone who fiddles with their closed source software in the Linux world.

My doctors office runs an app on what obviously is a Gnome desktop (foot instead of a "start" button).

Don't moo!  I was heartbroken when Citadel86 went from M)oo to M)eet user.  It was never the same.

A lot of closed source, even on the kernel level comes to mind:

Nvidia Display drivers (and tools) (which taints the kernel license when installed)

VIA S3 Display driver (and tools) (aka the reinvention of crappyness, but hell, it exists)

Bitdefender/F-Prot antivir clients

Virtualbox until recently, right now only the USB2.0 and some other oracle tagged stuff

VMWare

Intel's Tivoli Storage management

Skype

Even some crippled groupwares, with their sorry excuse of a community version, as a tribute to the GPL'ed stuff they are using.

Some games

Some Javaapps are tagged as unfree (codewise) and run under Linux.

So there is lots of weirdness out there and not everything has to be free on a linux. Heck, lots of settopboxes and other embedded devices run a linux kernel and some propriety environment, remember the AVM Fritzbox GPL lawsuit recently posted here.

Also, AGPL is out there.

Thu Sep 01 2011 17:06:17 EDT from fleeb @ Uncensored

I suspect that I would need to compile against other code that is certainly GPLed in some fashion. And I don't just mean libraries underlying the operating system or anything like that.

I'll just have to hope that, someday, I'll have the chance to work with Linux in some more friendly environment than this one.
But, I suspect that will be challanging... the majority of my working experience has involved Windows OS. I don't know how many firms would take interest in hiring someone with little to no experience in Linux for system level programming.

many (if not most) libraries are lgpl, which means you mustn't staticaly link them, but everything else is ok.

many are also bsd style licenses.

QT for example is dual licensed: GPL & QPL & proprietary (maybe they dropped the QPL meanwhile) which means, if you want to write closed source software this is possible; you simply need to buy a license from them. You can however develop your tool with the gpl version, as long as you don't distribute it, you simply have to provide yourself with the source.

the only constraint in that case would be, that your programm would have to quote the user the lgpl'ed code that was used on startup. For example my garmin gps enlists libexpat on bootup.

On linux you've got the powers of valgrind. You should try compiling it using winelib; use a VM or AndLinux for that.

*hint* you may work on citadel to collect some linux experience ;-)

@IG: What do you have your backup intervals set up to?

My normal server backups hit every night at midnight, but i use the "freeze and snapshot" method for backups.

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

well, maybe if you need to do in kernel code; which usually shouldn't be neccesary.

I absolutely agree on the raid arguments (for backups), but I have to say that I love Raid6. The issue that IG had is a common scenario, most of the time you bought 3-4 harddrives from the same production line on the same date, so if one of them fails for any reason, chances are high that a second one will fail too. Due to wear out, technical failure, old age, whatever. On a Raid5 your lost then. And I have seen a hotspare in a NAS being in the same used state (SMART-wise) as the 3 actual raid disks.

I also had a raid which silently died, ripping the fs slowly appart without any notice and completely imploded when fsck came to the rescue....

We have two fundamental problems with Linux for production use in our systems.

My boss is very, very comfortable with the Windows operating system, for all its faults, and simply does not want to invest the time to learn another operating system, end of discussion, yadda yadda.  This is, frankly, the second largest impediment to using Linux.

With that kind of mindset, *I* don't want us to move to Linux.  Because if we did, I will be the only person doing technical support for all of our boxes, installations, etc, and I want to be able to take vacations, and sleep at night (our customers call 24/7 if there are problems), and actually work on real code instead of constantly handling support.  We aren't going to hire another person (at a loss) just to do technical support because we wanted to change operating systems.

He's well aware by now that Linux is a viable operating system, one that is essentially free to use, and one that doesn't fuck up any more than any other operating system if you use it correctly.  But he just doesn't want to get comfortable with it.  He has had many opportunities, but just won't do it.  He's happy enough with Android, but I don't think Android is the right operating system for what we do.  It's perfect for hand-held machines but not server/workstation systems.  This sorta cracks me up in some ways, as he will complain bitterly about having to pay for Windows, but he won't do anything to get away from it.

The other problem involves licenses.  If we moved to Linux, we would almost certainly have to open source everything because of the viral nature of GNU licensing, and he is completely unwilling to do that at this point.  He doesn't want to risk some other company stealing our work, and using it to enhance their own products.  There's very nearly a 100% chance that would happen to us (e.g. a certain company that has created an automation system that claims to do what we can do would love to steal our code and actually make it happen instead of just advertise it falsely).  We'd effectively find ourselves killed as a company, at least at this point in time.

I keep saying 'at least at this point in time' because we know we need to change.  Our core business right now isn't really moving us forward, so we have to adjust.  We have plans towards change, but as ever, hush-hush.  Furthermore, unfortunately, much of our core code relies on APIs within the Windows operating system.  I'm slowly working to change that, but I can only do so much at a time.  And, unfortunately, because Linux doesn't have a more componentialized approach to working with media as far as I can tell, some of what we're trying to do can't be properly done in the Linux operating system.  I hate Microsoft, but they did a very impressive thing with that DirectMedia environment.  Closest thing to that in the Linux world is VideoLAN's efforts, but they're way behind right now, and nowhere near as flexible as the DirectMedia environment.

did you use that situation to tell him that linux doesn't try to solve your problems on its own and doesn't do that fataly wrong therefore?

having done an exchange recovery a while ago... they tell you the point & click lie, which lasts as long until you run into real trouble. suddenly "cryptic commandline tools" show up promising to solve your problems after lots of documentation reading.

IG, maybe dividing the system into data partition could also do some good and reduce the amount of data needed to be backed up?

Fleeb, fancy that your windows done wrong event doesn't seem to have the same conclusions as linux done wrong...

ouch... 15 grand just because of microsoft... wait... that comment should be in the Microsoft Bashing room.

I've never worked with RAID setups before, but know how either side (soft or hard) works... I just use .img/.iso backups. I have it set to freeze the system and write to an .img every couple of days. I used to use the automated backup to .tar.gz approach but felt it necessary (and slightly easier) to do disk images...

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

Wed Aug 31 2011 16:22:32 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Having been toasted by software RAID failures twice now, I'm simply not going to run RAID at all this time. And I don't have the money to spend on a hardware RAID controller.

A hardware RAID can also fail, and take data with it.

yea, seems as if they should get carly fiorina back and continue manufacturing printer ink.

as for webos... one would think that a company like HP could do better in buying a promising technology and developing it to some point where everybody wants it...

as the register comments,  they might get a chance to license it, as maybe androids flag sinks with the motorola merger...

but they currently seem to be rather able to fork it instead of buying a license of another os...

I guess they're following their aquired companies compaq & dec into the hoods of insignificance.

I guess one could argue that intel managed to successfully evaporate all better alternatives to unix workstation & server processors with its itanic, and eventualy take them all out of business...

- alpha / dec dead.

- pa/risc HP;  dead.

- mips well sort of dead man walking, trying to become the next ARM since a decade now... promising fork of the technology in china

- powerpc Ok, we've got IBM, who didn't buy on itanic in first place,

- Sparc who might survive within sun/oracle

now there is no ex-intel / microsoft employee to blame for their decision to move "into the cloud" like over at nokia, though the stories seem somewhat similar...

oh. hp drops webos? and want to sell their pc-business? (like ibm did to lenovo?)

I guess their drop in value...

well. not good news i'd say.

Nothing, it is just the number game all browsers play atm.

And since some distros rename it to 2.6.40 and others call it 3.0.0 for compatibility reasons, I think Linus was on meth when he decided to go for the 3.

Do Aug 04 2011 01:14:43 EDT von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

More than a decade ago when some people were waxing eloquent about Enlightenment (which is still around, actually) I had commented that it's great if the only purpose of your computer is to render a pretty desktop, but most of us actually want to run some applications. Now it seems that GNOME, KDE, Unity, Apple, and Microsoft have all caught up to Rasterman's dream of a world in which a computer desktop is 100% eye candy.

Actualy Enlightment can be called "lightweight" these days, and is considered to be run on mobiles & tvs (bada ;-)

well, found one of these centos VMs running a deamon of 200MB ram just polling for UPDATES?

ain't that a job for cron?

and... I realy dislike exim being the default MTA, and that you needed to know a litte deb-foo to replace it with msmtp

but...

dpkg --set-selections is a real cool feature.

So Jul 24 2011 20:49:41 EDT von LoanShark @ Uncensored

I think it's just nostalgia at this point. Kind of like all those
people who still want to petition IBM to release the source code to
OS/2's WorkPlace Shell so that it can become The Next Great Desktop
(tm).

Well they can't, or at least shouldn't. OS/2 was spun off/sold to another business which is still selling & supporting the product. The code might no longer be IBM's to release.

yes, it is. but I wouldn't think that the WPS is their primary featureset; since most customers are using their os/2 computers in automatons having their own UI, or as sort of a "thin client" to run RDP/X11/3270/... applications.

but due to that they probably just got a license, not all rights, its hard for both of them to release the source...

as for the kernel, its probably got lots of additions from Aix, which also makes copyright a problem.

geos was also set to fill this gap and failed.

yea, realy loved that.

If only GEM had a decent terminal emulator.  Oops, wrong room.

so I ran the sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Installed beautifully. just waiting until I get home to see the results. I'm assuming I have to choose that option at the login screen the same way I chose "Ubuntu Classic"

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

Fri Jul 22 2011 09:39:44 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

I hate all this convergence crap. Each device should run a UI that is designed for it.

And I'm on the same boat here. I hate the new proposed UI for Win8... and Unity sucks for large screens (I have 2 monitors at 1680 x 1050)

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

@IG <like>

I'll install xfce when I get a chance. I've always loved Xfce, so clean and well fitting to my 2 screen setup with nVidia graphics. I only did the "Ubuntu Classic" since it was an easy fix for in a hurry.

It would seem, updating to 11.04 was less painful this time. Though, I did the Ford (or is it someone else I'm thinking of from here?... my memory fails me) approach and waited several months to actually do the update.

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

i3 scales nice from tiny to big screens.

nvm. solved my own problem.

At the end of the 11.04 upgrade it asks if you want to remove the "obsolete" and "unused" packages and dependencies. I said "Keep Them" and all worked out fine.

I don't really like the Unity desktop, so I logged out and chose the "Ubuntu Classic" session at the bottom during login.

All is right with the world now :)

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

btw, this is the problem/solution i tried last time and never worked for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1742952

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

So, I've been putting-off updating my Ubuntu10.10 systems to 11.04 because last time I tried, it screwed up xorg and nvidia horribly. I don't want to nuke my system and do a fresh install of 11.04, nor do I want to lose my gfx drivers and have to do back-handed ways to get them back.

Anyone have advice?

-- 
Stephen D King
skpacman8629@gmail.com

MMMMmmmmm PAM.  I wonder if I still have the thread where I argued with Patrick Volkerding (Slackware) about my need for a PAM package (and my naive thoughts on how easy it would be).  Early in my messing around with Linux and found that I did not in fact want to recompile all that needed to be recompiled.  Turns out there are folks that ended up packaging linux-pam for Slack, but that was years later - and I used their work to my advantage when I needed to install VMWare Server on Slackware.  Being lazy pays off some times :-)

Ax25

udev is the replacement for devfs, the thing replacing HAL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviceKit, with its minions ukit and upower. Under the reign of PolicyKit they let you mount your usb sticks and whatnot as normal user. And it is easy, have a look here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-858965-highlight-.html <- one monster of a firstpost and 12 pages of addendum...

And of course you need not only ConsoleKit, PolicyKit and DeviceKit, no, you will also need PAM as it seems. And I hate PAM. I once had all my systems PAMfree.

The funny thing is, that it seems that PolKit replaced PolicyKit and the DeviceKit stuff  is merged into (lib)udev...

Stuff like this and the "Xorg goes HAL, all will be golden now. Wait, we are removing HAL and we will not go with the next hype since they deprecate it before anyone converts to it" incidents are what I ment with "hey, lets reimplement it again, differently". It is the complete opposite to the MS route who stick with a stupid concept for years. But both ways suck.

dbus?

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html Is another approach and has some critical points in the "On Upstart" section. Personally, I hate all these "let's reimplement everything differently, at least in two versions, deprecate it a year later when everybody uses it, announce something new and deprecate that even before it is released" projects. Especially I hate booting. I don't boot, since I don't see thee point of it. There is suspend. Until there is a newer kernel, then you can reboot, and it doesn't matter if it takes 5 or 5,5seconds or even 3 minutes, since you should do it once a day. (Ok, if you multiboot, think about virtualisation or a second machine, if you really really rely on it ;)

On the fat desktop environments, I never got the hang of them and they are directly connected to these crappy reimplementation projects. I started my linux experience with Windowmaker. I never liked taskbars or the start menu concept. From Windowaker I switched to Enlightenment16 and since 5 years I only use e17 with some cherry picked things from gnome. I avoid KDE stuff like the plague. So now since HAL is deprecated it is complete madness to get such a simple thing as auto mounting usb sticks going. I needed to create two config files for consolekit, edit a pam config, startx with ck-session-launcher and there were other obscure and unholy things involved. Still it breaks every now and then, so I need to completely relogin again. Of course, progress is good and variety too, but why do they need to become ever shittier?

well, there is just another... lxde...

you might have seen the discussion in citadel support lately; debootstrap is the way to start; dunno which way dab works in here; hopefully just wrapping existing tools.

Yes, that is where I am stuck, too. Maybe there is some sort of "patch set" applied to the image, where the default distro things are touched and the changes to the configs are made. If I need to chroot into the machine or even boot it and ssh into it, I could simply run self generated scripts or do stuff by hand when I am there...

http://boxgrinder.org/ sounds really fancy. Anybody here tested it?

BoxGrinder creates appliances (also called images) from simple plain text Appliance Definition files. There are only two simple steps to create an appliance:
Create Appliance Definition File – Check out our appliance definition structure page for detailed information about the file structure along with examples.

name: jeos-postgresql
summary: JEOS based on Fedora 14 with PostgreSQL server
os:
 name: fedora
 version: 14
packages:
 - postgresql-server

Run BoxGrinder – BoxGrinder will download all the necessary artifacts, build the instance, convert it to the selected platform and upload it to the selected destination. All in one process!

boxgrinder-build jeos-postgresql.appl -p vmware -d local

That’s all!

As an el cheapo alternative I can recommend Zero Assumption Recovery, it did really impressive recoveries for me, at least for various states of messed up NTFS partitions. They have linux fs support and even raid recovery and if you are lucky, you get your license for 50% on some weekends. (And I don't usually buy software (let alone use illegal copies) because there is often an opensource alternative.) But if money is  no problem and the drives are paleolithic, go for OnTrack or some other pros.

Link http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

Wed Jul 13 2011 11:39:58 AM EDT from athos-mn @ Uncensored

I've been given a problem by someone, and am curious how you all think this will work:

 

A client of the company I work for has an ancient Fedore Core 2 that we never backed-up properly (long story on that - thankfully it doesn't involve me) and has a custom program on it that's been retired, but is occasionally referenced. After two drives on the RAID 5 went south, the programmer, who was fired two years ago, told them to take a hike.

 

My plan is to take the drives to a recovery place (OnTrack) and see if they can deliver a coherent filesystem (as opposed to "here's a DVD with one segement of the array, here's a DVD with another - have fun putting them together!"), reinstall the OS (if nothing else to get the boot loader on it), then copy everything over - if not live than via a boot CD.

 

The last time I tried anything like this was in 1997 on a SCO OpenServer box, but I had a cpio backup - so everything else was in place for the restore.

 

Many thanks.

I've had good luck with OnTrack, in the past...used it to recover a drive that had gone bad in an Netware 3.12 server.

While they're expensive as all get out, if the data recovery is really necessary, it's worth it.  When my personal server's drives bit the farm a couple of years ago, I took them to a local service, but they couldn't read anything that didn't come from a Windows system (last time I'll go with them...even if one of my family's Windows machines goes to hell).

I've been given a problem by someone, and am curious how you all think this will work:

A client of the company I work for has an ancient Fedore Core 2 that we never backed-up properly (long story on that - thankfully it doesn't involve me) and has a custom program on it that's been retired, but is occasionally referenced. After two drives on the RAID 5 went south, the programmer, who was fired two years ago, told them to take a hike.

My plan is to take the drives to a recovery place (OnTrack) and see if they can deliver a coherent filesystem (as opposed to "here's a DVD with one segement of the array, here's a DVD with another - have fun putting them together!"), reinstall the OS (if nothing else to get the boot loader on it), then copy everything over - if not live than via a boot CD.

The last time I tried anything like this was in 1997 on a SCO OpenServer box, but I had a cpio backup - so everything else was in place for the restore.

Many thanks.

Hehe, pretty ironic.

afaik, ClearOS decided to base their distribution (again) on RHEL sources directly in order to rely less on CentOS, not so much for full compatibility reasons. They were tired of waiting. Btw, as a google fanboy, you might like the idea of the appstore in the ClearOS webinterface. :-P

I will try and compare the 64bit versions of both distros in the next weeks, will give feedback then. (Also, how well the citadel rpms work!)

So Jul 10 2011 10:29:23 EDT von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Hmm. Does the stock Debian distribution have a way to do a complete in-place online upgrade to every new version, the same way Ubuntu does
?

ubuntu derived this from debian.

imho it does even work smarter in debian.

though a more frequent release of ubuntu is garanted, debian is released if its done.

ClearOS 6.1 alpha release, for VM and Virtualbox only

http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/release_info/clearos_enterprise_6.1.0/alpha_1_release_information

@matt: from hanging around at #e on freenode, what I understood is, that bada is not in any way related to e/efl. It is just some homebrew samsung stuff, like nokia did with symbian (rip). These enterprises have far too much money and tend to unerringly flush it down the toilet with some shortliving inhouse nonsense.

Totally unrelated to mobile phones, while I was waiting for CentOS6 and the first evarrr 64bit CentOS, I found ClearOS. And was blown away by the webinterface they provide for administering Samba/LDAP/NFS/FTP/Younameit. I always thought Webmin was kind of a hackish approach which took the wrong turn somewhere. ClearOS definetly took the right one. (It derrived from Clarkconnect, maybe that rings a bell). And while it can be argued that "subscribing" and "registering" a linux seems odd, I have never seen a system which can even be adminstered by your usual "I am the Windows admin around here" kind of clickety-click guy. So they, like me, waited too long for CentOS to sober up and bring forth the new release, so they are creating their own "Core" version (without the nifty UI):  http://www.clearfoundation.com/ClearFoundation-Blog/411-clearos-core-vs-clearos-enterprise-whats-the-diff.html

Wed Jul 06 2011 10:34:28 AM EST from the_mgt @ Uncensored Subject: Re:

Since Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment and the EFL and they also employ Carsten Haitzler (aka Raster(man)) and at least two other enlightenment devs, I hope something is going to hit the market soonish. I already saw a prototype of a samsung mobile on the Cebit and damn it looked good and was snappy.

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die...

Proper linux on phones/mobile devices seems to be caught in the cold fangs/tentacles/whatever of ye elder gods sleeping away in R'lyeh. There is one current project going on which consolidates a few efforts, but I forgot the name, will post if I remember. Here are some other projects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

http://www.mail-archive.com/enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg30689.html

Since Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment and the EFL and they also employ Carsten Haitzler (aka Raster(man)) and at least two other enlightenment devs, I hope something is going to hit the market soonish. I already saw a prototype of a samsung mobile on the Cebit and damn it looked good and was snappy.

well, if you accept the GPL you're allowed to change, compile and redistribute the source. Part of the GPL is, that you accept to give this right to others.

so if you don't want others to change, redistribute source and biraries, you effectively didn't accept the GPL and if you don't accept the terms of the GPL you're effectively not allowed to distribute that code in any form.

so... this would be a first aproach to revoke somebodies license because of he didn't accept the license terms ;-)

I do use ISDN here, too. We have an ages old Elmeg (they ceased to exists, part of it is now FunkWerk, iirc) phone system with up to ten internal MSN and support for 8 analog phones. We only use half of the capacity, but inhouse calling is something comfortable. Also we do use all of our three external MSN.

I heard that AVM is developing something like the software (content filtering  for/against children) as the company they are sueing, so maybe it is more about market shares than GPL.

So Jul 03 2011 15:42:51 EDTvon IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Ah yes, I forgot that ISDN is still used a bit for voice work and broadcasting, and it had wider deployment outside the US than it ever did here. It's a shame that it never caught on here; it would have done a better job bridging the path from dialup to broadband than ADSL did.

Anyway, as for the issue at hand ... hasn't the GPL been tested in court already? Or have its biggest detractors continued to be very careful about avoiding a test case because they know how it would end?

well, revoking it wasn't tested so far... And, afaik all that AVM delivers _is_ available in source, but they just don't want others to patch it.

Sa Jul 02 2011 19:21:28 EDT von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Someone is still using ISDN?

I do. but just from my phone to my DSL router. ;-)

oh, and my computer still as an ISDN card popped in...

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/german-company-claims-it-can-disregard-gpl-re

so... evidently all companies go bad sometimes.

AVM, maker of ISDNcards, with linux drivers from the very early days, that now claims that nobody should modify their linux routers firmwares.

Heh... that's gonna get weird.

hm, fancy... but cool? probably some nerd who let that slip in?

hm, so nat friedman joined xamarian.

do you know what came to me the last days?

it was novel to first by ximian (gnome enforcement group) then suse (kde/qt enforcement group, they didn't even realy maintain a gnome desktop before)

and then there was mameo which was a gtk/gnome mobile environment merged with nokia who previously purchased trolltech(qt) which in term evaded the MeeGo GTK/X11 interface to replace it with a raw QT one.

both of these are next to done now.

Nokia sort of abandoned QT/Meego and it seems as if qt/trolltech are going to be laid off / casted out again.

Novel/Attachmate amndoned Gnome/Mono and laid off all staff, who already re-created their own company.

now we have Nokia with Steven Ellops (a Microsoft droid) who wants to migrate nokia to VistaFon and has to migrate all their apps from symbian/QT/C++ to c-carpet wince.

then we have Microsoft, who have real problems to get an app ecosystem which can level up with android/apple/blackberry to ramp up their sales and vice versa (chicken egg problem)

here we have two activities:

- ramp up sales of hardware by sort of buying nokia (well biheading it, and frankensteining its own head onto it)

- make people create portable apps in c-carpet that run on all of these phones, so at least the urgently neccesary "me too" apps like angry birds can be easily created across all of those phone platforms, and at least vista fon doesn't fall behind in that area.

so... if the ellop frankenstein head has some interest in keeping nokia running as an own company and not continuing to drown it into microsoft he should purchase xamarian.

and, most Suse Customers and Employees pretty much hate the gnome UI and want KDE, which after SLES10 led to support of both. If Attachmate is clever and wants to get together stuff they should by / hire the remaints of QT/Trolltech so it can boost the usability of KDE...

all in all, Nokia never should have purchased QT, and Novell should have never purchased Ximian, but vice versa instead, and the world would be a much happier place.

hihi...

Brauckmann explained that SUSE made this move because “Quite frankly we have to adjust our investments to meet sales and customer demand.” And, there simply wasn’t much commercial demand for Mono.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/where-novell-suse-linux-goes-from-here/8951

-> nobody used mono anyways.

reading the 'who bought who' for attachmate over at the register

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/18/attachmate_suse_business/

suggests that attachmate might have similar problems as compaq did...

Di Mai 17 2011 15:38:32 EDT von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Betreff: Re:

With any luck, SuSE will be spun off completely and will have a chance to recover from the past eight years.

Meanwhile, the idea that Xamarin is being funded by Microsoft is becoming more plausible all the time:

$ whois xamarin.com

Registrant Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()

Fax:
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1
C/O xamarin.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US

For those of you who don't know your Pacific Northwest geography -- that's about three blocks away from Microsoft headquarters.

hm, seems to me like a whois agent that hides away your real address from spammers?

I guess locating the companies postal address (its gotta be registered as an inc) will give you the real address.

otoh:

http://twitter.com/#!/schestowitz/statuses/70464798688690176

'

'

but these are also your opinnion:

http://techrights.org/2011/05/17/angel-funding-for-mono/

Yea, a quiet obvious step. I wonder why attachmate didn't let go the ximian brand while there was time to get some money from it... (as he writes they've been planning to get out of novel for over a year now)

I also wonder whether SuSE is going back to KDE as their primary desktop, since nobody liked gnome there anyways...

I suspect it's imaginative and possibly laden with several invectives of a nasty nature.

So, yeah, I wanna see the response.

well, since formfiller terminals are fading away (even as emulator on windows) the last 15 years, they were replaced by middleware to feed the mainframe which was run on boxes surrounding the mainframe.

these boxes would often run windows, at least it would be dedicated hardware.

these would be webinterfaces, pdf generators, printing adaptors etc.

these boxes are gone now and running inside the mainframe on linux partitions.

so you see, linux operates as gluelogic here, since you can cheaply create software for it.

The minimum requirement for develpoing mainframe software would be a 10k$ PCI Card with a mini mainframe.

The Linuxbox to develop this glue logic on is available for < 0.5k$

I think Attachmate does a lot of these gluelogic and on mainframe stuff, so it makes absolutely sense to own a company which knows howto maintain & operate & extend these partitions and develop software for them.

I don't think redhat or oracle offer Z linux; and for Novel this definitely wasn't core competency too.

This is why there were rumors of IBM buying SuSE before Novel did.

the suse guys seem to be all quiet happy to have escaped the novel claws.

and for attachmate suse has one primary _BIG_ interesting thing: they know howto run linux on a Z.

Mi Mai 04 2011 15:03:25 EDT von Ford II @ Uncensored

I like how nowadays nobody can dispense a bit of news without saying "I said it first, and it was on my twitter feed and you should follow me."
yeah dickhead there aren't thousands of other douchbags saying the same thing, and for some reason now I have to value everything you say from now on. Yea, right.

yea, and read the thousands, aeh dozends aeh 5 tweets he posted so far with no real information.

Attachmate, eh?

Heh... I didn't realize they went for Novell.  That's funny.

I guess IG s gonna like this:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQwMQ

Mono Developers Go Bye-Bye From Attachmate

Posted by Michael Larabel on May 03, 2011

so i finally made the permanent switch to Ubuntu on my main tower. It was the only computer in my house that was running Win7.

Now it's running Ubuntu 10.10 with Win7 in a VM (for my windows programming purposes).

... it's nice to be home :D

We should find out soon enough whether Oracle has seen the light and is doing its best to re-harmonize the project, or if they've simply decided to give up on the project altogether. It really doesn't fit with what Oracle wants to do with software anyway (aside from Ellison thinking "I can screw Microsoft with this? cool!).

There are some things I'd like to see OO.o do in the not too distant future. For example, I think with their platform-agnostic toolset, they are uniquely positioned to deliver an open source office-suite-that-works-in-a-browser (with all of the requisite "cloud" buzzwordianism attached to it, of course).

the browser one which seemed to be the one oracle was primarily interested in...

oh, its that obvious, that i'm not the only one with that idea:

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/12/21/kinect-hacked-to-aid-learning-american-sign-language/

http://news.opensuse.org/2011/04/01/the-canterbury-distribution/

*lol*

btw, the google aprils fool was also pretty nice. I'd like to have this in konjunction with the Kinect and the usual deaf signaling language. Could become pretty fast, plus the real deaf ones could use of some more non deaf having a good reason to learn their language.

Yeah, that is a bizarre 'answer' to your question.

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/149211/

carla schroeder laid off from linux today...

From Ars Technica:  "Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that version 11.10 of the popular Linux distribution will be codenamed Oneiric Ocelot. As per Ubuntu's usual six-month schedule, the release is due to arrive in October of this year.

The word "oneiric" describes a dreamlike state. Shuttleworth says that the name Oneiric Ocelot is intended to represent the innovation process, which he characterizes as a confluence of daydream and discipline."

Please, somebody stop Shuttleworth before he alliterates again.

Thu Mar 03 2011 03:59:55 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Ah, I see that the new AT&Tigy webmail portal *is* Yahoo. That explains why they look identical.

It was about time.  The only way that AT&T could get around the whole "public utility filtering my email content" debacle was to outsource the actual handling of their high speed internet customers' email to a company that wasn't a public utility.

yahoo is dead in the whater as is nokia.

both of them just have the chance of somebody else being interested enough to purchase them before microsoft does.

I think since its going to take nokia another year to produce smartphones with the only microsoft supported arm silicon : qualcom.

Nokia never used qualcom cpus, so its a complete redesign.

Otoh, we have HP here with the palm os, which definitely is a very good thing, plus based on a linux kernel.

I'd put hopes into the direction of HP buying nokia, so they can enter the smartphone biz in a bigger scale.

but nokia would need fo first get rid of that microsoft drone on the captains seat.

Installing Chromium is the first thing I do on either platform now.

I've tried Chrome....but I can NOT live without ABP.  Adblock Plus.  It blocks out 90% of those stupid little ads that don't interest me anyways.  I don't thin Chrome has anything like that.  I can't see Google wanting anything like that as they get all of their revenue through ads.

You're not a traitor, you're innovative!

(I too have switched to Chrome on all of my linux machines... and windoze machines...)

Easiest re-install ever......after I jettisoned any hint og Ubuntu 10.  Grub2 does not like my hardware AND apparently there is a bug in the version of gparted that ships with the latest release.  I had to boot a live CD of Ubuntu 9.?? to actually edit the HD they way I wanted it.

Good news though....I was able to simply copy my configuration files for Thunderbird and Firefox.  Usually I have to mess with things.

Here I am on a Friday backing up my HD.  Preparing to install yet another distro.  Decided that I just don't like Fedora.  Gonna go with Mint...then not change things for awhile and concentrate on work instead of messing around with the OS.

Mo Feb 21 2011 16:57:08 EST von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored Betreff: Re:

Hmm, the VRDP thingi is definitely disabled in my build. I got the one right out of the Ubuntu repo so it would receive automatic updates. But I am running Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) which gave me VirtualBox 3.1.6_OSE ... perhaps if I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 it would give me a newer VirtualBox with VRDP in the build?

got spice?

http://www.spice-space.org/

I didn't dislike Ubuntu Netbook Edition.  I did not find the Unity interface confusing or frustrating after a few minutes of playing around.  That said, I like Gnome-Shell a good deal better and was interested in trying something new.  Over the last few days, I wiped my Ubuntu partitions and my netbook is now playing happily with Linux Mint Debian Edition and the latest build of Gnome-Shell.  [A minor saga of newbie mistakes, poor documentation and glazed-eye incomprehension is glossed over in the previous sentence.]  My computer is quite snappy now and everything works, more or less.

no, but virtualbox itself offers a debian/ubuntu repo with the proprietary version.

hm, actualy the non free version is free to use for pretty much everything (even on cooperate environments), unless you're doing it in large scale deployments (ala roll it out on every workstation at your company etc.)  so why not use that one?

From comments around the intarwebs, you would think I was the only person (outside of the project members) who likes Gnome-Shell.

well, unless you need windows/bsd vms I think vserver / virtoutzo is the right choice.

well, your obversion is correct; in fact grml was named by that; the letters you type to express your extreme discompfort with your current situation...

and thats the cd you pop in to change it again ;-)

Mo Feb 07 2011 14:30:56 EST von Harbard @ Uncensored

That wasn't why I switched......

I was just updating to Ubuntu 10.10.  The installer did not like my set up.  More specifically Grub2 would not detect my Windows installation.  Fedora still uses the original Grub.  This picked up everything without a hitch.  I prefer Ubuntu to Fedora, but if I can't get it work on my hardware....

 

Grub2 has gone out of it's way to prevent any easy manual configuration.  If "sudo update-grub" doesn't do the job, you have to be a super linux geek to analize things and figure out what's happening.  The Ubuntu boards are filled with posts from people having Grub2 problems and an equal number of people saying "there is no problem, it's the users fault RTFM".  Not sure if those people actually see what's going on.  I've installed a lot of distros on a lot of different hardware so I am not a newbie...but there is so much to learn no one can know everything about even a single distro.

wrooooong. you have to have the grade dr. prof rear. med. grub. alternatively the 16th DAN in bootloaders also fits in.

if you just want to get it fucking done run apt-get install lilo, edit the fucking text file with the 5 lines you need, run lilo and done.

and no, I don't need no os alike prompt working in a byzantine [tm by IG] syntax similar to other roman languages as mandarin chinese.

for that reason i've got GRML. the box won't boot? use grml to fix it, boot back into it.

all my so far tries to use grub ended at the 'useless waste of time'-threshhold of half an hour.

That wasn't why I switched......

I was just updating to Ubuntu 10.10.  The installer did not like my set up.  More specifically Grub2 would not detect my Windows installation.  Fedora still uses the original Grub.  This picked up everything without a hitch.  I prefer Ubuntu to Fedora, but if I can't get it work on my hardware....

Grub2 has gone out of it's way to prevent any easy manual configuration.  If "sudo update-grub" doesn't do the job, you have to be a super linux geek to analize things and figure out what's happening.  The Ubuntu boards are filled with posts from people having Grub2 problems and an equal number of people saying "there is no problem, it's the users fault RTFM".  Not sure if those people actually see what's going on.  I've installed a lot of distros on a lot of different hardware so I am not a newbie...but there is so much to learn no one can know everything about even a single distro.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) got some bug up thier collective butt about moving the max, min and close buttons to the left side of a window.  EVERYONE complained.  They basically said "suck it bitches" we aren't Windows or Fedora or "take your pick".  I got used it it mostly,  Ihave to switch between Windows and Ubuntu a lot.  So I waste a lot of time gpoing to the wrong place to close a window.  Even worse some applications don't follow the Ubunti convention so you never really know where to look.  Now I'm a little more uniform.  EXCEPT...now I have to change all my boxes to Fedora.  I don't want to use a different distro on every computer.

And yeah, I have more computers than girlfriends.  Maybe there's a link there....

I think I last used Fedora 3 (?). Something like that.

Sun Feb 06 2011 10:51:06 PM EST from Harbard @ Uncensored

Damn it.  In Fedora, the window buttons are on the other side.  I was just getting used to the wrong side Ubuntu does it.

Damn it.  In Fedora, the window buttons are on the other side.  I was just getting used to the wrong side Ubuntu does it.

Ok, I'll check into it.  Things have changed this week end.  I made the mistake of installing (trying) Ubuntu 10.10.....it apparently doen't like my computer.  No matter what I tried, it would not set me up for a dual boot windows/Ubuntu configuration.  Had to switch to Fedora 14.  Kinda inconvienient.  The people on the Ubuntu forums were very unhelpful too.  Some of them anyways.  Suggesting that 'newbies should read the manual'.   Umm....we have to memorize everything about grub2 before we can install?  In anycase, Fedora uses grub and it took no intervention on my part to install correctly.

yes....thttpd looks interesting.  It's precompiled in the repository too.  Now I just need to get to my box.  It's buried behind a bunch of stuff I should throw out.   It's been running unattended for about a year.  The only time I've touched it is when the power has gone out.  Old hardware, doesn't power up after an outage.

Looks like I'll try xampp.  Just need to get something up and running to show off the concept.  Then I'll turn it over to the real IT guys to screw it up.

Wed Feb 02 2011 16:40:57 EST from dothebart @ Uncensored Subject: Re:

is this #windows?

It's Spartica.

actually, it Windows, Linux, OSX, or solaris... whatever your flavor may be

it's windows or linux. there's sections for either, whichever platform you're on.

(though, the linux version is much more feature-rich... duh)

is this #windows?

I suggest XAMPP:  http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

-- 
Stephen D King
Network Admin
Blurred Vizion Studios
outsider@blurredvizionstudios.com

nginx? apache?...

Yep, that's the military I remember.

It takes a lot more than being incompetent to find yourself unemployed in this organization.

That does raise a valid point, however.  My full time boss, the battalion XO (a major), has only nice things to say about their customer service.  I suspect it is similar for other field grade officers.

When I worked for the Navy as a contractor, I remember an occasion where I was pulled off a "entire office is unable to print" ticket to go set up the base commander's Blackberry.  He wasn't even in that morning, but his secretary insisted that it be done before he arrived.

Fri Jan 14 2011 11:36:45 AM EST from fleeb @ Uncensored

I should adjust that.

There are no consequences for bad service delivered to most people.  You do have consequences for bad service delivered to certain commanders... terrible consequences that could include paycheck, but mostly the amount of free time you have for your own.

I should adjust that.

There are no consequences for bad service delivered to most people.  You do have consequences for bad service delivered to certain commanders... terrible consequences that could include paycheck, but mostly the amount of free time you have for your own.

Bingo.

Fri Jan 14 2011 10:28:56 AM EST from fleeb @ Uncensored

There are no consequences for bad service.

If I remember the general attitude correctly, most of them don't really want to do anything anyway.  So it's easier to not learn what needs to be done to resolve the problem.

It isn't about service.  It's about the paycheck.  And the paycheck is going to happen regardless of the service.  There are no consequences for bad service.

I brought my work laptop with me to some training at Camp Murray (the state HQ) only to discover that the web app on which we were being trained required JInitiator or something that I didn't have.  About 20 of us had this issue; they sent us across the street to the IT directorate to get it fixed and continued the class.

Now, it's been a few years since I did desktop support--OK, it was 2003.  But if I'm working the desk and 30 soldiers suddenly walk in with identical problems, the new primary mission of everyone present has just become to identify a solution and apply it 30 times and get these people out of the nice quiet workspace.  Instead, I watched as one harried person applied the fix 20 times.  One very slow-moving sergeant wandered over and inquired whether I was there for something different.  He nodded glumly when I described the problem.  "Yeah, I don't know how to do that, sorry."  Then he went back to puttering aimlessly about the office.  I wanted to choke him out.  How about watching the one person do it, maybe take some notes, and then start helping people?  That's a good, safe course of action that would a) help you learn something new and b) get people out of your office a little faster.

The entire concept of customer service seems foreign to these people.  You can tell that they are only competing for their positions with other soldiers of similar backgrounds.  I'd wager not a one of them has ever had to compete in the Seattle-area IT contractor market.

That's a spectacularly awful IT department, possibly informed not by anyone who actually knows how to run an IT department, but some butterbar who wants to prove something (and is failing at it).

It's hard for us because our IT department is particularly bad.  I used to contract for the Navy and I always believed that was the worst IT environment I'd ever seen, but this trumps it.  A few examples that spring to mind:

-CD-burners and USB storage devices are disabled.  You have no way to get files off the network to a soldier other than e-mailing them BUT

-Massive restrictions on what file formats you can e-mail (which I would actually support, except for point the first)

-100 MB e-mail account limit.  I can burn through this in about 3 days.  I make copious use of personal folder storage, but that's not an option for soldiers who don't have their own computer (e.g. 95% of them), in part because

-No network personal shares.  I can browse to a spot on the file server where I can save things, but there is no share that is "mine" and no file security whatsoever.  I don't have permissions to modify the security of my own files on the network.  Since I deal heavily in personnel and pay (and occasionally health) information, this is horrifying on a number of levels.  An officer outside my company didn't see why this was an issue; I did a quick search and showed him his last few evals.

-Every e-mail to the helpdesk distro (what THEY tell you to do) generates a new ticket in their tracking system, creating so much junk and noise that they rarely find or address the actual help requests.  After the third time that my ticket was closed 3 months later without any action at all, I stopped trying to use that method.  I did request through other channels an additional network drop in one of my offices.  They sent out a contractor who did a bang-up job doing the physical installation, and then closed the ticket without actually hooking it up to anything.  When I sent a (polite, really) request to find out what else I needed to do to make it work, they threatened to blacklist me from support.  I refrained from pointing out that we would likely never know the difference.

-I had a network printer/scanner sitting in my office for 4 months.  They never hooked it up, and eventually took it back for deployment elsewhere.

-No user data backups.  Really.

-DAR encryption.  The contents of my hard drive are constantly being checked and encrypted using a certificate on my common access card.  This is good, I guess.  If I lose my CAC for whatever reason, the files are unrecoverable.  They will revoke the certificates, issue me a new card, and presumably a new laptop because whatever was on the old one is inaccessible.  They sent out instructions on how to manually (and very temporarily) decrypt files prior to getting a new CAC; they never addressed what happens if you lose one.

-If a machine is off the network for more than a few weeks, it's removed from active directory.  If it's new enough, they will nuke/pave it with the latest desktop image, else you just turn it in and hope they might give you a new one some day.  We are down to one general use computer (a WinXP P4) for the 50+ soldiers who come in each month.  It was disconnected 4 months ago for some reason IT was unable to determine.  We've been trying for that entire time to get a bunch of the 1SG's files off it, including dozens of NCO evaluations from the last few years, without so much as even a response from IT.  (To keep this vaguely on topic: yesterday I wiped the local admin password with a Linux-based recovery tool on USB and grabbed the files.  Too easy.)

-Because of the lack of computers, most soldiers in my unit no longer have accounts on the network.  You have to log in to a computer on the network (not just the Outlook Web Acccess or SharePoint) at least once every 30 days or it gets disabled.  Even if we had computers for them to log on to from time to time, we aren't necessarily in the office every month, nor do we drill on the same weekend every month.  Rather than modify this policy to make it fit reality for a one-weekend-a-month organization, they have just stopped giving computer accounts to soldiers who aren't full-time (e.g. 90% of them, including most of the commanders and senior NCOs).

OK, that was more than a few.  But that was just what I could think of off the top of my head.

Fri Jan 07 2011 07:38:52 AM EST from fleeb @ Uncensored

The army used to embrace unix-like systems, as I recall.  But I guess they like going with what feels familiar, and Windows is pretty familiar to a lot of the officers and such.  It's just awful.

The army used to embrace unix-like systems, as I recall.  But I guess they like going with what feels familiar, and Windows is pretty familiar to a lot of the officers and such.  It's just awful.

I really wish DoD would get serious about information assurance.  Switching to Windows Vista for desktop productivity--as the Army did THIS YEAR--is ridiculous.  I'd settle for at least developing solutions that worked cross-platform so we didn't have to follow them over the cliff on our machines at home...

There's no reason you should have to wait minutes to drop a directory entry.

Well said. With Win7 it says "discovering items" when really it means "wait a minute... i gotta find somewhere in the recycle bin index to cram this before actually deleting it.."

Once it finds somewhere to put it, it doesnt actually delete the file... it's still sitting on your HDD in .recyclebin{blahblahblah} for who knows how long... even after you "empty" the recycle bin, it's there as an indexed entry until you run a secondary program like CCleaner to physically wipe it off the HDD...

Linux is too simple for that process... rm /path/to/file/  and deleting a directory just takes a -r for the command and, hot damn, it's actually gone. no fuss.

-- 
Stephen D King
Network Admin
Blurred Vizion Studios
outsider@blurredvizionstudios.com

Agreed, that about sums up the current state of things.  I have been having fun scripting KVM (via Libvirt) using Python for admin tasks.  The Virt-manager does a fairly nice job of simple tasks.  For the down and dirty tasks, I have to admit I touch xml definition files and use the virsh shell quite a bit as well.

Binary blobs scare me.  I have a few too many binary blob programs that no longer run under current Glibc releases.  If KVM gets replaced at some point with someting better, I would guess I would have a way to continue using my ancient vm images that I keep around to punish myself and my free time.  I can't say that about the more recently abandoned VMWare Server product - Firefox breaks the browser plugin and I end up having to use a hack for the ESXi management tool just to see the hosts I have deployed.  I would guess the blob would quit working at some point as well with a Glibc update.  At least the qemu convert tools will give me some hope.

Probably being to harsh on VMwer, but KVM fits the bill for 99.99% of what I do (i.e. no games or graphics intensive stuff, but they are working on that via seperation from the vnc stuff).

Or KVM :-) (recent kernels)

ah, ok, you're using that inferor linux where you have to configure everything by hand, well.

me does 'dpkg --get-selections' and it gets me on 98% of where I was in advance.

I'd rather do gentoo, where its waste your time on compiling instead of waste your time on configuring ;-P

</rant>

I would boot of an SD-Card, a thumb drive  or something like that.

separate your system from the payload.

the tar will give you a snapshot of your actual data. More precise than the dd.

unless you have several disks to dd to.

So Dez 19 2010 15:28:07 EST von Ford II @ Uncensored Betreff: Re:

I was thinking of powering down the second drive (if i can) except for the once a week do do the dd.
By the way, did I mention it takes EIGHT HOURS to dd 650gig.
I gotta think there's a batch size setting I can set somewhere.

basicaly i'm not a friend of dd here. if your filesystem is inconsistent or broken, you will copy the brokenness.

also reading the full disk stresses your system and the disk.

i'd rather prefer sort of a monthly backup with tar over the full range, and incremental ones on a daily basis.

ok, tar has one real big disadvantage: you can't mount it.

but its probably also a good (and faster - less stressing ) solution.

ok, gzipping effectiveness and incremental tar effectiveness affects the amount and the quality of my sugestion...

otoh, i'd rather do it via tar | nc to another box. if you've got a problem with your memory, or your disk controller, that backup also will break. if you have a second box around,

I had a situation where I created an ext2 filesystem, copied everything over with tar |tar, put other disks into the hardware raid, bootet a newer kernel, and the backup was totaly broken, the filesystem totaly fucked up.

since then I prefer to have tcp in the line of my backups.

you should use LVM and snapshots to get that steady state ;-)

but in general a drdb via loopback probably would be the same as online.

But I realy like your idea of having the two drives wearing of in a different time frame; since one of the biggest fails of any raid is, that the drives age at the same pace, so you end up

You can use gparted and change the 'bootable' flag on the partion.  But....shouldn't you edit the grub configuration instead?

"Hmm, I think I should like to rip this Russian DVD (which I cannot even watch on my DVD player) to a video file on my computer."

It took longer to reboot into Ubuntu than it did to find and install an app and start making AVIs.

nah. green sux. even paperwhite (which in the end was just bright green) sux. Amber rox da house.

/etc/X11/app_defaults/*XTerm-color :

*VT100*pointerColor: yellow
*VT100*cursorColor: yellow
*VT100*XtDefaultForeground: red
*VT100*foreground: orange

whew. spellbinder, that sounds like a very sound 'it had to be proven' and having done that in your youth pro'lly makes you old and wise evil h4x0r.

Heh... nice!

hm, repurposing.... reminds me of:

http://hackaday.com/2010/02/24/oscilloscope-doubles-as-a-serial-terminal/

By all means let us know how it goes.  I used NX briefly in 2003 to talk to my home machine from work; I remember virtually nothing about it, except that it seemed really fast and responsive, more so than my local Windows 2000 machine...  I would seriously consider a solution like that to provide me some useful connectivity in my garage.

most probably 'your focus' is supposed to somewhere near to your mouse focus?

me uses i3: http://i3.zekjur.net/

scales from tiny netbook screens to big multiscreen desktops verry well. plus: its lightning fast.

usefull feature #1: <meta> F : go away and make the current window flusscreen.

plus; it still can easily switch between virtual desktops while in fullscreen, so you can effectively switch fast between several fullscreen apps.

wanna jump from window #5 to window #42 as quick as possible: this is your WM.

if you sit in front of a wintendo, 8 similar running windows start to suck if you have to switch from one to another.

plus that the wintendo will always open new windows on your primary screen instead of simply taking the one your mouse cursor is on.

can't tell how often I see collegues double-click title bar of window, drag it from left to right screen, double click it again for fullscreen...

I3: opens window in the current frame, if its wrong, move it with <meta><shift>#desktop done!

I did a crapton of apt-geting (not much developer-related comes with desktop Ubuntu) and eventually was able to compile the current Gnome-Shell from source.  Performance and stability are underwhelming compared to the older version that I was able to get from repositories and theming seems kind of broken at the moment, but it's a work in progress and I don't sweat that much.  Once it got going, I stopped worrying about it, but it did seem to be pokey for a while out of the gate.

I could get used to it, but I actually didn't hate Unity, either.  Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of (recent) experience using other systems, but I expected it to be different and have a learning curve, so I was willing to experiment a little.  Some of the reviews I read were just ridiculous--"This doesn't work how I expect, ergo it sucks and you should stay away from it."

The main difference between now and the last time I started playing heavily with Linux is broadband--I can do so much more damage so much more quickly than I could on dial-up.  Also, my computer is still somewhat modern, which means I can actually try some of the current toys out there.

The nice thing about being so far out of the loop (I think I last used Fedora 3) is that everything is new and shiny to me.  I experiment to a degree I wouldn't dream of on a Windows system.  Anyone playing with gnome-shell?

yea, that part of the deal is pretty scary. fail :(

novel aquired by attachmate:

http://www.securityweek.com/attachmate-acquire-novell-22-billion-cash

it uses the controll groups (like the patch)  to group processes by tty (aka shell they run in)

so if you start a cpu intense application spawned in a bunch of processes, the scheduler will rather calculate the group as one item next to your firefox process (or whatever) then putting each of these processes next to firefox; by that your box will remain as responsive as if you would just run one cpu intnse process.

best sample use: make -j64

-> all your available cpu time will go into compiling, but the box will remain responsive as if it doesn't compile. no dia-show.

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html

works like a charm.

top - 17:30:09 up 60 days, 10:18, 24 users,  load average: 65.70, 62.10, 38.18
Tasks: 610 total,  65 running, 542 sleeping,   2 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 88.0%us,  8.8%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  3.2%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   3696004k total,  3582516k used,   113488k free,   116460k buffers
Swap:  1847432k total,   318904k used,  1528528k free,  1406600k cached

and still a verry responsive iceweasel.

Mo Nov 15 2010 13:46:14 EST von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Since Firefox on Linux is a GTK application, Firefox will come along for the ride automatically. I don't know what obstacles are involved (if any) with using X11 plugins on a Wayland browser.

performance? Rendering 's gotta be fast. browser is _the_ main application these days..

and, there are rumors that nvidia for example won't support wayland for a while now.

does firefox have a native backend to that?

I heard they were doing opengl rendering on windows already and IE9 is trying to use hardware acceleration too...

I realy think firefox/chrome are what dictates the direction to go... and the availability of flash still is a basic requirement for any browser these days (youtube..)

until thats the case, i'd call it half baked...

otoh, once firefox starts to move into that direction, x11fox is definitely going to suffer.

yep, sounds like a step into a different direction; though GL-rendering seems to be the way to go, since even 'droids do it... maybe thats a new way to briing mobile linux and desktop linux closer together again...

Cirrus has been porting xscoar from wince to linux, and is now doing it with a java frontent that forwards the GL rendering...

first renders on on android can already be watched:

http://www.androidblip.com/android-apps/xcsoar-62760.html

(its a glider navigation software)

maybe some time in the not to distant future one can scrap the java frontend for the c-code then.

I was going to ask a question, but then I didn't need to.  Huzzah for "--?".

maybe strace can tell more?

da error is in da house!

fail2ban is nice.  It has been working swimmingly for me.

Heh... 'ruined myself on Java'... it's almost like you wrote 'soiled myself with Java', although in either case the meaning is clear.

Mon Oct 18 2010 03:58:33 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

I really wish Red Hat didn't include SElinux in their builds. As far as I can tell, the only role of SElinux in the universe is to break stuff.

I agree.  There are two reasons I don't use Fedora....SElinux and KDE4.  I have never been able to get those to work properly.

Fr Sep 24 2010 17:59:55 EDT von IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Yes we know, in your perfect world everyone would be running Debian and only Debian.

well, the boxes I have to interfere with on a regular base ($work) would be enough ;-)

Yes we know, in your perfect world everyone would be running Debian and only Debian.

can't be for the quality of the package manager. i'd call that wooden class.

Fri Sep 17 2010 9:38:24 am EDT EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Curiouser and curiouser...

http://tinyurl.com/vmware-novell-wtf

Word on the street is that VMware is acquiring Novell's Linux business. The legacy Netware stuff is being sold off to Attachmate (that makes sense -- Attachmate is in the legacy business).

Two of VMware's major competitors (Microsoft and Red Hat) each have an operating system, so perhaps they believe it makes sense for them to have an operating system too?

I'm interested in knowing whether it will be VMware or Attachmate that receives the Unix copyrights. I've been worried about that, because one of the outcomes of the SCO debacle has been that it's absolutely clear that Novell owns the Unix copyrights. If those copyrights fall into the hands of the wrong people (read: any Microsoft puppet) there could be another, more difficult, string of lawsuits.

I totally love VMware but I really h

I'd be interested to know how the lawsuits could get worse.

Novell have already granted license via the GPL, and Novell owning the Unix copyrights removed claim that they weren't entitled to do that - thus the GPL grants are valid.

Novell could sell now and it could have no effect on what has already been licensed.

*sigh*

ITX == IPX if you just push on the top of the T a little and bend it, while holding the vertical line in place.

Point.

I haven't had to worry about supporting ITX since leaving the WinINSTALL project (3 or 4 years ago).  And, honestly, I don't think WinINSTALL was terribly worried about supporting it anymore, either.

Heh.. Attachmate...

If they're still anything like they were when I worked there, they haven't made up their mind what they want to do yet.

To the people they acquire, they will say things like how their core business is only going to survive for so-many more years, and how their acquisition of you is supposed to help move them into another kind of market while the old one dies off, etc, and so on.  But they won't put much into whatever they get... it'll have to prove itself.

Which is kind of stupid.  If whatever they acquired could prove itself on its own merits, without some kind of assistance, they wouldn't have been able to acquire it in the first place.

Should they get a hold of that operating system, I think it's as good as dead.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626593

Of course, that problem exists now.

Well, the biggest problem with Wave, perhaps, is that it's centrally managed.

If businesses had their own Wave engine, where all their data remained at their facility, it might be more compelling.

android uses the davlik vm.

plus android doesn't even remotely follow the j2me spec.

To develop applications for Android, you're mostly developing in Java.  But there's some C++ you can do:

http://www.android.com/

It really is a distribution of Linux.  Some things are kind of kept secret by Google, because of agreements they've made with other vendors, but a good portion of the operating system and its components are open sourced.  Including the Java-related stuff.

The N900 is my comfort zone,

having a root> prompt in a CLI window on my handphone is something orgasmic,

not to mention being able to run native debian apps.

It has some Nokia binary stuff to be sure, but the OS is simply a basic linux.

Android sound like it is a smoke-and-mirrors javafest rather than true open-source,

but since I do not actually own an Android machine perhaps someone could shed some light on this.

The Android market is certainly having positive effects on thepublic push for open source,

-- 
TheOneLaw

had one of those for quiet a while.

didn't manage to hack it before it died :(

yes, the UI is ugly.

it can't even play ringtones from the sd card.

Sheesh... have you ever tried working with a Microsoft phone?

They suck rocks.  Through tiny tubes.

*looks around nervously*

I think its remarkable to point out that the wintendos have different bluescreens; watch the width of the messages ;-)

I think the latest sun desktop thing was sunray; you could take your x-session along with a smartcard... nice thing.

There is a distinction between the "real user id" and the "effective user id" -- and that's not something new, either.

I don't know what "+s" does, I usually just do "chmod 4755 <filename>"

Keep in mind that you have to change the owner first -- on many/most systems if you make the program setuid and then change the owner, it clears the setuid bit.

Mi Jun 09 2010 23:10:18 EDT von jclambert1 @ Uncensored Betreff: Applications?

As for AutoCAD, they USED to write Unix and Windows versions.  I imagine they were properly threatened and/or paid off to be exclusive M$ partners.  While WINE under Linux is not perfect, but will allow you many Windows apps.

there only was a solaris version of autocad, since autodesk does its animation software for linux too, they know how to do it. they just don't want.

Sun Jul 05 2009 12:45:09 PM EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold @ Uncensored

It's still about applications..... Where's Photoshop? Office? Visio? And don't tell me GIMP and OpenOffice are just as good. They aren't. Where's AutoCAD? There's nothing even close.

Applications?  OpenOffice works over 95% as well as MS Office 2003.  Gimp - about 90% that of Photoshop.  Scribus is a solid publishing solution.

As for AutoCAD, they USED to write Unix and Windows versions.  I imagine they were properly threatened and/or paid off to be exclusive M$ partners.  While WINE under Linux is not perfect, but will allow you many Windows apps.

you need to be in the group the file is owned by, and it needs to be group executable

I knew someone would would criticise me for using PERL.  It has one over riding benefit that trumps all other considerations:  I like it.  Plus, I am thorougly impressed with CPAN and the amout of well documented modules available.

Since I just fool around with programming, I really have no motivation to stay up to date with the latestest and greatest programming language du jour.

hm, perl sounds a bit of yesterday to me. probably python is the way to go, if.

in general you should care about the tools that the whole gps community uses, much can be found in the openstreetmaps wiki, it seems as if quiet some java is in the mix.

Yeah, that's basically what I am doing.  I use PERL to download the tracks from my GPS, then do a little pre-processing, submit it to google (or yahoo) and make a nice map.  Really the whole point is me learning PERL more than anything.  I have a couple of projects way in theback of my head and PERL seems like the way to go.

No, I'm just downloading a file from the eTrex that contains the track data.  Then I am applying some post processing magic to visualize the data.  Eventually, I can take the data and super impose it on a map or satelite picture to see where I've been.  I have part of it working.  I need to delve into a little Java code  to access Yahoo maps or Google.  I also need to access the device as as a normal user not root.

As for updating the maps....check out gpsbabel.  That will let you translate file into the proper format.  I bought National Georaphic maps for $5 off a clearance rack.  I think I can put those on my box after translation.

I need a little help.

I need some Linux know-how too.  I want to run this command from a shell:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F tracks2.txt

The trouble is, I have to run it as root.  Is there a way to run it as a normal user?  Not using 'sudo' that is.  The command is accessing the USB port and downloading an XML data file on my GPS.