Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 7, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Fixing Five Common Windows 7 Annoyances

I’ve been using Windows 7 since its beta days and helping clients work with it since the operating system was released to manufacturing. Overall, Windows 7 is impressive. But, as good as it is, especially compared to Windows Vista, it’s not perfect. Here, I share with you some of its common problems with the new Windows in its first months of life and, if not their solutions, at least some workarounds.
1. Installing and Running Old Software

While many older Windows programs run just fine on Windows 7, everyone seems to have at least one older program that doesn’t have a fully Windows-7-compatible version. You can get many, but not all, of these programs to install and work on Windows 7 if you use Windows 7’s Compatibility Mode.

Some older programs (such as system diagnostics, hard-disk managers, and security software) shouldn’t be run on Windows 7 at all. The odds are that these kinds of programs will give you more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

To install an older program, find the software’s installation program icon, and right click on it. Then select the Properties/Compatibility Tab. Once there, select the newest version of Windows on which you know the program will run.

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December 7, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

High-Energy Linux: Linux & the Large Hadron Collider

The biggest, most powerful atom-smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams is finally up and running, with Linux in control.

After some LHC engineering problems were fixed, CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) LHC is now back to work starting to explore if the standard theory of how matter and energy holds up and how the universe was created? The LHC does this by smashing together a pair of particle beams that are shot around the circle in opposite directions at just shy of the speed of light. The resulting collision will produce showers of new particles, including, scientists hope, the illusive Higgs Boson particle.

Now if you were going to blast together TeVs of protons, which might create micro-black holes, and as one CERN scientist put it, if you somehow got in the way of the beam “It would be the equivalent of having 87kg (kilograms) of TNT dumped into your body,” which operating system would you want running the show? I’ll give you three guesses.

That’s right. The LHC runs on Linux. To be exact, its uses a modified version of Scientific Linux. Scientific Linux, in turn, is based on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

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December 3, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

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
2 Comments

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
0 comments

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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