Back from Vacation

I'm back from my vacation, and I found something interesting while I was there.

I was in the Gift Shop across the street from my hotel. I peered at the beanie babies section, and I found a little penguin. Curious, I picked him up and looked at his tag. His name is, you guessed it, TUX! I guess this time it is a coincidence. His name is based off the fact that he looks like he's wearing a tuxedo. Anyway, I got him and he may become the logo for this blog ;-)

In other news, the first beta of Windows Vista is on MSDN. It is only avaliable as a 2.42 GB DVD (although I imagine they'll make a cd version for those of us without dvd drives). I'll try it out and post my thoughts on it.

On Vacation

I'll be on vacation for the next week. Don't expect any new posts until I get back.
May the Penguin be with you :-)

Gary McKinnon, Hacker

I found this from Slashdot. There is a hacker in the UK named Gary McKinnon, who hacked US Government computers to find any evidence of things to do with UFOs. It sounds like he believes more that we created UFOs which have anti-gravity technology, with extra-terrestrial origin.

He was arrested and made bail. He then did an interview with BBC. Of course, being interested in things like Hacking and UFOs, I listened. About 6 minutes into the interview, he said this:

"I did a lot of research on the web and found out that a lot of the military used Windows, and having realized this, I assumed it would probably be quite an easy hack if they hadn't secured it properly. And it was even easier than I first thought. I downloaded lots of commercially avaliable programs, and if you scan a large network, you find eventually there's a few hundred machines with blank administrator level passwords"

And after hearing that, the BBC interviewer said this:

"It sure seems astonishing that anyone at that level in any of these organizations, the American Army, Navy, Air Force, and so on, that they would use those systems without effective passwords"

The sad truth is that a majority of Windows users do not have an admisistrator password. Why? For a couple reasons.

1. They don't know the risk
2. They don't know how, and had Windows pre-installed on their computer
   

Should I mention that Linux forces you to have a root password?

Anyway, here's the interview. If you just want to hear this part, skip ahead to 6:38

Longhorn, soon to be "Windows Vista"

This is a couple days late, but I just found out about it.
Apparently, Microsoft has decided to call their next release "Windows Vista", which was Longhorn up until now.

From Wikipedia, here's their logo:


In my opinion, that name just sounds stupid (anyone agree with me?). Really, the term "XP" was cooler.

I have actually been able to play around with a pre-alpha copy of Longhorn (since I have an MSDN license, go figure). While I admit it wasn't on a "real" computer, it was in MS Virtual PC. I was emulating 320 MB of ram, and it was very slow. This looks like the most memory-hogging release of windows to date (may I mention that newer distros with window managers like XFCE can run under 64 MB of ram?). Out of a fresh, clean install, it was slow.

And I absolutely HATE what they did with the desktop. They have this annoyingly huge bar along the right of the screen which contains an oversize analog clock, quick launch, system tray, etc. It is possible to click a button to go into the taskbar, but then it is not easy to find things. Grr...

Anyway, looking at the Wikipeida article, there are going to be some new "features" that look like they have been in other Operating Systems for a little while (especially OS X). It is supposed to have the ability to record DVDs (and it's only a matter of time before someone hacks that to do something "illegal"...).

Looking further into the Wikipedia article, they are now dropping the "My" extention from everything, which can be good and bad at the same time. Me, I hate seeing the constant My's in there all the time. Go into My Computer, then My Documents, then My pictures... ugh. However, some people are used to it and will probably be annoyed without them there.

Anyway, I think I'll get the latest build of "Vista" (god I hate saying that) and put a review on here.

May the Penguin be with you :-)

Playing with Deer Park Alpha 2

I read today on Mozilla.org that they released Deer Park Alpha 2, which will be the next version of Firefox. I didn't want to screw around with it on Linux, since I have enough Firefox problems with it (that's why I use Konqueror ;-) ). So, what better to play around with it than Windows? I rebooted into Windows, and ten minutes after I logged in it was ready to go (and I don't have a slow computer, either).

On first glance, it looked identical to Firefox, since it had all of my Bookmarks, extensions, etc. The only immediately noticable difference was the icon, which is the Firefox icon on Debian.

I looked around in the settings, and it installed two new extensions called, "Reporter" and "Talkback". Reporter can be used to report broken website, and Talkback is used to submit crash reports.

One other thing I noticed after a bit of looking is that the Prefrences portion of Firefox has been renamed to Options, and has been moved from the Edit menu to the Tools menu. I think this makes a little more sense. The Options portion has also been redone. Instead of the choices on the left, they are now on the top. The menu items are mostly the same, except the Privacy menu, instead of having different drop down menus, has seperate tabs for everything in it. The only other noticeable change is the addition of a Tabs menu, which looks nice.

Another nice feature that isn't currently in Firefox is a feature called Sanatize (again, under the tools menu). This is a way to easilly delete history, cookies, passwords, etc.

So far so good. I haven't used it a lot, so I can't say how stable it is. It seems safe for standard web browsing, but I wouldn't reccomend this for everyone until it is beta. If you want to see some of the upcoming fearutes in Firefox, check it out. If you want to make sure that your browser remains completely stable, then don't (hey, it's alpha)

(I'm using it now to post this, by the way)

Dr. Tux to the rescue!

I got a phone call from a friend today, he was having some computer troubles. His computer (actually an aincent one from 1999, running Windows 98) would not boot up at all. I figured that there are three possibilities:

1. His MBR got screwed up
2. His Windows 98 partition got screwed up
3. His hard drive crashed

He did have some important data that he wanted off, so I had hoped it wasn't the third scenario.

I downloaded the Windows 98 (SE) boot disk, wrote it to a floppy, and brought over Mepis and Kanotix Live CDs.

Well, my first attempt was to use the boot disk to start the computer up. Windows 98 simply did not want to read the drive (this is starting to look like the number 2 scenario).

So... I whip out Mepis. I am hesitant to do this, however. Why? Their computer is old. I know that Linux is great for old computers, but this one has 64 MB of ram - hardly practical for a Live CD, but I don't really have a choice. I booted up Mepis (s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . . l . . . y), and was surprised to learn that it couldn't read the windows partition.

In a desperate last attempt, I popped in Kanotix. That booted up (s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . . l . . . y) and it could read the partition, although something was wrong with it. I couldn't back up the whole drive, since lots of files were corrupted. Luckily, the important ones they wanted weren't, and were all small enough to fit on a floppy.

Thanks Doctor!

Another MythTV Update

As promised, I have tested MythTV without a DM or WM running. I did not attempt to watch live TV, but to watch a pre-recorded show. First of all, I was shocked to see how much space it takes up. On the website they say it is about two GB per hour, but for a one hour show, it took up 26 GB. Considering that I only have a 46 GB partition, this is taking up tons of space.

Anyway, playback started with some slight pausing here and there, but it picked up and I was actually able to watch it without interuption. Pretty cool. I just need to get the size issue worked out now and I may actually be able to record shows like this :-)

MythTV Update

Well, I've learned something these past couple days. A 926 MHz Celeron (actually, overclocked from 600 MHz) is not as good as an 800 MHz P3.

I do have MythTV up and running, installing it was a breeze through apt-get, setting up the MySQL database was painless (thanks to the HOWTO). The MythTV configuration script wasn't that easy to navigate through (since you can't see the pointer and have to use the keyboard), but nontheless easy thanks to their GUI.

So I tried it out and... wow! A picture with sound (before, the only way I could get sound was by going into gnome-alsamixer and adjusting the "Aux" switch of the sound card), which was nice. But... 4 seconds later, pause for two seconds, then 4 seconds of play, pause... you get the picture. It's better than 600 MHz (that was like 2 seconds, pause...) but definately not suitable for live tv viewing. That wasn't my entire goal for this, because I want the system mainly to record shows. I used the guide (very nice guide) to find a show that I wanted and hit space (god I need a remote...). I told it to record that episode only, and I came back once it was over (with the GUI frontend closed). I opened it up, and went to recorded shows and, sure enough, there it was. Full description and everything, which is nice. I hit space to play it, and it was playing fine for the first few minutes, and then it started pausing.

At this point, I can only assume that it's the fact that I'm running Gnome in the background that I'm having problems playing recorded video. Later tonight, I'm going to try it with no WM or DM running (ie - in 'failsafe terminal' mode) and report back on that.

Interesting Finding at Library

I went to one of my local libraries today to pick up a couple books and DVDs. Right next to all the computer books was the area with all the computers. I looked at an empty one and was pleasantly surprised to find Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox shortcuts on the desktop. While giving users a choice of which browser to use is definately a good thing, there is another issue that has to be addressed here. While there is a Firefox shortcut on the desktop, it is not always obvious to a new user who hasn't used Firefox before to figure out that Firefox is a browser. The IE shortcut was clearly marked "Internet", while the FF one was marked "Mozilla Firefox", so most users would end up using IE... and as I looked to see what people were doing, I found one person using FF and the remaining 5 were using IE.

Something's wrong here...

More Fedora Fun

Remember yesterday when I said that I was going to use yum to update the system? I lied. I tried to use yum to update the whole system, and couldn't. In the process I also learned why people generally prefer apt to yum - it's so freakin slow! Apt took about 20 seconds to determine which packages need to be updated, removed, newly installed, etc. Yum took about 10 minutes to do that. It had to first download headers for the one site in my yum.conf file, and I believe it does this every time it installs something (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). It then checked which packages on the system needed to be updated (which didn't take that long), and after that it found what dependencies each package needed, but it did that about 5 times. I got bored and left. I came back a few minutes later, only to see that it couldn't update because it was missing about 15 dependencies, which apt didn't seem to find.

Hmm... I still have a functional Fedora distribution, why not try the RedHat network program that I haven't tried. I opened it up, and it downloaded all the updates it could find. I left about 3/4 into the downloading process and came back to find that it was done and could start installing. I hit next to begin, but halfway into the install process it rebooted again. GRR!

As I thought back to the dreadful days of Windows XP on this computer, I can now remember that this computer used to reboot at random times often! The only reason I could think of was the overclocking that I was doing (my CPU is actually 600 MHz, but overclocked to 900 MHz). I re-installed Fedora, this time with Gnome (and without KDE). I rebooted and disabled the overclocking.

When it booted into Fedora again, I tried the apt update. It updated thw whole system, but still left me without apt afterwards and a disfunctional rpm. I applied the fix to rpm (by installing a version of SELinux) and used yum to install apt again (with 'yum install apt' - kind of odd to type) and it worked :)

This time, since there's no KDE, I don't have the problem I did last time. I now have a fully updated Fedora system with apt and many repositories that only took 6 fresh installs to do.

I plan on doing what I origonaly intended to do and install MythTV tomorrow.

(BTW, this was posted in Fedora)

Adventures with Fedora Core 3

I'm trying to take an old computer that was sitting in my basement for the past year and turn it into a home entertainment center (hey, the TV card in it from 1998 has to be useful for something). Luckily, according to the MythTV site, 800 MHz is just enough to watch live TV, and this is 926 MHz.

I had previously tested it out with a few Live Distros (Mepis, Kanotix, and even LinspireLive!) and in all of them, the TV card worked with the module 'bttv' (although in Mepis, the sound card wasn't detected for whatever reason).

With the Fedora/MythTV HOWTO being my best chance of getting this thing working, I downloaded and burned all 4 FC3 discs (since the HOWTO is in FC3, and I have heard some bad things about FC4).

Well, my first step (after installing) was to install the atrpms-kickstart package, which included apt and a configuration good to update all the packages in the system and to restore the proper version of apt. The first time I did it, all went well with the upgrade (even the new Kernel), although once I restarted to use the newer kernel, I quickly found that apt was gone (it was supposed to install the normal version, which it didn't) and rpm kept giving me errors. I found a fix on RedHat's Bugzilla, which involved installing a version of SElinux (even though that was disabled). Sure enough, that worked fine, but I still don't have apt.

Rather than mess around with it some more, I did another clean install (except this time, since it has two hard drives, I did an LVM so I have an extra 6 gigs for recorded TV). This time I installed a little more, including OOo. The apt upgrade took twice as long since it had to download/install twice as much. This time, the computer rebooted in the middle of installing, and I still don't know why.

I booted back up into Fedora, and the RPM command returned the error "Segmentation Fault"

I did a third clean install of Fedora, this time with less packages than I did the first time, and the apt upgrade went along much quicker, but once it was done I still didn't have apt and had to apply the rpm fix. This time instead of doing another clean install, I decided to try out yum. I added the atrpm repository (or, as yum refers to it, 'Repo') to the yum.conf file. It seemed to work ok, so I tried to install synaptic. This actually worked and, as a bonus, installed apt in the process. So now I finally have apt, and even synaptic.

However, I quickly noticed dependency problems. I could not install any KDE application, because there was an issue with kdebase and kdeartwork (or whatever the proper name is). kdeartwork was too new for kdebase, so every time I tried installing a K application, it gave me that error.

*sigh* I will probably need to do a fourth clean install of it, except this time, I'm using yum for everything exept for installing MythTV itself (on the website, he says that it is easier to install MythTV using apt)

I wish there was an easy Debian/MythTV HOWTO out there...

How schools can get free software

I suppose this one isn't exclusively about Linux, but it is about Open Source Software, and is a good read. Check out the article here.

Windows takes 12 minutes to get infected

You heard me right - 12 minutes. That's all. In fact, this reminds me of another article I had read in the past about an unpatched Windows Server 2003 and unpatched Linux. The Windows server was hacked in a matter of minutes, while the Linux server took a few months to be hacked.

Anyway, check out the site.

Why I Switched to Linux

I'm sure that there is the occasional Windows user that strolls by here wondering "Why would anyone use Linux?". The answer to this question is obvious to most Linux users, but not obvious to Windows users. Most Windows users have never used Linux for a reasonable period of time to rule it out over Windows. I have used both of them and so far, Linux is proving to be better in more ways than one.

For some background information, I had been primarily a Windows user until a few months ago when I just got fed up with Windows and all it's problems. I found myself re-installing the system about every six months, and I just got fed up with it (I'm sure anyone would).
For a few minutes, let's go back to the last time I had to re-install my Windows system. The first thing I would do is back up my data, usually on my iPod. Once all my data was backed up, I would pop in the Windows XP CD and install the system, which takes 45+ minutes. Why it takes so long is a mystery to everyone, as Windows XP contains very few additional programs other than the system itself.

OK, so now the system is installed. The first thing I would do is get out the SP2 CD that I got at Staples and install it. This also takes mysteriously long. Once it reboots, the next thing to do is spend half an hour searching for the Linksys CD that contains the driver for my wireless card and install that. Once I had internet, my first stop (and hopefully only stop with IE) is mozilla.org to get FireFox, so I don't have to browse in fear. The next few programs I would get are Spybot S&D, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, and (more recently) Microsoft Anti-Spyware. My next task was to take another half hour searching for the Norton Antivirus CD so I can have protection against viruses. Once all that was done, I would download the driver for my sound card as well as the NVIDIA driver.

OK, now I have a clean system with some sort of security (which took about 4 hours), so now I can go about my daily tasks, right? Wrong. Windows XP offers very few applications, and most of the applications it does have do not do a very good job at what they're supposed to do.
Here's what I mean - let's say that you just got home from work and have to start typing a document. This can be a problem. The only program in Windows XP that allows you to type documents with slight formatting is word pad, and this program is absolutely horrendous. It hardly gives you any control over formatting, and it isn't even compatible with a word .doc file, which is a serious flaw considering that Microsoft is the one who came up with this file format in the first place. If it was me, I would end up going to the Library to type it up because I refuse to use word pad.

Here's another example. One day, you come home from work and just want to relax and watch a DVD movie. Once again, Microsoft is miles ahead in creating an incomplete operating system. Windows XP has the capability to play a DVD, but not out of the box. Playing a DVD requires you to spend at least $30 on a commercial DVD encoder first.

I could continue to ramble on about basic tasks that Windows XP does not allow you to do without additional (and sometimes expensive) software, but I think you get the idea now.

To recap, a few months ago, I got completely fed up with this whole process. The PC I have is a very good one, so I didn't want to go out and buy another one, nor did I want to buy a Mac. I had known about Linux for some time, but hadn't considered it as a serious alternative to Windows. After doing some more research into it, I decided that I could try a Live CD to see if Linux was any good. I had read good things about Mepis Linux, so I tried that. I downloaded and burned the ISO image (but before I could burn the image, I needed some more software!). I booted the CD up, and it was absolutely beautiful! The desktop is KDE based (version 3.3), and the distribution itself included so many useful applications, that I didn't even need additional software (to this day, I don't think I have added much else to it). The only thing that I didn't like about the desktop was that the Kicker (the KDE main panel) was somewhat cluttered, but that was easily fixable. I must say, what really amazed me was that it automatically detected and configured my wireless card and my sound card, which Windows was incapable of doing. I noticed right away that it had my favorite web browser FireFox pre-installed and ready to go.

After some playing around with it, I decided that I really liked it, and wanted to use it as my primary OS. After reading some more documents online, I quickly learned how to partition my hard drive to allow Mepis and Windows to dual-boot, just in case I had any problems with one of them so I could switch to the other. Once I partitioned my hard drive with Q parted, installation was really easy. I was pleasantly surprised. It didn't take 45+ minutes. If I remember, it took about 10 minutes to install and only a few more to add user accounts and configure the boot loader. I booted it up, and had no problems with it. The only problem I had was not even to do with Mepis itself. GRUB (the boot loader) had a problem booting Windows. Fixing this problem was a simple matter of changing the (hd0,-2) entry in the grub.lst file to (hd0,1). To this day, I have not had any big problems with it. Additional programs were installable easily via the Debian apt-get command.

As far as applications go, there are plenty useful applications that come standard in Mepis. One that I use frequently is OpenOffice.org, which directly can rival the Microsoft Office suite. In my experiences, I have found it to be somewhat better.

So for those of you who are running Windows and wondering "Why would anyone use Linux?", consider pondering this question: "Why would anyone use Windows?"