Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 3, 2009
by sjvn01
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Holiday Season Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Up on the Internet servers pause and then out jumps relatively good old Microsoft and down through your Internet chimney they’ll be delivering lots of Windows and Office patches to good little Windows users-those who have legal copies of Windows.

Yes, it’s almost time for Microsoft’s holiday edition of Patch Tuesday, December 8th. This is one set of gifts you shouldn’t wait to open and install. Microsoft announced that the patch presents would contain “six new security bulletins addressing 12 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office products.” And, the important news is that three of them have the maximum severity rating of Critical.

For my money, the most important of these is Microsoft Security Advisory 977981. This is the latest IE (Internet Explorer) bug, which could, in theory, be used to take over your Windows PCs.

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December 3, 2009
by sjvn01
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Red Hat Linux without the Red Hat

Red Hat is the number one Linux company on the planet by a wide margin. Their flagship distribution, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is great and they have excellent technical support. That hasn’t stopped other companies from trying to ride on their coat-tails, and lately more businesses are adopting their Linux code-base and offering support for it.

Why would anyone want to do this? After all, Red Hat support doesn’t costs you an arm and a leg. The first developers who used Red Hat Linux as the foundation for their own distributions–CentOS, StartCom, and White Box Enterprise Linux–ended up creating distributions for people who were richer in Linux expertise than they were in money. Thus, historically, RHEL clone users tend to be old Linux pros who didn’t need much in the way of Red Hat hand-holding.

According to a report by Sean Michael Kerner, Red Hat isn’t worried about these users. Kerner quotes Red Hat’s Marco Bill-Peter, VP of Global Support Services as saying, “We are not actively chasing users of CentOS, but rather find that enterprises are naturally turning to Red Hat for the value of the Red Hat subscription model and support.”

That isn’t stopping other companies though from trying to horn in on Red Hat’s support business. On December 1st, OpenLogic, an enterprise open source software support company announced that it would sell low cost support packages for CentOS. OpenLogic also plans to will expand its support to other community Linux distributions in 2010.

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December 3, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

A Linux answer to Windows SBS: ClearOS

Linux is used as a server all the time. From branch-offices using Linux and Samba to Google running, well everything, on Linux, it’s the operating system for choice for most businesses. Except that is, for small offices. There, Microsoft’s SBS (Small Business Server) is the server of choice. The Clear Foundation wants to change that with their ClearOS 5.1 small business server distribution.

Why has Linux not done well here? It’s an odd story. In some ways, Linux has historically done quite well for small businesses. Back in the late 1990s, the Cobalt appliance line did quite well in the market. Sun, in one of their less than bright moments, however, bought Cobalt for about $2 billion in 2000. By neglect, Sun had killed off Cobalt, and small business server Linux, by 2004.

Of course, this is Linux. Why hasn’t someone else stepped up? In part, Linux hasn’t entered the small business market because Linux distributors haven’t focused on it. Only Novell, of the major Linux players, with its Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition had made much of an effort in this area. The Clear Foundation’s sole focus is on providing small business users with an easy-to-use server.

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December 2, 2009
by sjvn01
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Black Screens of Whoops!

Windows does get black screens of death, but it doesn’t get them from the November Windows and Office updates that UK security company Prevx blamed recently.

Prevx claimed that the security patches caused a new rash of black screens of death. Microsoft denied that these updates had caused this problem. And, indeed, Microsoft said that, as far as they could tell, there were no new flood of black screen of death problems period.

Guess what? It turns out Microsoft was right. Prevx has publicly apologized to Microsoft and put the blame for the problem on malware. The company also claims that their free repair program will still fix some malware-created black screen of death problems.

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December 1, 2009
by sjvn01
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Dell releases unofficial Chrome OS Linux desktop

Of all the big computer companies only Dell really supports desktop Linux and, in particular Dell offers a nice selection of PCs running Ubuntu Linux. What Dell hasn’t done though is come out and announce that they were working on Google’s beta Chrome OS. Other vendors, such as Acer, HP and Lenovo are on board with Chrome. Regardless of that, Dell is actually the first big-time vendor to have released a version of Chrome OS designed to work with one of their netbooks.

This isn’t an official beta though. No, this is a skunkworks project. In a Dell blog posting Dell technology strategist Doug Anson revealed that he and some of his work friends decided to try to get Chrome OS running on a Dell Mini 10v netbook. They were successful. Sort of.

You can see for yourself. Anson wrote, “I have released an USB key image file to: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto. The file name is: “ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img.” It contains a functioning image of my USB key loaded with ChromiumOS. In addition, I have made a best effort attempt to get the Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter working in this image. It’s definitely not perfect (read: highly experimental, untested, unstable, yada yada…) but it does appear to function.”

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November 30, 2009
by sjvn01
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Fixing Windows’ Black Screen of Death

Microsoft’s colors of choice now appear to be black and blue. There’s always been the Blue Screen of Death, but lately people have been seeing the Black Screen of Death. Here’s what to do if your Windows computer is getting a black eye.

First, though, I should point out that not all Black Screens of Death are caused by this newest set of problems. People have been turning on their computers and facing a blank screen since before there were PCs. If you’ve been running into a black screen on your Windows PC for some time, check out Microsoft support on the more common problems that causes black screens to happen with Windows XP.

But, if you just started seeing a Black Screen of Death after installing Microsoft’s November 10th set of patches for Windows and Microsoft Office, you may need this fix. Is it right for you? Here’s how to tell.

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