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August 7, 2008 9:30 am

Useability: Linux / Unix v Closed Software

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by Martin English    in *nix,Code,History,Microsoft,Open Source,Productivity,Web / Web 2.0,software

A tweet from Linda Eastin pointed me at this old blog entry from Daring Fireball on Linux and Spray-on Useability, that takes aim at the Eric Raymond rant on Linux usability (the one where he can’t get CUPS working).

There’s an old engineering adage: “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.” (Where
“fast” regards development time, not performance.) Desktop Linux
software is cheap (free) and fast (release early, release often), but
it’s not good.

Or, perhaps one could argue that it is cheap, and eventually it’s going
to be good, but it’s getting there very slowly.

Windows and Mac OS, on the other hand, are fast and good. For the sake
of this discussion, it doesn’t matter which is better and which is
improving faster. What matters is that neither is cheap. It’s very
difficult to beat the fast/good/cheap rule.

For example, look at how much Mac OS X has improved in the last three
years alone. Even if desktop Linux is improving — and I do think it is
— it’s improving at a much slower pace than Mac OS X.

…..

More often than not, you get what you pay for.

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March 14, 2008 11:34 am

Linux Screenshots and Movies

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by Martin English    in *nix,Open Source,Technology

Gimp, an open source and public-domain package available on most (if not all) Linux Desktop distrributions, makes it easy to get a screen shot. Note that Gimp is also available for windows now.

  1. Bring up Gimp. This will vary, deepending on your OS.
  2. From the Gimp menu, select File, then Acquire, then Screen Shot….
  3. To capture an image of one window, select the radiobutton for a Single Window, increase the delay time under Select Window After…Seconds Delay, and click OK. Once the delay you have specified has passed, the cursor will turn into a crosshair symbol. Move the cursor into the desired window and click the left mouse button.
  4. To capture an image of the entire screen, select the radiobutton for the Whole Screen, increase the delay time under Grab After … Seconds Delay, and click OK. After the delay you have specified, Gimp will take a snapshot of the whole screen.
  5. A window containing your snapshot will appear on your screen. You can use Gimp to crop the image, adjust color and contrast, and the other usual photo processing options. Most operations start by right-clicking on the image.
  6. To save the image to a file, move the mouse into the image window and right-click. Then select File, then Save. Navigate to the apropriate directory by clicking in the Folder window. Click on “../” to go up one directory; to move down into a directory, click on that directory’s name in the Folder window.
  7. Once you are in the right directory, type the name you want to give the graphics file in the Selection field, including the file type suffix such as .png or .jpg, and press Enter.

See this LinuxDev article for informatuion on making Linux Screen Capture Movies.

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March 5, 2008 8:03 pm

Amazon MP3 Downloader available for Linux

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by Martin English    in *nix,Technology

Amazon has released Linux versions of their MP3 downloader.

There are specific versions for Ubuntu 7.10 “gutsy”, Debian 4 “etch”, Fedora 8, and OpenSUSE 10.3. The package managers on the respective distributions should automatically fetch and install all necessary dependencies. If your distribution isn’t the list, the *.deb or *.rpm files may still work.

Also, the Fedora and OpenSUSE packages are signed with a public key. This key needs to be imported into your rpm database, via the following command:
sudo rpm --import amazonmp3.pubkey.

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January 31, 2008 9:47 pm

Installing Adobe flash player on Ubuntu 7.10

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by Martin English    in *nix,Code,Open Source,Productivity,TV / Video,Web / Web 2.0,software

A flash player is a must have plugin for browsers. Without it you cannot acess a lot of video sharing sites such as YouTube. By default, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a flash player because the Adobe flash player is proprietary. The solution is to manually install the flash player.

# get the flash player from the macromedia website (above) or by using wget
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

# extract the tar file
tar xvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

# run the installer – You will asked to close all the browser windows during this.
cd install_flash_player_9_linux
./flashplayer-installer

# specify the firefox folder during installation
/usr/lib/firefox

And that is it. Restart your browser and you can watch flash videos on Ubuntu! (This also shows why it may be better for your grandma to stick with Windows).

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January 23, 2008 5:46 pm

Test system stability using Pi calculations

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by Martin English    in *nix,Microsoft,Open Source,Technology,software

The System Stability Tester is a freeware download for Linux, Unix, and Windows, that claims to test the stability of your system by calculating millions of digits of Pi in different threads, and comparing the threads for any disparities. You can also run the test on a single thread for benchmarking purposes.

It was originally developed as a system stressing and benchmarking tool for hardware overclockers, the System Stability Tester has since gone open source (licensed under the GNU public license) and more mainstream (e.g., by giving Windows users an easy executable install file).

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January 4, 2008 12:16 pm

The world ends on January 19, 2038: thanks Unix!

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by Martin English    in *nix,Code,Enterprise,History,Open Source,Productivity,Security

The world ends on January 19, 2038: thanks Unix!

If you thought the Y2K bug had a lot of world ending potential, you might want to skip this post right now. If we don’t blow ourselves up by 2038, the end of the world is going to have little to do with nukes and a lot to do with Unix because Unix systems can’t keep track of the date past January 19, 2038.

This is because Unix keeps track of the date and time using a four byte integer that represents the number of seconds past January 1, 1970. The integer can only get so big before having to restart from zero. If a machine can’t restart it’s time, which may be the case for many Unix systems, it will crash. Hackosis confirms this problem has the potential to affect Linux boxes too. Unfortunately, machines running on *nix operating systems act as the backbone for much of the cyber-world, meaning we may see anything from planes falling out of the sky to the internet shutting down when this hits.

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January 2, 2008 9:59 pm

Manage your GRUB menu the easy way with QGRUBEditor

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by Martin English    in *nix,Code,Productivity

from DownloadSquad:
Ubuntu and Kubuntu have become a world wide phenomenon. Nearly synonymous with the word Linux, it has become the Operating System of choice for hundreds of thousands of people and organizations. This success is partly owed to the simplicity of the system. Insert the Live CD, install, and everything else is automatic.

However, when the user wishes to make changes to the system, Ubuntu and its cousins tend to be a bit less convenient. Under normal circumstances, the user must crack open that dreaded Terminal and edit settings by hand.

This is where QGRUBEditor comes in. With its simple and self-explanatory GUI, this application helps configure every aspect of the GRUB boot menu.

QGRUBEditor is free, Open Source, and just an APT-GET away for Ubuntu users. It’s also available for SuSE, Arch, and Slackware.

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8:36 pm

Read/write access to Linux partitions from Windows

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by Martin English    in *nix,Microsoft,Open Source,Productivity,Security,Work

I read today on Hackzine about a freeware tool called Linux Reader. It provides you with read access to ext2/ext3 partitions within Windows and has an explorer-like interface that allows you to drag and drop files from a standard Linux partition.

For full read/write access, there is another freeware utility called Ext2 IFS that provides full write access. It’s is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows, which allows the operating system to access your Linux partitions in a more native manner.

After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

Both packages appear to ignore the permission settings on files, so you’ll have full access to files across the entire partition.
Note: LVM volumes are not supported by the Ext2 IFS driver (and I’m assuming the same is true for Linux Reader).
ReiserFS, XFS and other filesystems are also not supported.

For an ordinary dual-boot system with an ext3 partition, however, you should have no problem accessing your Linux files from within Windows.

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows – Link

Linux Reader – Link

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5:39 pm

Open Source Living

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by Martin English    in *nix,Open Source,Productivity,Technology

Open Source Living is a nicely organized collection of the best Open Source software and applications.

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5:20 pm

Turn one PC into two for free

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by Martin English    in *nix,Code,Hardware,Productivity,Security,Technology

How do you like the sound of taking one machine, and having two people logged into it simultaneously? Sounds pretty neat to me – and it’s free too, which is always a tick in the right box.

Canadian company Userful markets Linux-based desktop multiplier and public access computing solutions – effectively turning one system into an X Window server supporting up to ten terminals. They’re giving away a free 2-user copy of their PC Multiplier software, which lets you have two people simultaneously connected to a single system, but running separate sessions.

PC Multiplier uses basic dual-head GPU technology and USB inputs to turn a monitor, keyboard and mouse into a complete workstation. The user has a range of environments to work in, all of which are fully customisable, and more importantly, completely independent of any other environment.

PC Multiplier comes as a set of installable packages for Linux or as a LiveCD for non-Linux systems. It works with most graphics cards supported by X.Org/XFree86 and has been tested on most major distros running the 2.6 kernel, like Fedora Core, SLED, SuSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu (just to name a few).

There’s also a LiveCD available. Like all LiveCDs it doesn’t make any changes to the underlying system, and once it’s up and running individual session performance is pretty good, so it’s suitable for either testing or in a limited production environment.

Actual system requirements are pretty low. For the installed packages, on top of the base resources needed to run the host operating system, PC Multiplier needs a supported dualhead graphics card, 192MB of system memory for a two-user environment (256MB recommended) and an additional 64MB for each extra supported workstation. It has a tiny hard drive footprint of around 13MB and runs on a 400MHz or better CPU. The LiveCD just has the CPU and memory requirements, and can even be run on a system with no physical hard drive.

Within their sessions, users don’t have access to the underlying file system, which means that they have to store data on the network or on USB devices. It’s recommended to link the USB keyboard and mouse for each session to a powered USB hub – this reduces the number of USB ports needed on the host system, but also allows each user to connect a USB storage device which is secured to that session alone.

In short, PC Multiplier is a very clever example of what can be done in the realm of public access computing. The free two user product is a great tool for home users wanting to set up secured environments for kids, or for desktop admins for “proof of concept”. However, to do something really usefull you may need to pay to get more than two users.

A usefull link on Multiple local XFree users under Linux

from APC

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