devnet, Author at Yet Another Linux Blog

Donate to a Good Cause, Win a DVD Burner and More…

A lot of us take what we have for granted. We often look at that lazyboy recliner or that big screen TV. We look at our 5 or 6 computer network and our PVR and just sigh, not ever thinking twice about those that aren’t able to have what we have. Most of you have probably heard this more than once from various charities and organizations around the world or in a city near you. Outside influences and rotten luck often cause people to lose their house, their land, their cars, and subsequently their livelihood. What happens if someoone is pinkslipped from their job and is in danger of losing their house? Most of the time, this would go unnoticed and people would kick back and switch channels on the Sony 47″. This time, it’s different.

A major Linux website webmaster is in trouble. They’re in danger of losing house, home, and practically anything that isn’t bolted down including their site which has been around for quite some time. To help this person, Lobby4Linux.com and “Yet Another Linux Blog” have teamed up to hold a Drawing for those who donate to help save this Linux site AND this webmaster from the dire straits (not the 80’s band either) and to help keep this website and this webmaster afloat until they’re back in the proverbial saddle again.

Therefore, if you donate to help this pillar of the Linux community, (using the Lobby4Linux paypal link and include your email and name) you will be added into the fray for a drawing where the winner will win a Linux compatible DVD Burner and five runners up will receive a licensed copy of Apgens MyBooks Pro.

As more incentive to donate, Yet Another Linux Blog is adding two older model laptops for a prize package…A Panasonic CF-75 Toughbook and an IBM 755c Thinkpad. Both have had hard drive upgrades (10GB in the Toughbook and I think 2GB in the Thinkpad) and both will work with Linux (Debian installed on both quite easily) and each comes with a nice carrying case/backpack. I’ll leave it up to Helios, webmaster and organizer of the donation drive at Lobby4Linux.com to decide which place in the drawing will receive the laptops since I feel they should be offered together.

Once again, you won’t be entered into the drawing unless you donate! Get over to Lobby4Linux.com now and donate to this good cause and enter yourself in the drawing to be held on 15 August 2005. Don’t forget to add your name and a valid email address so you can be contact if you win in the drawing.

Thanks for helping out and let’s hope that we can save this site from going under.

Edit: I’ve been asked not to reveal the identity of the person or site until after the 15 August deadline. I know it sucks quite a bit for those donating…but I respect this person’s wishes.

Think of it this way…if you donate to Lobby4Linux anyway, you’d be donating to open source since Ken doesn’t take any cash for himself (except to cover the cost of webhost) since he has his own business and does fine without income from a website. So if you donate, you have nothing to lose and some hardware/software to gain.

The cool part is that if you donate now, Lobby4Linux will give all donations to save a major Linux site. It’s a win win situation. Thanks again if you donate!

Shhh…you’ll wake the Linux…

Shh…Microsoft is up to something. When isn’t Microsoft up to something? Usually never. Redmond has quietly been developing something in the background to silence the Linux rise in the business sector and perhaps even the educational field.

Linux has been attracting much attention as a cost saving alternative to Windows in the school system. Indeed, Linux is a very thrifty way of changing all of those Pentium II and III’s into a nice internet PC or email computer. An alternative way of configuring Linux in education is through using each computer as a thin client. In this arrangement, a central ‘server’ computer would be the main computer to which each satellite PC would ‘log in’ to and would run programs remotely using this server. This means that each satellite can have NO HARD DRIVE. Most of you probably already know about K12 Linux and The Linux Terminal Server Project. But did you know that Microsoft has been quietly readying their own “thin client” to battle Linux in this arena?

That’s right, Microsoft has begun development of a Lean or Thin Client OS Codename “Eiger” and you can bet that businesses are not the only ones Redmond is eyeing to push this ‘thin client’ on. While it is not technically a terminal server style computer, it would work on a 500MB hard disk with 1GB recommended and 64MB of RAM. If my memory serves me right, a Pentium II Dell or Gateway would be right up that alley. These machines could be configured remotely using standard IT deployment methods. While I think they’ll probably nail this in the business market, I don’t think they’ll be able to make it stick within the educational arena. Most schools have decentralized networks with a volunteer IT person to take care of things…I just don’t think it will hold water there though.

I just think back to a time when we configured about 10 computers using K12 Linux Terminal Server in a small community college. Nothing can match the power of a properly configured Linux thin client….and then there was the best part…you only had to install updates to ONE COMPUTER…not to mention zero virus threats (well, actually about 4 I think but you gotta be really dense to get a Linux virus). Very nice. Let’s see Macrocrud match that one.

In the meantime, remember that Linux can run quite nicely using 4MB of RAM and a Pentium 75Mhz CPU or equivalent and still remain quite productive. It’s a shame that businesses didn’t know that one…they might have kicked their Windows 95 boxes to the curb.

Discovering Redmond

Some readers of this blog know that I recently moved my family from North Carolina to Virginia. The move went smoothly and I now find myself employment with a Fortune 500 company as a project manager. Therefore, I am in both unfamiliar territory as well as familiar territory. Familiar because there is a complete lack of Linux in this entire business; which is something I’ve read about considerably across many Linux websites…and also unfamiliar because I thought that reading these same articles allowed me to know the scope of Microsoft in business. I was dead wrong.

Unveiling the Beast
How could I have been so blind? I ask myself this question often now… Other new IT Professionals finding employment in corporate America might have asked themselves the same question. My conclusion is that Microsoft is far larger than I had EVER imagined. It’s model, its business presence, its structure, and its existence in IT. Straight massive. They’re everywhere IT is…no matter how large an operation or how small it is, Redmond is staring back at you from every neck of the woods. It is so large that I can’t even get a firm grasp of every market it is in or every area it encompasses, nor every niche it has found foothold. Microsoft has a department for every new technology and every standard currently being developed. They also have the largest piggy bank in the world and they don’t hesitate to raid it.

You’re saying, “Yes, Yes, we know this. Everyone that uses Linux knows this.” Perhaps some OSS users get it. But I don’t think everyone truly grasps how large Redmond is and how far its tendrils thread out in business…a majority of Linux users don’t have the whole sprawl of Microsoft in front of them daily to allow it to ‘sink in.’

Most Linux users have to settle for reading about this “whole sprawl” at a technology website or hearing it from a friend of a friend whose brother works at Microsoft. In these situations, reading or hearing about something and actually seeing it put to action are two separate things. With this line of thinking, most Linux users may not fully comprehend the size, involvement, and area that Microsoft currently has.

Realization
Being a project manager here has enabled me to see each and every area that Redmond has infiltrated in corporate America. It’s everywhere. And not just in my company, it is also ingrained in every other company that we work with. It’s everywhere and in everything. I was flabbergasted and knocked for a loop when the realization hit me. No longer was it David vs. Goliath. Microsoft is much larger than Goliath could ever hope to be. Nay, it became a spec of dust vs. the sun.

I was completely sunk for about a day. I looked at the Linux business desktop (mainly Suse 9.3 and Red Hat) and then back to XP with all of its enterprise and server manipulation tools staring at me on my work computer and I physically dropped my jaw and slumped my shoulders in disappointment. The Linux business desktop is far inferior in abilities to Microsoft and is conversely inferior to corporate businesses because of its lack of features and abilities. I do understand that this isn’t the fault of Linux but rather, because most vendors develop third party applications to run using Windows. The lack of third party server admin applications and enterprise manipulation tools on the Linux desktop is painfully evident and completely understandable as most vendors do not support *nix desktops. I’m sure that there are many active projects in this area right now. That’s the beauty of Linux…when something isn’t present and there is a need for it, a project springs up and developers begin to remedy the situation.

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BASH Prompt Fun

The Bourne Again Shell aka BASH has been around for a while. For those of us that also have been around for a while…this shell possibly could be the one you choose to use for your Linux distro. I first started using BASH when I was in college. We had Solaris 2.0 Servers that allowed me to mess around quite a bit back then.

But most new users fear the shell (or as windows likes to call it, command line) and venture there as little as possible. The prompt that greets most users that open a Linux shell is static and unyielding; yet, there are small adjustments that can make your Linux shell bend to the will of your force. Today, I’ll be going over some simple and fun ways to alter your .bashrc file, which is where your BASH “profile” is kept and read each time you login. Changes to this file can make your Linux shell a little bit friendly and less frightning.

Most shell’s look similar to this by default:

[devnet@lostgate root]$

This doesn’t do much for you other than tell you who you are, what your hostname is, and what directory you are in. If you are like me, you want some useful information to be there so that what is above, becomes what is below:

(devnet@lostgate:/var/www/html)#

Why is this so different? For starters, after seeing how to add color to your prompt you’ll be able to add your own color scheme to things. You’ll also be able to check out various ways to display information you want such as dates, times, whether you have mail, and your directory path you are in. Do you need l33t programming skills to accomplish this? Not at all! If you’re ready, let’s give this thing a try…

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Experiment: Interview with Texstar of PCLinuxOS

Those of you who followed our experiment here at Yet Another Linux Blog followed my wife’s path as she test drove distros for their out of the box abilities. Those of you who stayed positive throughout this process also understood why some of the more popular distros did not rate well…simply because they do not have much done for you out of the box. The reason we chose rating out of the box is because most new users wont be able to install hardare and software easily without reading some documentation and those new users might become immediately frightened of the aspect of finding answers to ‘how to do this’. By having stuff done a user can gain confidence at the early and critical times of using a distro and then build on top of that. Therefore, we set out to find the best distro that came suited for a user like my wife. If you followed along, you also know that PCLinuxOS was rated the top distro. As promised, today we’ll chat with Texstar, the creator of PCLinuxOS.

Devnet: Please tell us a bit about how you got your start in Linux/Computers/Open Source…

Texstar: My first successful Linux install was Red Hat. I later found Mandrake which was nothing more than Red Hat with KDE at the time. I moved to Linux after watching Microsoft abuse their monopoly on the desktop. I formally provided unofficial 3rd party rpm updates to Mandrake users between releases until that function was taken over by Mandrakeclub.

Devnet: What type of person do you see yourself as?

Texstar: I’m kind of quiet, laid back, humerous and easy going person. I don’t take life too seriously. I look for the good in people. I enjoy chatting with fellow Linux users on our IRC channel (efnet #PCLinuxOS). What a great bunch of people…except for that Lewis guy. Just kidding Lewis! We love you, we really do 😀

Devnet: Why did you start PCLinuxOS?

Texstar: To provide an outlet for my crazy desire to package source code without having to deal with egos, arrogance and politics. I love to package. It is like a puzzle where all the pieces have to fit together or the code doesn’t work.
That is my favorite part of doing PCLOS. The other reason is I wanted something that worked out of the box, looked fabulous and didn’t require a technical degree from college to get it working.

Devnet: How did you come up with the name?

Texstar: It is Linux for your Personal Computer. I wanted something generic that people could easily relate to and the name matches our website.

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mv elitism /dev/null

In the beginning of things, open source was about open everything. I remember joining an irc channel # on efnet back in 1993 and chatting with people who could make things happen with computers…really make things happen. Coders, managers, hackers…they were all there and a tight nit core of about 6 of us stayed in touch for about 7 years until we went our separate ways and began to use irc less and less. The thing that I remember the most is the fact that when I joined their little group, I was a complete and total n00b. Not just a n00b to Open Source…but to computers altogether. I had a Texas Instruments computer back in 1985 but only messed with that for about a year. Mice were new to me…I didn’t know ANYTHING at all. In the short time that I began chatting on irc, I was shown how to do things. When I didn’t know how to do something, I could count on one of the guys or girls in the channel helping me to solve my problem within a matter of minutes. These people stepped down off of their level of operation long enough to educate me in the ways of the open source.

I look fondly back at this time and have spoken about it before…not because I don’t think something like this exists now…just that I think it is a rarity. There was a time when this “spirit of open source” was all about educating and furthering the program/app that you were working on. Now it seems that when a new user comes in to any channel on irc or forum, they are told off with a hearty RTFM (Read the ‘Friendly’ Manual).

Where did this Elitism come from? Where and when did Linux and open source become about the mentality “you must be this knowledgeable to ride?” It pains me to see people do this to new users…distancing themselves from potential advocates of open source…zealous ones at that. It’s a real testament to some of these new users STILL wanting to plug open source and Linux, despite being squashed by elitists in forums.

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