Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I'm joining Identi.ca, Wikipedia, BoingBoing, MoveOn, Mozilla, Reddit and scores of other websites large and small in going dark on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 to protest the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which would allow U.S. copyright holders to shut down foreign web sites with only a suspicion of copyright infringement.

I've burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I've saved many and gotten rid of many as well.

Courtesy of Distrowatch, I learned about Tails, a live Linux distribution based on Debian Live that uses Tor and other cryptographic- and privacy-minded features to protect a users anonymity while using the Internet.

After months spent pondering the installation of a post-2.6.38 kernel that's actually being patched when needed for my Debian Squeeze system, I finally figured out how to add the Debian Backports 2.6.39 kernel without the operation removing every other kernel from the hard drive in the process.

When I did my initial tests on this Debian Squeeze installation back in 2010, I had trouble with OpenJDK. I only use Java for two web-based things, and one of those -- GoToMyPC.com -- wouldn't successfully open up a Java client window. So I replaced openjdk-6 with sun-java6, found everything working and left it at that. Had things changed in the many intervening months? I was determined to find out.

The PDF import function for LibreOffice Draw in Debian Squeeze, if you're using the libreoffice-pdfimport package from Debian Backports, is broken. Doesn't work. LO wants to open PDFs as text files in LO Writer, not as editable PDFs in LO Draw. So how do you fix this?

I've never seen this kind of thing before: I noticed that the Flash plugin that Debian installs from the flashplugin-nonfree package hasn't updated in quite some time. I've been stuck at Adobe Flash 10.2 for a long while.

When you think "free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," I bet CentOS comes to mind. But a look at the CentOS project over the past few years shows a considerable lag between when RHEL releases and CentOS catches up.

Blogging had already 'jumped the shark,' when it became easy for the average person to create a blog with downloaded software installed on their own web space, be that a physical, wholly owned server, a leased server, a virtual private server, or a shared-hosting account. We don't need to depend on Google/Blogger, Wordpress.com, Livejournal, Tumblr or Typepad to run a blog for us. This is a good thing, and it is a good thing to have the option of doing this with social networking as well.

The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it. I'm not at the point where I can say, "Oh, it's totally better than GNOME 2," but I'm increasingly able to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.

I've been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10's GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16's GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops. They're more alike than you think.

Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

I've traditionally used stand-alone FTP clients like FileZilla and gFTP to interact with the servers I use. Only recently have I decided to start using the GNOME Nautilus file manager's FTP/SFTP capabilities to manage the content in some of my servers.

I thought I'd hate GNOME Shell, but I actually ended up liking it. The Fedora 16 live environment was responsive. I could really be productive here. If only it wasn't so darn ugly.

One of the founders of the nascent Diaspora social network has died at age 22. I have included the story on Ilya Zhitomirskiy's untimely death from the Associated Press, followed by my thoughts on Diaspora and where it stands given that Google+ is pretty much steam-rolling over the rest of the social-networking space.

Just because I'm writing about how I'm editing these videos in OpenShot, don't think that I'm some kind of video-editing expert. I'm learning. And I'm excited about it. Beats the alternative, don't you think? In the video I just cut today, I am refining the way I use multiple tracks to organize and edit the video with OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze.

Though I've flirted with console e-mail in the form of Mutt and Pine, I came to the realization long ago that GUI mail clients are the thing for me. I've used Claws Mail, and I pretty much centered my mail-client universe on Thunderbird, running it on every platform I can. But I have kept a fully configured Evolution mail client at the ready on my Debian laptop.

Here's the thought (and action) process I went through to edit a video today with OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze (I've been using the OpenShot .deb package from the OpenShot Launchpad page to make sure I have the latest version). I used the audio and video from one long clip interspersed with titles created in OpenShot and still images from the same event. The "trick" was keeping the audio and video in sync, with the audio playing continuously, while I traded off the images with the video.

By way of Planet Debian, I found Vincent Sanders' article on the HP ProLiant MicroServer he bought for use at home instead of a dedicated NAS appliance. This is by no means a blade server. It's a squat little box. And the HP ProLiant MicroServer line starts at $329.

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I've used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK/FLWM in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.