Practical Technology

I see my buddy in technology writing, Preston Gralla, is having trouble getting his new Wubi-based Ubuntu 8.04 system to work with his Windows file systems and vice-versa. While some Linuxes, like Xandros and SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) come Windows network ready, most, like Ubuntu, require some Samba work. Samba is an open-source program [...]

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Generally speaking for consumer/SMB grade network equipment, I swear by Linksys hardware. I’ve been using he Linksys WRT54G family of access points since 2002 ever since Linksys open-sourced the firmware for many WRT54G models and they’ve never let me down. But, then there’s the Linksys print servers. If I had met these devices first, I’d [...]

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Thanks to the European Union’s courts, Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs and protocols for its MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program) and WSPP (Workgroup Server Protocol Program). According to Keith Hageman, an MSDN moderator, “The MCPP package content details Windows Clients to Windows Server protocols for all features. The WSPP package content details [...]

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If you didn’t know what was really behind Microsoft’s open standards and source promises, it might sound like Microsoft was making real changes. You’ve got to give Microsoft credit for gall. They take a crunching defeat at the hands of the European Union court system for trying to conceal information and now that the court [...]

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On Dec. 20, the Samba Group and the Software Freedom Law Center announced a deal with Microsoft that places all of Microsoft’s network protocols needed for programs to work with Windows Server into the hands of the newly formed Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is a U.S.-based nonprofit corporation. It will make Microsoft’s server [...]

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