Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba. –via digg.com
This is great news for all the Linux and Mac users out there!
Yesterday my wife’s computer finally croaked. We decided that the best option was to build a desktop replacement form scratch. This can be a nerve racking experience as a Linux user because you never know how well every items will work with your distro of choice. I ended up with an ECS 6100SM-M, AMD BE2300 (45watt) processor, 2GB of OZC PC6400 RAM and a Pioneer DVD/R/RW. None of these components are amazing but they all work perfectly with Ubuntu 7.10 and the computer is surprisingly fast. My boot time out of the gate was a brisk 28 seconds and I haven’t even began to tweak the system to improve this time.
Today I was doing some work in innotek’s VirtualBox and noticed something new. It now accepts the “vmdk” format. For those of you not in the know, this is the format used by the most popular virtualization software, VMware. After recognizing this I decided to give it a shot and see if it would work. The first system I tried to convert was an Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon server I haven’t used in a long time. I decided on this machine as I knew that Ubuntu is pretty forgiving about hardware and often it can reconfigure itself to run when drivers are missing or changed. To my suprise it booted the system with little to no problems (took a long time).
After such a great success I decided to try a Windows system that I had laying around (and had previously backed up). This time around I wasn’t so lucky. Unfortunately Windows thought that its hardware had been significantly changed and refused to boot. This is probably due to the VMware drivers I had previously installed on the machine. Either way I am sure with a little work the machines could easily be converted to what I now consider a superior virtualization solution. It is important to note that I went back and successfully ran Windows and the Ubuntu machines in VMware.
This last week Innotek released Virtualbox 1.5 which is a major move forward for this free virtualization system. One of the best features is the easy to use implementation of seamless virtualization. It allows the user to integrate their two operating systems in one nice interface. While this is not a new concept as Parallels has been doing it for a while, it is new to a free, cross platform application (to the best of my knowledge).
To get it up and running all I had to do was update my VirtualBox install and then press “Host(Ctrl) + L”. Next thing you know your Windows task bar will appear at the bottom of your desktop(I moved mine to the top). You are now free to access windows applications as if they where a GTK application. There is one thing that doesn’t work smoothly as of yet. It appears that Beryl/Compiz style compositing applications don’t get a long so well with this seamless integration. It is hard to say who is at fault in this case but I am sure it will be resolved in due time. Until then I am happy dealing with the problem or simply turning off Beryl.
Ever get tired of typing the same long terminal commands over and over again. This is a short article that does a great job of explaining how to make those nasty terminal commands nice and easy to handle. Every Linux user should check this out as it could save you a lot of time.
via Jon
What do other OEM’s think about Linux running on their machine. This story is from Germany but it gives you an idea of what the big manufactures think about Linux.
“I took a screen shot of it.. because many of us thought that Dell would put the Ubuntu Machines 2000 pages deep into their site.. and only have it there to appease linux users. In fact, they are putting the Linux boxes on the main page of Dell on the rotating script.” – TheFounder
This is truely amazing! Linux is being pushed by a major vendor. Other vendors like HP have tried sell Linux machines in the past but none of them have made a push this strong. Dell has been in trouble for a while and perhaps, although unlikely, this will help revitalize their sales.
With a little help from my friend Jon I was able to successfully virtualize Windows today. I have spoken in a previous post about Innotek’s Virtual Box. For this little project I decided I would use it again. Everything went off with out a hitch. I was even able to find an easy way to install Virtual Box’s Guest Additions brought to you buy Google.com.
The final piece of this puzzle is one I am not looking forward to. The software needs to be registered with Microsoft and I have heard they are not very friendly towards users who virtualize their operating system. Because I am using a previously registered copy (off my old computer) I will have no choice but to call their tech support to get this situation resolved.
Since I made the jump to Ubuntu there was only one program that I have really missed, Notepad++. I used Notepad++ for all of my coding from XHTML to PHP with CSS in between. Granted I am no where near a master coder but I had grown a custom to its lightweight nature, great language highlighting and most of all the ability to fold the code. I tried running Notepad++ in Wine for a while but there are several problems with that. The biggest of which is Wine makes it difficult to access network folders.
When I initially made the jump I spent several days trying out various programs but never found one I liked. Since then I have been doing all my coding with gEdit. It has worked but doesn’t provide the best highlighting and has no support for folding.
Today I was missing Notepad++ and thought I would go out and look at it’s site again. Low and behold I completely missed a key piece of text in all my other visits. It turns out Notepad++ is based on Scintilla, a GTK+ application. I quickly checked the repository and was able to successfully install it in a matter of minutes. It is fairly similar to Notepad++ but with out all the shine.
Overall I am not a happy man, funny how such a silly thing can really lift my spirits.
As I have previously stated I have been using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn since it was in its Beta phases. I was hoping to give back to the community and notify them of any bugs I encountered. The beta period has now finished and as many people know, they released the official version on April 19th. Unfortunately I wasn’t much help to Ubuntu as I did not run into any problems save two small “glitches”.
The first small bug I had was with the GDM login screen. For some odd reason it would not size correctly. It would take my wide screen resolution of 1440×900 and attempt to cram it into a standard 4:3 format. This wasn’t a big problem as it only seemed to occur on the GDM login screen and once I logged in the system would display at the proper resolution.
The second problem was from one of the patches/updates they had released. The 2.20.14 kernel wouldn’t boot. The funny thing about this glitch was that by the time I had realized it I simply booted back into 2.20.13 and updated to 2.20.15. Since then it has been smooth sailing.
For the first bug I placed a bug in launchpad. I now realized that I messed this up by adding my problem to a bug from long ago that had since been closed out. The best part of the story is when I started up the machine today the problem had been fixed! It appears that my update from yesterday some how remedied the problem. It is also important to note that now when I boot I get the proper Nvidia splash screen as I am currently using the nvidia-glx graphics driver.
Just another great reason to use Ubuntu!
The final thought is I am still scheming was to give back to the open source community so be looking for my resolution in the very near future.