Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I did a Debian Etch install on one of my test machine drives recently, and today I added the openssh-server package so I could play around with PuTTY and Xming. Once I installed openssh-server (I used Synaptic, in case you were wondering), using PuTTY to start the connection, I was asked whether or not I expected the encryption key to change (I was, since this is the Debian install, not OpenBSD, which I've been using until now).

Quick notes because I've got time for no more: I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you've been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

I haven't hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well. Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD. First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That's strange. I don't remember XDM ever showing up before. Then Internet networking doesn't work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct. I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it's not a bad cable.

Of all the theories behind Microsoft's assimilation of Yahoo (I think it's about eliminating a competitor under a mountain of cash), this is the most intriguing I've seen yet: According to Linux-Watch, Microsoft wants Yahoo because no huge Web-based companies use Windows products to run their back-end ... except Microsoft, of course, and this might give the rest of the world a reason to consider Windows for their servers ... or it could crush Yahoo under the weight of a soul-sucking software sea change. ("Sea change" ... that's as idiotic as "change agent" and "best practices" ... sorry for using it ...).

A Macintosh IIci -- with 25 MHz of CPU power -- equipped with NetBSD is currently serving up Web pages and somehow surviving.

Thanks to the colleagues at credativ for this nice romper suit.

[Note: It's a Debian baby! -- Steven]

OK, never mind the huge controversy going on about OpenSolaris. OK, I grant that the project is in turmoil, and Debian founder-turned-Sun evangelist Ian Murdock's silence isn't helping the matter. But I digress. I just found out about an intriguing new project out of Russia -- Damn Small Solaris.

I just read that Debian is removing Flash from its repository: Flashplugin-nonfree has been removed (see below), as this is closed source and we don't get security support for it. For security reasons, we recommend to immediately remove any version of flashplugin-nonfree and any remaining files of the Adobe Flash Player. Tested updates will be made available via backports.org.

What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS. Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

I don't know what took me so long. After unseating Ubuntu from the No. 1 spot on Distrowatch months ago, PCLinuxOS has shown no signs of folding in the face of all things Feisty and Gutsy. Even my co-workers (OK, co-worker, in this case the Los Angeles Daily News' City Hall reporter Rick Orlov) are telling me how great PCLinuxOS is. Even Scott Ruecker, master of LXer, has sung its praises.

I've been shuttling CDs in and out of my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, just seeing what works and how well. I've also been fiddling around with the BIOS settings, trying to get the CPU fan under control in both Linux and the various BSDs. A select few Linux kernels do this automatically ... most don't. I can control the fan with a cron job, but I've never, ever been able to do this with any version of BSD. Until today. For some reason, I ran DesktopBSD 1.6 as a live CD, and the fan fell silent, turning on at various intervals, then off.

I've taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I'm so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I'm not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I'll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD. During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates.

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are. I'm thinking most of you will say they're very important. If you have a Debian-based Linux system, for instance, there are updates available almost every day, both security- and bug-related. Live CDs are different. Knopix 5.1.1 has been around a very long time -- over a year at this point -- and plenty of people are using it, even though it's had no update of any kind in that period of time.

Google "linux vs. bsd," and this comes up. Written by BSD user Matthew D. Fuller, there's a lot of information to absorb. Here he is on "Chaos vs. Order": One common generality is that the Linux methodology is the living incarnation of chaos, whereas the BSD methodology is far more about control. To a large extent, it's true. Linux grew out of a spare-time hacking background, while BSD grew out of a controlled engineering background. Of course, there's plenty of weekend tinkers writing BSD code, and plenty of full-time professional programmers sloughing away at various parts of Linux.

When I installed OpenBSD on this system's 14.4 GB drive, I made the root partition a whole lot bigger than recommended. I recall a previous FreeBSD install that crapped out when I didn't have enough space, but I was too ambitious on what I was installing at that point. Still, I gave / a whole gigabyte. I'm not quite sure why I gave /usr so much space, but in the case of /, I wanted to make sure I had room to grow.

OpenBSD doesn't use the CUPS printing system by default, and while I've been successful in using Apsfilter in Damn Small Linux (but not in Debian), now that I've figured out all the quirks in CUPS and my office network-printing situation, I prefer to use CUPS to manage the many network printers at my disposal.

Google didn't get where it is today by charging end users for software and charging them again and again for endless upgrades. Back in the early Macintosh days (i.e. the mid- to late '80s), Apple used the OS to sell hardware. Upgrades were free. Today, Apple sells music at 99 cents a track, but what they're really selling is iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and any other damn thing they can slap an "i" in front of. Apple wins on the desktop -- and crushes Microsoft -- in one way: Make OS X free -- or very cheap. And make it run on Windows-compatible PCs and available preloaded from vendors like Dell and HP.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD. It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc ... There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

When users say the documentation is excellent in the BSD operating systems, they're not lying. Besides the excellent handbook/FAQs available for download or online browsing for NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the man pages are way more valuable than I ever though. In OpenBSD, they're up to date -- and they have plenty of plain language throughout.

Damn Small Linux won't add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there's a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I'm anxiously awaiting another improvement: Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That's a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality.