PC-BSD revisited

My first "conscious" open source Operating System experience was with FreeBSD. For this reason it is with great excitement that I "take the plunge" check out the latest progress of the PCBSD project. Recently, I have become a big fan of both Ubuntu Linux and her cousin Xubuntu Linux. Ease of use and a default installation that includes many of my favourite software applications have made Ubuntu Linux an integral part of my LAN. In the same way that Ubuntu is a GNOME X-Windows graphical user interface (GUI) to Debian Linux ...PCBSD defaults as a KDE X-Windows GUI for FreeBSD. The default PC-BSD installation includes KDE as a Window Manager and the PBI installer.

(more...)

BSD-Licensed C Compiler Added to NetBSD, OpenBSD

Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's src tree.

(more...)

Top 10 little-known Gmail features Parts 1, 2

Gmail has a bunch of lesser-known feature that can end up being very useful once you get to know them. I've put together a list of my top 10 favorite features that you may or may not be familiar with.

Part 1
Part 2

How to Installing OpenOffice.org 2.3 on Ubuntu Linux

The official OpenOffice.org 2.3 have not yet been released. But it have already availabled for download. Perhaps you might want to try this release. So, this tutorial shows how you can install OpenOffice.org 2.3 on Ubuntu Linux.

introduction to awk

Awk may sound funny but actually it is an extremely powerful command line tool. Awk or variations of awk (gawk, nawk) can be found on most modern linux & unix distrobutions by default. Awk can be used as a programming language which can nearly turn text files into something more like a database. I am not going to elaborate that extensively on the awk programming language. This article will be addressing many uses for the awk command. Hopefully by the end of this article you will be confident using awk in your day to day command line adventures.I use the awk command for all kinds of things such as trimming down output, restructuring output, & mathmatical computations.

OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 Quietly Released

The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 is scheduled for Monday, September 17, but it is available already. OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 introduces a number of new features and changes for all OpenOffice.org components. There is a new charting wizard, the ability to create Wiki pages using a new Filter in the OpenOffice.org Writer, and performance improvements are among the many changes found in the OpenOffice.org 2.3 branch.

(more...)

Digital security with GnuPG plugins

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify communications and data, as well as create and manage the keys needed for these tasks. It is a full, open source implementation of the OpenPGP Standard (RFC2440) and is integrated into many Linux applications ranging from clipboard applets to instant messaging clients. These applications make it easy to use GnuPG for digital security in the GNOME desktop environment.

The applications we introduce in this article use GnuPG almost transparently, and you can get by without knowing too much about encryption or digital security.

Beating Sandvine on Linux with iptables

If you are tired of Sandvine screwing with your BitTorrent and a user of GNU/Linux, then this is for you. I will tell you how to take your bandwidth back.

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping

This guide shows how to install and configure Smokeping on Debian Etch to monitor network latency. From the Smokeping web site: "SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection."

How to install and boot 145 operating systems in a PC

The 145 systems are:

3 Dos
5 Windows
137 Linux

I have also installed most of the PC-based BSD and Solaris together with a Darwin x86 too but these systems dislike to co-exist with a large number of other systems so I have to keep them off in another PC until I find a way to tackle the technical issues.

There are only 3 steps in this howto.

NetBSD: Three new security advisories

Three new security advisories were published.

OpenBSD: Mergemaster Tutorial

OpenBSD 4.2 is scheduled for release on November 1 and systems running releases prior to 4.2 should be upgraded. Mergemaster is a tool in ports included that minimizes upgrade headaches by merging system configuration files from OpenBSD 4.1 with the new 4.2 /etc and /var files.

Upgrade steps:

1. Buy a CD (EU link).

2. Backup the 4.1 system.

3. Upgrade the system using the "Upgrading a previously-installed OpenBSD System" section of INSTALL.$ARCH in the /4.2/$ARCH directory of the installation CD.

4. Upgrade installed packages with: pkg_add -ui -F update -F updatedepends

5. Use mergemaster (details below).

Use a Screensaver as Desktop Wallpaper

You can embed a screensaver as the destop background with two terminal commands. Tech blogger Prashanth Ellina demonstrates how you can create a "video wallpaper" by temporarily removing the nautilus desktop and replacing it with an xscreensaver. An embedded screensaver is light on memory usage, but won't play nice with Compiz Fusion.

(more...)

Anonymous browsing with JAP

When it comes to anonymous Web access, Tor is not the only fish in the sea. If you are looking for a lightweight utility that allows you to navigate the Web anonymously, JAP is more user-friendly.

Similar to Tor, JAP sends a user's Web page request through multiple intermediary servers called mixes. Unlike Tor, however, JAP uses a predetermined sequence of mixes called a mix cascade. According to JAP's documentation, because each mix cascade handles multiple connections, it's virtually impossible to trace a particular connection to its user.

(more...)

New OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 includes live migration

The team behind the OpenVZ project will announce today the availability of its operating system virtualization software for the latest stable release of the Linux kernel. OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 now supports user ID namespaces for improved security, and has new process ID namespace code that makes live migration possible.

(more...)

Implementing quotas to restrict disk space usage

If you manage a system that's accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It's fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group.

(more...)