fuzzylizard

I finally found a mostly successful tutorial on how to install Ubuntu 7.04 in Parallels. A straight forward install won’t work. You need to do a few tricks to get it to install. The most important thing, I found, was to set the memory at no more then 512megs. I tried with both 1024MB and 768MB and met with failure each time. As soon as I used 512MB, the tricks in the tutorial all worked. The other trick I used was to use a typical install instead of a custom one when first starting Parallels.

I also found another tutorial that shows you how to change the screen resolution once Ubuntu has been installed.

My server died; first I smelled smoke and then the computer just shut itself down. Given the smell of smoke, it was probably a good thing. The downside is that I have had to rebuild my server. Part of the rebuild process was picking an Linux distro to use. The server had been running “CentOS”:http://www.centos.org/.

Lately I have been playing around with Ubuntu as a desktop version of Linux and have been really liking it. For the desktop it is excellent and may actually, finally put Linux on the desktop. Since it has been fairing so well as a desktop OS, I decided to try it as my server OS.

My server is very simple, mostly I just use it as a file server with the home directories shared and one large directory shared that can be used for dumping files. In addition, I also had a second drive in the machine on which everything in a home directory or in the shared directory was mirrored every hour. I realize this is not a true backup system as it also mirrored all deletes (this was mostly to save space). Now that the server is dead and I had to transform the larger of the two internal drives into an external drive, I have lost the backup capabilities.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu; it didn’t work. One thing I really like about CentOS is the administration tools. If I want to configure Samba I just click on the Samba config tool and add shares and users. There are also tools for Services, httpd and other apps. All of these are missing in Ubuntu (at least I couldn’t find them). I would rather use a GUI tool than try and work with config files. This is 2006, I should not have to open a shell and fool around with vim and config files to setup a few Samba shares. This is the main reason that I went back to CentOS.

I bought a new 2Gig “OCZ Rally2 usb flash drive”:http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_rally2_usb_2_0_dual_channel_flash_memory_drive. Every computer that I plug it into it works great. Windows recognizes what it is, loads the drivers, and brings up an explorer window showing the drives contents. Every computer except for my personal desktop computer running Windows. If I boot the computer using Knoppix, the flash drive works fine. I installed Ubuntu onto my computer and the drive works fine.

I am beginning to think that my Windows install is messed up. However, since I installed Ubuntu, I may stick with Linux and only use Windows for playing games.

This looks interesting, it is a guide on how to “install and run Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8 on Ubuntu Dapper”:http://blog.publicidadpixelada.com/2006/09/04/how-to-dreamweaver-and-flash-8-running-on-ubuntu-dapper/ using Wine.

For anyone who is thinking of doing or learning linux shell scripting, check out this very nice “tutorial”:http://www.cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/linux/docs/uniqlinuxfeatures/lsst/.

At work, we are transitioning all of our servers from “Red Hat”:http://www.redhat.com (old versions like 7.2 and 8.0) to “Debian”:http://www.debian.org/. Part of my job has been to move all of the services from the old Red Hat server to the new Debian server. This has entailed setting up things like NIS and our Jabber server.

On Red Hat, this would involve trying to find the right packages, trying to install them, searching for dependencies, trying to install them again, and so on. On Debian, it is dead simple. For NIS, it is just apt-get install nis and for Jabber, apt-get install jabber. Would could be simpler then that.

In addition, for both apps, I have been able to find a nice little “tutorial page”:http://www.debian-administration.org/ on the Debian website that shows how to fully setup “each”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/36 “one”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/42. Very cool.

“Digg.com”:http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/(Proprietary_software_)_Pay_a_little_now,_pay_a_lot_later has a story up right now with a link to an article discussing the benefits or evils of using proprietary software. The jist of the discussion is vendor lockin and the fact that we should use open source software and open standards. The interesting thing is that most of the discussion on digg is about the benefits of proprietary software and why businesses buy it.

From my own experience, whether the software is proprietary or FOSS, there is still vendor lockin. At work, we are creating an application using the “JBoss application server”:http://www.jboss.org. One of the problems that we face is that we can not port our app to another app server even though our app is based on an open standard–J2EE.

The problem though is, in addition to the vendor lockin, is that there is almost no documentation for JBoss and the community support is nill. And, no one in the organization is going to dig into the code to fix a bug. We are either going to work around it or wait for the next release and hope the bug has been fixed. We have done this with all the open source software we use (PostgreSQL, Red Hat, etc).

So what exactly is the benefit of using Free software?