Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I've had this problem on one machine ever since I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It's a triple boot, with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on one of the other partitions, and I never had this problem with the older LTS installation. Basically, the Ubuntu login screen in 8.04 is too large to fit in the dimensions of the monitor. Once I'm logged in, my resolution is 1024x768, which is exactly how I want it. But the login screen is so huge, I don't get the Options menu on the bottom, which comes in handy if I want to log in with another window manager.

I hate to be down on Thunderbird, which I use as my default mail client in Windows XP. But today I turn on the box, start Thunderbird, and things don't go well.

It's nice — really nice — to see via Distrowatch that development is continuing on low-spec favorite DeLi Linux.

From the rumor/leak mill comes ASUS' move of its eee platform to the desktop. Just look at this thing. Yes, it's cooler than a Mac. And way cheaper. And the most intriguing part of the rumor/leak? the EBOX will use Intel's new Atom processor, which the chip-maker is marketing as power-saving CPU for ultra-small devices.

Once you have the proper Ubuntu repository added to get Childsplay (is it Universe?), in order to get sound for GCompris, Childsplay and Tuxpaint, make sure to add the proper packages. For some reason, the sound packages aren't added as dependencies.

After all the heat Psystar took in the blogosphere for its erstwhile Macintosh clone -- a commodity box that can run OS X -- many said the company was either a sham or about to fade quickly away. Well, in recent days, the company has begun offering its own Mac updates for Psystar Hackintosh users, pledges more surprises in the future and is also offering a pretty nice $299 computer called the OpenLite that runs many versions of Linux and has pretty nice specs for the price. While they used to preinstall only Ubuntu, the most recent announcement has them also willing to install CentOS and Fedora for those who want them.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 refused to do just about anything on every computer I've tried, but the OpenSolaris-based MilaX runs like the proverbial wind on most of those boxes. So I figured it was time to try BeleniX, another project that brings a GUI and live-CD environment to OpenSolaris.

I wasn't able to boot Damn Small Linux 4.4 RC1 on the machine I really need it to run on — the $15 Laptop (aka Compaq Armada 7770dmt) — so I booted it on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, the machine that ran my two Puppy Linux torture tests. I've already written about how the inclusion of Firefox 2 (renamed Bon Echo) in DSL 4.3 has breathed new life into the live-CD distribution as far as I'm concerned.

I will never cease to be amazed at how fast things change and how quickly people forget. Today’s example is a Slashdot posting with the title, “Why Buy a PC Preloaded with Linux?” Specifically, the dotter—slasher really doesn’t give the right tone—wants to know “‘Why should I buy a PC preloaded with Linux?’ They are more expensive, and it’s not hard just to reformat the PC with Linux. I hate paying the Microsoft Tax as much as anybody else, but if paying that ‘tax’ allows companies to reduce my price by bundling with my PC products that I will never use, why wouldn’t I just buy a Windows-loaded PC and reformat?”

I can hardly believe that I'm composing an entry in Movable Type Open Source 4.1 using Damn Small Linux. Now that version 4.3 of the low-spec Linux distribution has added Firefox 2 to its software mix, I can use the browser -- here named Bon Echo for reasons that escape me -- for many more things than I could the Firefox 1.06 browser included in previous incarnations of DSL.

I've blogged a bit recently on how hard it is to install Movable Type and have it actually work on your own server. After getting and configuring Apache and MySQL (or PostgreSQL or SQlite), making sure you get the static files in the right place and the CGI/Perl files in the other right place, then making sure everything has the proper permissions ... I found it to be way beyond my capabilities. To be fair, I haven't yet tried to install WordPress, but I recently found out something very interesting: There are WordPress packages available in many of the major Linux and BSD distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu and even OpenBSD. Luckily, the same thing is now happening for Movable Type. So if you're using the Debian GNU/Linux distribution -- and I strongly suggest you do -- you can now install Movable Type as a Debian package.

Now Ubuntu dutifully informs me with the Update Notifier that I have packages that need updating. ... And best of all, something somewhere has solved my USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu 8.04. I now can plug in a flash drive and read and write to it with no problem whatsoever.

After being assured that my test on the Dell Optiplex GX520 didn't work because 512 MB of RAM is usually enough but not always, I tried to boot OpenSolaris 2008.05 on my Gateway Solo 1450 -- featuring a 1.3 GHz Celeron M processor and a whopping 1 GB of RAM. I got to the console, but no GUI, no matter how hard I tried.

I don't know how I missed it, but one of the best writers out there on open-source software, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, has -- for reasons unknown to me -- ceased working for Ziff-Davis, the owner of the DesktopLinux.com Web site for which he had written hundreds of entries.

I stumbled across this on Slashdot, which led me to Red Hat's own release on all the new things in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (and eventually in the free CentOS clone of RHEL). The most shocking: Firefox 3. The Red Hat people must have a lot of faith in Mozilla's latest browser.

I said I was wary, the instructions were detailed but not complete, the process was far from instant, and I killed X for a few minutes when I tried to fill in the blanks, but I eventually was able to upgrade my VIA box's existing OpenBSD 4.2 installation to 4.3, packages and all.

Thanks go out to commenter pcfixitguy for telling me about the update to the OpenSSH-server packages in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

I have one swappable drive for my test box that has Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 triple-booting. I hadn't connected the drive in 25 days, and I booted into both Ubuntus to do updates. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS had 26 updates. None of them were for the OpenSSH problems that have plagued Debian-derived Linux distributions in the past week (and, more troubling, over the past two years).

Cleaning up the mess left by the OpenSSH vulnerability in Debian and Debian-based distros (including Ubuntu) is easier than I thought. For those who haven't heard about the problem, I refer you to my recent entry, or invite you to Google it. I've had my Etch box -- which has both OpenSSH-client and OpenSSH-server installed -- turned off for the past few days. I'm using it as a Web server on the local network, and yes, I've been SSHing into the box for weeks now. Here's what I did ...

It's been a year and a half since I started using Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) for much of my day-to-day computing, but the past week or so marks the first time I've had to support another user -- in this case my wife, Ilene, whose Macintosh iBook G4 is awaiting the end of the semester at California State University Northridge, where she teaches. ... It has been a lot harder than I thought. We don't think like our users. But we need to learn.