Labor Day BBQ Plans Forming:
Watch the Hal-PC home page for details on the upcoming feedfest. It's a volunteer appreciation event and is being put together as we speak (type).
Saturday HLUG meet:
The 22nd is the second meeting date of the month and so far, there's no new President. I may be able to make it in order to help facilitate an election but if I'm not there, I give my blessing to a quorum present. Here's my suggestion for upcoming topics that I think would make good presentations ---
VMware
Virtual Box
VMware VS Virtual Box
IPv6
current developments in TRK (may have an expert for this)
current developments at insecure.org (I'm looking into this)
More Thoughts On Unconfiguration (if that's a word):
Previously (under the rubric "Off-Topic") I posted on Mac OS 9.1's ability to wipe settings and prefs in a way that distantly suggested sys-unconfig in Solaris. The distant relationship is that one is able to change some things without reinstalling the whole shebang (which can take many, many hours with some of Sun's products as we know). Can someone at a future meeting tell me if this is now possible in some Linux or other? I don't mind admitting that I don't know.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Mac OS9 Reinstalls: It may seem off-topic...
...and on a Linux basis, it is. But I dabble in all kinds of systems and I just discovered something that might be useful to one or two of you.
PROBLEM:
You have a late-1990's-era Mac (that you aren't using to run NetBSD or FreeBSD or some Linux coded to those processors) with OS9 or 9.1 and you forgot the password. Rather than research which file the password's in (which is probably visible using the version of Norton Utilities or the equivalent app for that OS), you elect to reinstall. But this wipes your unsaved files about which you may have forgotten, as well as preferences, settings, drivers, scripts, OS upgrades and apps, all of which will need to be relocated and installed. How to avoid this?
SOLUTION:
Don't worry about it.
It just so happens that the installer for OS 9.1/9.2 (and maybe further down... can't remember) has a curious set of options under the button labeled so. Using the "Options" button and several other checkboxes that come into play, you get three install choices. You could (in the presence of a pre-existing OS) reinstall:
* Without checking the "clean install" box
* With a check in the "clean install" box
* By selecting the "erase disk" choice (thus making a "clean install" check irrelevant)
Apparently these (ordered) options produce the following results:
* preserves settings and preferences
* wipes setting and preferences; leaves everything else
* bare-metal install - all user-added material lost
I tried the first option and still got the login for the password I couldn't remember. I then tried the second option since I wanted to avoid the third. The result of the second - amazingly - was that I was presented with the opportunity to set a new password, and upon getting in, saw all the apps, files and settings that I'd been afraid I'd lose, and in the places I'd originally put them.
[My guess is that the first two options address only the System Folder and that the third option covers the whole disk. Kinda almost reminds me of sys-unconfig in Solaris.]
Love Macs or hate them, there's a rationale to Macs that once learned, you can repair to and count on, since that unchanging rationale makes its own internal sort of sense. And here comes my theory about the relative business models: that's because there's time to write things that way, as long as you're not part of some organization that aims at being the low-cost leader via saving money on allowed programming hours, then pressing users into service as beta testers... but that would be baseless supposition, right?
PROBLEM:
You have a late-1990's-era Mac (that you aren't using to run NetBSD or FreeBSD or some Linux coded to those processors) with OS9 or 9.1 and you forgot the password. Rather than research which file the password's in (which is probably visible using the version of Norton Utilities or the equivalent app for that OS), you elect to reinstall. But this wipes your unsaved files about which you may have forgotten, as well as preferences, settings, drivers, scripts, OS upgrades and apps, all of which will need to be relocated and installed. How to avoid this?
SOLUTION:
Don't worry about it.
It just so happens that the installer for OS 9.1/9.2 (and maybe further down... can't remember) has a curious set of options under the button labeled so. Using the "Options" button and several other checkboxes that come into play, you get three install choices. You could (in the presence of a pre-existing OS) reinstall:
* Without checking the "clean install" box
* With a check in the "clean install" box
* By selecting the "erase disk" choice (thus making a "clean install" check irrelevant)
Apparently these (ordered) options produce the following results:
* preserves settings and preferences
* wipes setting and preferences; leaves everything else
* bare-metal install - all user-added material lost
I tried the first option and still got the login for the password I couldn't remember. I then tried the second option since I wanted to avoid the third. The result of the second - amazingly - was that I was presented with the opportunity to set a new password, and upon getting in, saw all the apps, files and settings that I'd been afraid I'd lose, and in the places I'd originally put them.
[My guess is that the first two options address only the System Folder and that the third option covers the whole disk. Kinda almost reminds me of sys-unconfig in Solaris.]
Love Macs or hate them, there's a rationale to Macs that once learned, you can repair to and count on, since that unchanging rationale makes its own internal sort of sense. And here comes my theory about the relative business models: that's because there's time to write things that way, as long as you're not part of some organization that aims at being the low-cost leader via saving money on allowed programming hours, then pressing users into service as beta testers... but that would be baseless supposition, right?
Saturday, August 8, 2009
LOTS OF NEWS ABOUT HLUG
1.Last Saturday's Show: The Recent BSD Activity
2.Last Saturday's Show: Synfig's Capabilities
3.The New President Of HLUG
The show of Saturday the 8th saw me get not only the announced topic out of the way, but two others that I'd been wanting to bring up. BSD's movements of late constituted the two unknowns; the announced subject was (at Russell's suggestion) something about Synfig, a tool that could become almost as big as Open Office – at least for the animation community.
The two big differences to my mind between Linux and BSD (the movement beginning in 1993 (93-FreeBSD, 94-NetBSD, 95-OpenBSD, roughly) would be that the license is different, and secondly that the product orientation is way different. By orientation, I mean that the maintainers of these distributions seem to concentrate upon server use and if one wants a full-feature desktop, one can install it oneself. There might be a change in this orientation of theirs in the wind; the first reason that I believe this is the following offering.
PC-BSD is a distribution that takes FreeBSD and puts KDE on top of it. It's a three-CD load and I can't say too much about it because I tried to load the thing onto four different machines at my house and nothing took it. I didn't even get to command line; the install froze about halfway through. Now, one attendee said that he'd gotten it to load in a VM but I'm about ¼ Luddite, so I'm behind on getting any of those virtual products working at my place. I'll complain that any distro that can't load on my stuff needs work at the installer, but that may be just me...
Next reason I think BSD's low opinion of desktop products may be changing is something that I did get going, namely BSD Anywhere. This is a live-CD-only distro that failed on a few of my machines (notably the dual core) but worked on a Dell P3 550mhz with 512 ram from 2002. It's an OpenBSD product running Enlightenment as a desktop and includes a recent Firefox and Thunderbird load (visible on an CDE/NeXT/OSX-like dock at the bottom center of the screen) and although it was a little slow at surfing on this old of a computer, it was serviceable. The really sneaky thing about this distribution was the fact that the GUI (Enlightenment) didn't even list one tenth of the available applications! And if you went to the .org's website, the easily located list under “software” revealed the presence of such tools as netfwd, hydra, iperf, nmap... the list went on and on. I had no idea that this distro qualified as a Security Distribution like Back Track, but it does. Apparently, command-line only versions of the “stealth” apps are the ones included...
Synfig is a tool on which I am absolutely incompetent, but by loading it onto my Core2duo, I could at least prove that it could be installed on Fedora 11 and could run fairly well. This 2-D cartoon illustration system was best demonstrated by the demo reel at the website, but having the tool installed and running allowed my to show what a great job the .org did in putting together the help Wiki. Never liked those things before but this one's slick. And Synfig shows yet again what the Open Source movement can do. Fifty years ago only big animation houses like Disney could afford to do art like this. Today? The capability is free to all. Don't miss the demo movie: they do a scene that mimics the film "Ice Age" perfectly.
OH YES... one little program note. I'm no longer President of HLUG since my employer will now have me on rotating Saturdays, throwing 50 percent of meeting dates askew, so that puts me out. I'll still be attending meetings when possible, plus attending the Wednesday workshops and doing all the Board of Directors stuff. It's just that the conflict with this particular office can't be solved. So be thinking of who you want as President and I'll help as and when I can.
Also, as HLUG moves into the future, I'll note its activities at this blog as well as whatever interests me personally (which I do anyway). My interest in promoting Linux is the same, and so mandates spreading the word about HLUG and Hal-PC in any event.
1.Last Saturday's Show: The Recent BSD Activity
2.Last Saturday's Show: Synfig's Capabilities
3.The New President Of HLUG
The show of Saturday the 8th saw me get not only the announced topic out of the way, but two others that I'd been wanting to bring up. BSD's movements of late constituted the two unknowns; the announced subject was (at Russell's suggestion) something about Synfig, a tool that could become almost as big as Open Office – at least for the animation community.
The two big differences to my mind between Linux and BSD (the movement beginning in 1993 (93-FreeBSD, 94-NetBSD, 95-OpenBSD, roughly) would be that the license is different, and secondly that the product orientation is way different. By orientation, I mean that the maintainers of these distributions seem to concentrate upon server use and if one wants a full-feature desktop, one can install it oneself. There might be a change in this orientation of theirs in the wind; the first reason that I believe this is the following offering.
PC-BSD is a distribution that takes FreeBSD and puts KDE on top of it. It's a three-CD load and I can't say too much about it because I tried to load the thing onto four different machines at my house and nothing took it. I didn't even get to command line; the install froze about halfway through. Now, one attendee said that he'd gotten it to load in a VM but I'm about ¼ Luddite, so I'm behind on getting any of those virtual products working at my place. I'll complain that any distro that can't load on my stuff needs work at the installer, but that may be just me...
Next reason I think BSD's low opinion of desktop products may be changing is something that I did get going, namely BSD Anywhere. This is a live-CD-only distro that failed on a few of my machines (notably the dual core) but worked on a Dell P3 550mhz with 512 ram from 2002. It's an OpenBSD product running Enlightenment as a desktop and includes a recent Firefox and Thunderbird load (visible on an CDE/NeXT/OSX-like dock at the bottom center of the screen) and although it was a little slow at surfing on this old of a computer, it was serviceable. The really sneaky thing about this distribution was the fact that the GUI (Enlightenment) didn't even list one tenth of the available applications! And if you went to the .org's website, the easily located list under “software” revealed the presence of such tools as netfwd, hydra, iperf, nmap... the list went on and on. I had no idea that this distro qualified as a Security Distribution like Back Track, but it does. Apparently, command-line only versions of the “stealth” apps are the ones included...
Synfig is a tool on which I am absolutely incompetent, but by loading it onto my Core2duo, I could at least prove that it could be installed on Fedora 11 and could run fairly well. This 2-D cartoon illustration system was best demonstrated by the demo reel at the website, but having the tool installed and running allowed my to show what a great job the .org did in putting together the help Wiki. Never liked those things before but this one's slick. And Synfig shows yet again what the Open Source movement can do. Fifty years ago only big animation houses like Disney could afford to do art like this. Today? The capability is free to all. Don't miss the demo movie: they do a scene that mimics the film "Ice Age" perfectly.
OH YES... one little program note. I'm no longer President of HLUG since my employer will now have me on rotating Saturdays, throwing 50 percent of meeting dates askew, so that puts me out. I'll still be attending meetings when possible, plus attending the Wednesday workshops and doing all the Board of Directors stuff. It's just that the conflict with this particular office can't be solved. So be thinking of who you want as President and I'll help as and when I can.
Also, as HLUG moves into the future, I'll note its activities at this blog as well as whatever interests me personally (which I do anyway). My interest in promoting Linux is the same, and so mandates spreading the word about HLUG and Hal-PC in any event.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Hello Again And Welcome
Last Saturday's presentation on Subversion, the ubiquitous version control system, consisted in large part of a history of the entire issue of such systems' necessity. How does one organize a project to write a multi-thousand-line program using more than one programmer? As long as one person's writing the program, the problem never comes up. But hand the job to a department of two or more programmers and one needs a way to synchronize the effort.
It occurs to me that the two systems we've examined in detail so far typify the two large conceptual categories of the vast enterprise of software development. Whereas the open source model (illustrated by the development of Linux, for instance) might logically benefit from a decentralized system (like Bazaar), the closed source or corporate model might logically benefit from a centralized system (like Subversion). Ed suggested that the differences between the two categories of systems were less serious than many supposed, and that the considerable configuration options in both were sufficient to accommodate most situations. Furthermore, the claim that one system ate up storage space at a greater rate than the other was shown to be possible in both types, depending upon configuration and one's perspective regarding client or server.
Oops. My tendency to oversimplification is making Ed sound like the fence-sitter that I am, rather than the advocate he may prefer to be... but I'm in a hurry.
Coming up two weeks from last Saturday (August 8th, second Sat. of the month) will be my presentation on an animation program that runs under Linux. Which one? Ah, that would be telling. Stay tuned.
It occurs to me that the two systems we've examined in detail so far typify the two large conceptual categories of the vast enterprise of software development. Whereas the open source model (illustrated by the development of Linux, for instance) might logically benefit from a decentralized system (like Bazaar), the closed source or corporate model might logically benefit from a centralized system (like Subversion). Ed suggested that the differences between the two categories of systems were less serious than many supposed, and that the considerable configuration options in both were sufficient to accommodate most situations. Furthermore, the claim that one system ate up storage space at a greater rate than the other was shown to be possible in both types, depending upon configuration and one's perspective regarding client or server.
Oops. My tendency to oversimplification is making Ed sound like the fence-sitter that I am, rather than the advocate he may prefer to be... but I'm in a hurry.
Coming up two weeks from last Saturday (August 8th, second Sat. of the month) will be my presentation on an animation program that runs under Linux. Which one? Ah, that would be telling. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Again, Version Control! (anybody get the Harlan Ellison reference?)
I'm well aware that in the world of version control systems, there's a decentralized model, of which Bazaar is a worthy example. We had a good presentation (click on "presentations" at left) from Russell Adams not long ago regarding the broad version control picture and that particular application. There is another perspective, though, being the centralized organizational approach, of which Subversion is a worthy example, and we'll have a show on that program at our next meeting (July 25th).
One reason for doing a Subversion show (in addition to having competent personnel to deliver it) is that nothing succeeds like success. Subversion is one of the leading version control schemes in IT today, and probably the most popular one in the open source movement right now. So we'll give it its due.
One reason for doing a Subversion show (in addition to having competent personnel to deliver it) is that nothing succeeds like success. Subversion is one of the leading version control schemes in IT today, and probably the most popular one in the open source movement right now. So we'll give it its due.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
THIS SATURDAY rocked.
Although the show on the 11th may not have been quite tight, the show checked off several subjects I've been keen upon. First of all, I got the core 2 duo running and showed off several nice things:
FEDORA 11: My over-the-wire upgrade from 10.3 to 11.x actually happened. I'd tried that twice before (in Mandriva/Mandrake and in Ubuntu 7.something) and blew away the MBR, the file system, everything. But going to Fedora 11 live ACTUALLY WORKED. The download and reboot/rebuild took about 8.5 hours, but what the heck.
BACK TRACK 4 pre-final release: The live DVD running KDE 4.whateversthelatestversion showed off its newfound stability, as well as the formidable arsenal of tools to do everything from network enumeration to penetration testing to password recovery to cisco-specific analysis and so on.
URBAN TERROR 4: A game based on the open-sourced Quake 3 engine and FREE, I showed off (and on Fedora this time, as opposed to Linux Mint, which I usually run in mixed company) to the small but teeming crowd how fast I could get my posterior handed to me.
There was more, but you had to be there.
UP NEXT: ED ON SUBVERSION (another perspective on version control)!
FEDORA 11: My over-the-wire upgrade from 10.3 to 11.x actually happened. I'd tried that twice before (in Mandriva/Mandrake and in Ubuntu 7.something) and blew away the MBR, the file system, everything. But going to Fedora 11 live ACTUALLY WORKED. The download and reboot/rebuild took about 8.5 hours, but what the heck.
BACK TRACK 4 pre-final release: The live DVD running KDE 4.whateversthelatestversion showed off its newfound stability, as well as the formidable arsenal of tools to do everything from network enumeration to penetration testing to password recovery to cisco-specific analysis and so on.
URBAN TERROR 4: A game based on the open-sourced Quake 3 engine and FREE, I showed off (and on Fedora this time, as opposed to Linux Mint, which I usually run in mixed company) to the small but teeming crowd how fast I could get my posterior handed to me.
There was more, but you had to be there.
UP NEXT: ED ON SUBVERSION (another perspective on version control)!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Developments
First of all, the next presentation will give Russell a rest, consisting as it will of myself delivering the long-rumored ripoff of Linux Journal articles (one featuring references to BackTrack, as seen at HLUG presentations recently, and which we'll revisit a bit). We'll also snatch one or two looks at the way they do the "Linux Minute" on their website. This will happen on Saturday, July 11th at 2pm, at the Hal-PC HQ.
Second of all, Russell has uploaded the .pdf of his presentation slides from last Saturday's Linux accounting show, findable at the most recent entry under "presentations" at adamsinfoserv.com.
Third of all, some things being discussed for upcoming shows include a regex review and whatever we can talk Katrina into showing us before she's on assignment again. Mr. Spotswood also is continuing to test various open-source programs and he should have some comment on them before too long.
Second of all, Russell has uploaded the .pdf of his presentation slides from last Saturday's Linux accounting show, findable at the most recent entry under "presentations" at adamsinfoserv.com.
Third of all, some things being discussed for upcoming shows include a regex review and whatever we can talk Katrina into showing us before she's on assignment again. Mr. Spotswood also is continuing to test various open-source programs and he should have some comment on them before too long.
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