Misc Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Yet Another Linux Blog

Site Downtime This Weekend

The site will be down sporadically this weekend. I’m migrating the server to a new computer. I host this on my own Linux box that is in a standard ATX case. I’ve decided to go to a Shuttle case with it to save space and to look stylish. Space is always an issue. Recently, I upgraded to a 17-inch flatpanel LCD monitor that replaced my bohemoth of a 21-inch CRT monitor. So, more space = happier devnet and happier mrs.devnet. Plus it is easier to clean and what not.

If you experience this downtime, I apologize and please check back later. The site should only be down for a small amount of time…perhaps an hour. The only thing I’ll need to do is a restoration of config files, mySQL backups, and then copy the site files across and ensure permissions.

So, in pure Linux Blog fashion…I’ll post about this and how I did things so that perhaps others can apply this as well for on-the-fly-fast migrations. Thanks for reading!

PS: Update on the experiment…During the downtime, we’ll be installing PCLinuxOS 8.1a onto disk as well. Check back for mrs.devnet’s initial take on this fantastic distro on Sunday or Monday.

SpamBlockers and the Blog

The blog has recently blocked a large influx of spam. In the process, some user’s comments were blocked. I now offer them to you here. If the user making the comment would comment on where they originally were posted, I will post that as well. Here it is:

1. [REJECTED: Invalid captcha] – [#29, Name “Darl McBride”, E-Mail “”, URL “ip-wars.net”, User-Agent “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999”, IP XX.XX.211.165] – [Thanks everyone!
You all get a signed 8 by 10 and a scox mousepad!]
[2005-02-05 14:58:15]

Sorry Mr. McBride…one other person got their comment snagged by the old spamblocker. They too forgot to enter the captcha (or couldn’t see it). They reposted. Please let me know where the comment belongs and I’ll place it there.

LINUXBLOG UPDATE

I apologize for any downtime this evening. I upgraded my server operating system from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 3 Secure (just seemed like a ‘secure’ idea). There might be a few places that don’t have the right permissions, so please have patience with me. Please report any problems you see and thanks for reading!

Note: The experiment/review of the 5 desktop distros will begin tonight! I’ll have mrs.devnet post with initial impressions of Mandrake 10.1 Community after she installs it. We’ll have a more formal review after 3-4 days of use and then we’ll give her a 3 day break to go back to windows. After that, we’ll move on to the next distro. After all have been used, we’ll pick the best two distros and have a sudden death between them. At the end of things, we’ll declare a winner.

5 Distros of Desktop Linux go head to head…

Not all distros are created equal. This is something I’ve found out the hard way during the past 10 years I’ve experimented with Linux. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to search for the most new user friendly distribution of Linux I could possibly find on the market in order to recruit my friends and acquaintances to Linux. In order to find the best of the best, I’ve selected 5 distributions of Linux that are some of the top rated ‘Desktop’ linux distros (according to distrowatch.com and user opinion). I’m going to install each one of these distros for a week and let my wife try to do all of the stuff she normally would do (blog entries, surf web, email, burn CD’s, listen to mp3s, link her portable media device) and see how each one stacks up to each other. My wife is a new user to Linux. While she does know the basics of what Linux is…she’s never used a Linux desktop. I hope this qualifies her as a ‘new user’.

I’ve selected the criteria that all distros will be judged on which I will post after I install Knoppix to hard disk and do a quick comment under the ‘distros’ category here (sometime next week). I install these distros before hand to ensure that there are no large issues that cause problems for me so that when we go to actually rate these distros…they’re all on the same starting point. I also do a quick commentary with my take on the distro so you know my biases and opinions (which I will eliminate from the rating process as much as possible).

We’re one week away from posting the criteria of rating and 2 weeks away from getting started. It is important to note that if any hardware conflicts arise, I will not help my wife resolve them. She has told me that if something that ‘just works’ in XP doesn’t work in Linux, she’s giving up on that distro and moving on. That sounds a lot like what a new user would do so I have no problems with that. So, some reviews might be quite short. I’ll be equipping my wife with the command alsaconf and that is it 🙂 We’ll really know what distro is great because the hardware configuration (posted earlier in another entry) is really standard and isn’t cutting edge new…if a distro can’t detect and install what I’ve got…they not really that great. If I were to add a modem to this, I’m sure that it would really throw a kink in many distros spokes…but I think I’ll save the modem/winmodem tests for a part II of this feature. I’ll publish each review by mrs.devnet in the ‘reviews’ category here with as many screenshots as possible. Countdown, 2 weeks.

You gotta LOVE Micro$oft

[sarcasm]You absolutely have to love M$ for their fantastic business sense and fair tactics they use to accomplish their business objectives.[/sarcasm] There was this guy I went to college with who never did any original work. I mean, we used to go into the library and he’d pull up 15 articles on the subject his paper was and he’d pull 15 different paragraphs out of each of them. Then he’d ever-so-slightly change the words around a bit. Then he’d re-arrange the paragraphs so that it was harder to track down and he’d pass it off as his original paper. I would have to say, he must have graduated and gotten a job at Microsoft…because that is what they’re trying to do now.

According to eWeek,”Microsoft is claiming some form of IP rights over ‘a total of 130 protocols which Microsoft is offering for license.’ ” The stupid part about it is that these IP Rights are IETF RFC (request for comment) documents. Microsoft cannot show patent support for these claims, but on the other hand, no one can show that they don’t have rights to these claims either.

One thing is certain, if things get down and dirty…M$ will have the financial and legal means to prosecute or bully anyone they feel they need to in order to make a point or an example. Perhaps something should be done in the open source community to counteract this. I would say that a large number of open source supportive companies banding together to offer support for each other and the movement would suffice…but of course this won’t happen. They’re trying currently without much success…just do a search using your favorite search engine on “Linux Core Consortium” and look at the list of names that are absent from full support….among them are Redhat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems.