Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

You might think that Netflix is uninterested in dropping Microsoft's Silverlight and moving toward an HTML5 solution for its streaming-video service. But according to Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft, the company is very much interested in moving beyond Silverlight and broadening its base to include Linux users.

It's been this way ever since I began using Debian in the Etch days (circa 2007) -- GNOME is generally pretty fast in a distro like Debian, and you can get a lot done with the tools provided by the desktop environment.

Here's the killer feature for Firefox Sync: Your sync information is encrypted, only you have the key, and neither Mozilla nor anybody else can decrypt this information or use it for marketing purposes. Do you think Google is NOT using your Chrome Sync data -- decrypted on their side -- to compile a profile on your web use and target you with advertising?

While Firefox 4.0 is no faster than the Google Chrome web browser, 4.0 is certainly faster than Firefox(es) 3.5 and 3.6, all of which I've run extensively on both the Linux and Windows platforms.

I didn't just upgrade my Mozilla-made mail program (call it Icedove if you wish, or Thunderbird) because I wanted a higher version number — or any other feature except for one.

I tried out the Fedora 15 Alpha. GNOME Shell wasn't working on my hardware for some reason. I also tried Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity does work. OpenBSD 4.9's release is imminent. Am I excited? No. I'm in user mode. Not fanboy mode. I'm in no mood to run alpha-level software, or the dot-0 release of a new desktop environment (as in GNOME Shell and/or Unity). I kind of, sort of, need Flash on occasion.

I contend that it's not necessary nor even desirable to upgrade an entire Linux distribution or BSD installation just to get some shiny newness like Firefox 4. It's still a "selling" point for free operating systems: "Upgrade and you'll get the new Firefox/OpenOffice/Thunderbird, etc." But what if you don't want to upgrade every last package just to get the latest web browser?

This just in (from the openbsd-misc mailing list): The FlashVideoReplacer add-on for Firefox works in OpenBSD with the help of gecko-mediaplayer, which is now an OpenBSD package. Testers reported this combination working in OpenBSD-current. I've since found that it works for Vimeo videos in OpenBSD 4.8-release and could very well work for YouTube in 4.9-release.

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, I wanted to install OpenBSD to a bootable USB drive. Did that. It's as easy as installing to any other drive. You just need to look in the dmesg for what the system is calling your preferred target drive (sd2 in my case).

A very interesting article in Undeadly — the OpenBSD Journal tells the story of m:tier, a London consultancy that works with Fortune 500 companies to equip them with OpenBSD firewalls, servers and desktops.

After a bit of searching I found a new-to-me OpenBSD Live project called MarBSD. I downloaded the X image, burned it to a CD and fired it up on the Lenovo G555.

A year or so ago I tried to bring Debian to my 1995-era Sparcstation 20, a box I bought for $10 and not too much shipping, adding components that usually cost me $10 or less (30-something GB SCSI hard drive, CD drive, floppy drive, keyboard and mouse). I did it for fun. And to learn. Most everything with old hardware is a learning experience.

The Linux Mint team, led by Clement Lefebvre, has released a Linux Mint Xfce edition for 32- and 64-bit based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing.

My recent foray into running the 1995-era Sun Sparcstation 20, lately with OpenBSD, isn’t because I think a 16-year-old box will be in any way comparable to a modern (or even 10-year-old) Intel-based box. Because it won’t.

I just listened to this. It's all about rethinking our "relationship" with services such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like -- and what we can do about it to reclaim our freedom from a technological standpoint.

I’ve been going back and forth on whether to get rid of my Sun Sparcstation 20 and all of the hardware and software that goes with it. After I got the SS20 for $10 plus a nominal shipping fee (and it’s the shipping that’ll kill you) from eBay, I got it running with OpenBSD and Solaris 9 at various times. Yeah, it’s a 1995-era system, And even though SPARC is optimized for Unix in a way x86 will never be, there’s only so much you can do with a 50 MHz SPARC CPU and 256 MB of RAM.

I really like the idea of an ARM-based, Debian-running home server, and I really like Excito’s Bubba 3. The only problem? The Bubba is $393.75 U.S. (€279.20, exchange rate calculated by Google). What can I do between those less-than-hardy plug servers for $100 and this $393 item?

A lot of people have recommended the SugarSync file-synchronization service as an alternative to Dropbox. SugarSync offers 5 GB for free vs. 2 GB for Dropbox and has more flexible pricing when you want more storage. The big problem with SugarSync, for me anyway: No Linux client.

I’ve been planning to build a computer for at least a year. I started with the idea of a mini-ITX motherboard and case to produce a small, low-power desktop, to which I’d hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor and use as a traditional desktop computer. However, what I need (and/or want) is a server. I’m thinking principally of a file server-slash-backup server. Maybe a light-duty web server.

Even though I wrote about where and how to get Firefox/Iceweasel 4 for Debian, I’m sticking with 3.5.6 for now. The same goes for GNOME 3.