Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 19, 2009
by sjvn01
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How old does your hardware go?

Over the years, more than a 1,000 computers have made their way through my office and lab. They’ve included a $25,000 PC, Gateway’s very first 486; several SPARCstations; an IBM AS/400 mini-computer; and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I wish I still had. Most of them only stayed long enough for me to review them for magazines like Computer Shopper, Byte, or PC Magazine. I’ve also owned close to a 100 computers, and some of those have stuck around.

I just completed an epic office and lab clean-up. During it I got rid of 386s, 486s, and old Pentium PCs, but kept a 4MHz Z80 KayPro II from 1982. I kept that one because it was my first PC, and I actually still use it to this day as a terminal for switches and the like. This led me to the question: “What’s the oldest PC that you’re still using?”

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June 18, 2009
by sjvn01
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HP is business Linux friendly

HP has long had a love/hate affair with Linux. On the one hand, HP has long supported Linux on servers. For example, they’re the one major server company that supports Debian. On the other hand, it took HP forever to finally start shipping pre-installed desktop Linux. Recently, for business users anyway, HP has been making it a lot easier to get Linux on their desktops and servers.

On the server side, for example, HP and Canonical, the company that stands behind Ubuntu, just announced that the newest version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04 has been certified the new HP ProLiant G6 servers.

According to Canonical, “This extends Canonical’s existing support of Ubuntu Server Edition on the HP ProLiant servers to 17 configurations, enabling Ubuntu users to run their business applications on the world’s most energy-efficient servers. Additionally, HP will release the ProLiant Support Pack for Ubuntu, which includes agents, drivers, and utilities that can enhance the manageability of Ubuntu server on HP ProLiant servers.”

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June 18, 2009
by sjvn01
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Opera Unite alpha lets you share files — but is it safe?

Opera Software’s announcement that it’s going to bundle Unite, an easy-to-use Web server with content-sharing applets, with the Opera 10 Web browser sounds great — at first. Upon closer inspection, though, there could be some real security headaches.

For now, Unite, which is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, is alpha software. That means it breaks. A lot. (I experienced a number of disconnects and freezes.) Still, I was able to get it to work on systems running Windows XP and SimplyMepis 8.0, a Debian Linux distribution.

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June 17, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Save a job with open source

I can talk until I’m blue in my space about the technical advantages of Linux and open-source software. Forget about that for now though. Let me give you a reason for your office to use them that may strike home: It can save jobs, including, just maybe, your job.

This simple fact was brought home to me over the weekend when I was at the SouthEast Linux Fest at Clemson University. There, I saw Chad Wollenberg, a network administrator who focuses on the integration of free and open technologies in education. The point of his talk was really quite simple: “Why should our school systems be paying for proprietary software when teachers are being laid off?”

Good question. My own home county of Buncombe in western North Carolina will be letting about 80 teachers go with the current budget. Like many other government agencies, and businesses, they simply don’t have enough money coming in.

But, Wollenberg asks, why don’t we save money for teachers, by switching to FOSS (free and open-source software), he’s not talking about major changes, like switching from Linux to Windows on desktops. He’s talking about taking small steps. As Wollenberg points out, it’s not so much that the school systems have problems with open source; it’s that they’re reluctant to adopt anything new.

Instead of big scary changes, he suggests that you should try to get school systems to start with end-user programs like Firefox, OpenOffice, and Moodle, open-source course management software. The argument you should use to encourage administration to make these changes is simple economics.

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June 16, 2009
by sjvn01
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SCO rises from the dead

I’ve never been a fan of horror-movie series where no matter what happens to the baddie, such as Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies, he’s up and ready to kill again in the next sequel. So, you can imagine just how pleased I am to see that SCO, just when it looked like it was dead as a doornail, came up with a buyer at the 11th hour and 59th minute.

According to reports on Groklaw, Gulf Capital Partners LLC, a group formed by Stephen Norris of Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners, a private-equity firm, has offered to buy SCO, just as the company faced the end of the bankruptcy road. If the deal is real and goes through, SCO’s nearly dead Unix business will continue, and, oh the pain of it all, so will its zombie-like lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and other Linux companies.

Will this idiocy never end!?

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June 15, 2009
by sjvn01
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Linux 2.6.30’s best five features

Windows and Mac OS updates every few years. Windows 7 arrives on October 22nd and Apple’s Snow Leopard will show up in September. The Linux kernel, the heart of Linux distributions, however, gets updated every few months.

What this means for you is that Windows and Mac OS are taking large, slow steps, while Linux is constantly evolving. Thus, Linux’s changes may not be as big from version to version, but they tend to be more thoroughly tested and stable. What most users will like in this distribution starts with a faster boot-up for Linux.

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