tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-199608662012-01-24T07:01:45.435-08:00an open discussion of free and open source software and operating systemsPaul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.comBlogger651100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-3849439396728665622012-01-17T07:18:00.000-08:002012-01-17T07:18:51.962-08:00

The biggest news in Internet policy and legislation these days are the twin Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. Tomorrow, January 18, 2012, for the 24 hours beginning at midnight EST, the English Wikipedia and many other websites will execute a blackout in protest of this legislation. The blackout was

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-35362158532326354722011-12-20T20:30:00.000-08:002011-12-21T06:26:57.294-08:00

With recent issues like Net Neutrality (preventing content providers from gaining an unfair advantage over each other via carrier-level agreements) and the debate over the use of unallocated wireless radio frequencies after the switch to digital television, the developments over the last 6 weeks on the Internet front are not surprising. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) floated to the top of tech

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-78228560074098715362011-12-19T09:41:00.000-08:002011-12-19T09:41:23.985-08:00

US-CERT has published a bulletin advising caution when using wireless-enabled devices as you travel over this holiday season. Read the full article at the US-CERT website. This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Registered Linux User #370740 (http://linuxcounter.net)

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-16870198160940008012011-12-07T12:42:00.001-08:002011-12-07T12:50:12.401-08:00

Fyodor of the nmap project at insecure.org announced this week that C|NET has been wrapping the proper nmap software installer in a malware-installing application that in turn downloads and installs nmap. The collateral effects of what users download from C|NET include all sorts of adware/spyware toolbars, and the suspicious point is not only that users download something other than what they

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-12984194442115580772011-12-02T13:55:00.001-08:002011-12-19T11:30:11.977-08:00

The US-CERT has published (once again) their advisory concerning online scams that are so prevalent during this shopping season. Please have a read to protect yourself! http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#holiday_season_phishing_scams_and This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the Department of Homeland

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-53858002039855707722011-11-03T06:23:00.001-07:002011-11-03T06:23:11.656-07:00

Having used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a class project and more recently compared cloud-based virtual private servers for ease of provisioning, administration, and use as a web development sandbox in both Windows Server and Linux operating systems, I receive regular updates from AWS about new service offerings. It strikes me that every couple weeks Amazon introduces a new feature or enhances

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-74333075590043126762011-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:002011-09-11T13:22:52.253-07:00

So many columnists have written about security breaches this year and last; the cat and mouse game seems to have favored the cat more than the mouse recently. With major attacks against Google and the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Amazon and PayPal last year, plus major attacks against security vendors and now the most prominent organizations in the open source community -

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-21831415812745162992011-09-10T07:06:00.000-07:002011-09-10T10:55:15.984-07:00

I have blogged recently about IPv6, actually twice in a row! Time for a little change in that department. I have said a few times that in the computing industry, we often see a proliferation of multiple tools responding to the same need, which starts to confuse consumers (beginning with those in software development and trickling down to the average user). A few years into the proliferation

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-53691178397251808082011-06-07T17:23:00.000-07:002011-06-07T17:23:58.510-07:00

... and it's here! Today, June 8, 2011 (as of about half an hour ago GMT), is World IPv6 Day, sponsored by the Internet Society. Many major corporations are offering their content (or some of it) over IPv6 for the next 24 hours. Head over to the main event page and get yourself on IPv6 and check out some sites over it! My personal favorite test page for IPv6 connectivity is actually http://ipv6-

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-89294937892135806672011-05-04T20:13:00.000-07:002011-05-04T20:13:13.271-07:00

This is a hot topic, I know, but I just have to bite. Apparently IANA gave away the last /8 (Class A) subnet to regional registries in February, so the scramble for those last address blocks is happening right now. The Internet Society (http://www.isoc.org) is organizing World IPv6 Day to encourage a concerted step toward making content available via IPv6. I decided to do my part and set up an

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-86473703748231917612011-05-02T18:09:00.000-07:002011-12-19T11:36:15.931-08:00

US-CERT just released this cautionary notice about email-based scams related to the topic of Osama bin Laden's death. Please read this official publication from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team. To be really safe, what you would do is go to a trusted website and locate the official website of this organization there, then navigating to locate the information I refer to - to

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-70987523013449304772011-03-16T10:28:00.000-07:002011-12-19T11:35:50.795-08:00

The US-CERT released a bulletin today addressing tax season phishing scams that we should all look out for. Read the bulletin at the US-CERT website. This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-25655711817433675912010-12-23T22:44:00.000-08:002010-12-23T22:44:52.661-08:00

I was once again on the hunt for an efficient and powerful CMS... clients keep asking for upgrades and there always seems to be something better! Anyway, I have seen "django" around town a few places (most notably for me, at BitBucket) and decided to give it a read-through. I read the intro and FAQ one day and decided that it was worth looking into. The idea that its creators had ditched PHP for

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-70320994590729578802010-12-18T07:23:00.000-08:002010-12-18T07:23:35.203-08:00

It has been awhile since I posted, but I am by no means out of touch with recent events, especially those surrounding WikiLeaks. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to enforce the open government policy by stealing or otherwise obtaining through improper channels information that should remain private for reasons of security (bodily harm) or privacy (emotional harm) and releasing that information to the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-68060549983828784962010-07-22T15:48:00.000-07:002010-07-22T15:48:37.168-07:00

Facebook announced this week that it now has over 500 million registered users. I recall seeing a YouTube campaign about the online billion helping the hungry billion in the past. According to Wolfram|Alpha, there are now 1.56 billion people online. One must stop and think - what are they all doing online? Facebook began as a casual way to share memories via photographs and keep in touch with

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-54055010625537126962010-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:002011-12-19T11:33:45.971-08:00

I am re-posting a US-CERT Cyber Security Tip on erasing files that I think is relevant for people to know about. You can view the original on the US-CERT website; the PGP signature is included below for authenticity verification. http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST05-011.html This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-15240286761665784592010-03-11T09:24:00.001-08:002011-12-19T11:35:07.331-08:00

I am re-posting this Cyber Security Tip about Securing Wireless Networks, from US-CERT. This is standard practice information and should scale to accommodate future technology soon to be developed. Security is a mindset, a way of thinking about daily life, and information such as that published regularly by US-CERT (the Computer Emergency Readiness Team) helps inform the general public about

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-36310132820382578182010-03-03T11:06:00.000-08:002011-12-19T11:31:02.860-08:00

http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#u_s_census_bureau_2010 Please follow the link above to view the official notice from the US Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team. This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the time of writing, the US

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-66863699676872117322010-02-25T14:48:00.001-08:002011-12-19T11:34:34.313-08:00

I am reposting a US-CERT Cybersecurity Tip that defines web browsers, hoping to give users the advantage of understanding their systems in order to better protect themselves online. Please view the original article on the US-CERT website. This link is provided for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement by or affiliation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-68540363208202355322010-02-14T17:25:00.000-08:002010-02-14T17:39:41.659-08:00

Wolfram|AlphaIt is the computational knowledge engine, released in the Summer of 2009 by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica and maintainers of the MathWorld reference library. I followed the project loosely from buzz to release. It was rumored to be a Google rival, also having strong mathematical underpinnings. While it may take some traffic from Google, Wolfram|Alpha was not designed to be

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-73434458205038736942010-02-11T13:25:00.000-08:002011-12-19T11:34:01.061-08:00

I just received an email on the general security tips mailer from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team that describes operating systems in general, and then with examples of the most popular consumer operating systems on the market. Check out tip ST04-021 now. The US-CERT mailing lists are very informative, including these tips, as well as Cybersecurity threats and remedies. This link is

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-4071142520435839412010-01-01T11:59:00.001-08:002010-01-01T12:04:19.453-08:00

The Moodle project, in which I participated this past semester, was a success, though not complete.The reality is that, in Open Source, each contribution, though perhaps partial, helps the community at large. It is important that each code, technical, or design contribution be accompanied by appropriate documentation that explains its foundations and motivation, as well as sufficient technical

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-35650504642613336472009-11-12T21:45:00.001-08:002009-12-30T15:24:36.960-08:00

My apologies to the anonymous visitor whose off-topic comment I initially rejected. Let me answer your question.By social media, let me define it by example to be services like Google Wave, Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, and others. Let me consider blogs separately from these.By SEO, we mean Search Engine Optimization, or the art and science (yes, both) of crafting

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1144182276357721512009-10-15T23:11:00.000-07:002009-10-15T23:23:12.381-07:00

This weekend is the Society of Women Engineers National Conference. It happens to be in my hometown. It is shockingly different to attend an incredibly technical event and be completely surrounded by women - we are talking a 95% constitution of those human beings producing more estrogen than testosterone. This is the complementary circumstance to that which I experience daily - namely, a vast

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-69110753262025876382009-09-24T11:51:00.000-07:002009-09-24T11:56:53.202-07:00

This semester, I attack my senior project in Computer Science. We have been given the opportunity to contribute to Open Source as our senior project; of course, our experience will be well documented.My team of four has taken on an altogether greater opportunity to work with IBM to encourage compatibility for Moodle with IBM's DB2 relational database management system (RDBMS). Moodle is an online

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-11873665882519355352009-09-04T15:42:00.000-07:002009-09-04T16:07:27.356-07:00

This article from MIT's Technology Review gives a succinct overview of the WikiTrust project, an effort at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) to add accountability to open knowledge bases, like Wikipedia, in order to make the content contained therein more useful. The project takes into consideration several aspects of each author's credentials and how their contributions are

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-84785280004606653102009-08-02T20:55:00.000-07:002009-08-02T21:16:35.641-07:00

I was surprised to see that I have not posted about revision control systems yet. I began using Subversion about a year ago for personal projects; it was a nice start, and I had my beloved server under my bed hosting my repositories for local access.Since then, I have switched to Mercurial, which is so much more painless than Subversion, being distributed in nature, and the TortoiseHg Windows

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-40835669648809966982009-07-30T22:59:00.001-07:002009-07-30T23:04:22.501-07:00

I cannot believe I did not jump into these communities earlier - StackOverflow and ServerFault are two amazing community websites in question-answer forum fashion about programming and software development, and IT administration, respectively. I have occasionally landed on StackOverflow doing Google searches for programming-related problems, but from now on, I will be starting there and moving

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-26620700447898063892009-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:002009-07-21T21:25:26.445-07:00

Today, the California State University Board of Trustees voted to institute an additional 20% fee increase, over and above the standard 10% fee increase approved in May. This is to counter the gaping $584 million hole that the California legislature left for us. During today's meeting of the Committee on Finance, to which the fee proposal was referred, the Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-3207460545916998392009-06-22T21:26:00.000-07:002009-06-22T21:37:15.536-07:00

Microsoft did it again! I pulled up the Windows Task Manager on my slow laptop to diagnose its problem, only to find that even after several seconds of waiting, it was still not showing its status bar, menu bar, or title bar. I let it go. Then today I was on it again, and saw the same thing, even after rebooting the system (something that Microsoft Windows seems to be addicted to). That led me to

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-72898820876634125802009-06-19T10:58:00.000-07:002009-06-19T22:43:21.201-07:00

Things are getting quite heated with IE8 being tested by the community since being released through Windows Update, the imminent release of Firefox 3.5, and the whole Bing vs. Google hype. Tech news is littered with arguments for and against, studies conducted under very close scrutiny of the vendors themselves, and propaganda released by each vendor, desperately trying to get a leg up over the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-62602045546753736402009-05-25T10:49:00.001-07:002009-05-25T10:53:45.272-07:00

Facebook members have been hard-hit recently by hackers and spammers who send messages through someone's Facebook account to all their friends - the message typically contains a single link, which generally points to a phishing attack with a page that looks like the Facebook login page that you get when you follow an internal Facebook link before logging in, like the ones that are sent in

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-45076941032029323282009-05-21T13:47:00.001-07:002009-05-21T13:52:47.901-07:00

Several news agencies recently published articles including Pope Calls for Internet Evangelists and Bearing Witness to the Faith through the Digital World, both referring to Wednesday's General Audience, at which the Pope did, indeed, speak on these matters.It seems only appropriate that Open Source technologies be employed to meet this need - they are easy for the public to obtain, and therefore

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-68755096268786624432009-04-26T21:14:00.001-07:002009-04-26T21:20:25.753-07:00

Everybody is talking about it. The top-of-the-line enterprise database vendor is acquiring the leader in portable application development, dynamic web applications, and, by transitivity, the top-of-the-line open source database. Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems, which recently acquired MySQL.Java, Sun's software platform, has always had a good MySQL interface, and the open source

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-18026920189739979542009-04-26T21:06:00.000-07:002009-04-26T21:08:19.631-07:00

I was browsing my own blog the other day and really started to feel that itch - time for a new theme! I chose one that was not too far from the previous one, except for the decline in the obviousness of the RED color. This theme still uses red for highlights, but has a more modern, cleaner finish than the previous one. This is still a system theme - I have not broken down to write my own theme

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-6782702653048541072009-02-24T14:15:00.000-08:002009-02-24T14:23:33.823-08:00

Just celebrated my 21st birthday yesterday. I had changed my Facebook status to include 21 in the three alternate number systems used in computing: hexadecimal, binary, and octal. My only problem is that I frequently use the hex representation of 23, the date on which I was born; I mistakenly put down 21 = 0x17 = 0001 0111 = 027. Later in the day I was thinking about it and so changed it to the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-85950374926273224922009-01-31T10:26:00.000-08:002009-01-31T10:48:22.602-08:00

The United Nations proposed 8 Millennium Development Goals, toward which they challenged the world to work. Microsoft's Imagine Cup student competition requires entries to contribute a tech solution that works toward achieving one or more of these goals, at least partially. Numerous charities try to make assisting the neediest in the world an easy part of our daily lives, such as practicing

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-83740406822163948742009-01-01T20:40:00.000-08:002009-01-01T20:57:36.323-08:00

I recently read about the FireGPG extension for Firefox. This extension allows one to interact with encrypted or digitally-signed data included on web pages, using a separately-installed GnuPG installation on the local machine. It also provides tight integration with Gmail, adding a drop-down box that provides digital signature and encryption options for email messages and automatically verifying

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-89274292549233966602008-12-26T08:37:00.000-08:002008-12-26T08:52:16.871-08:00

It's a Slackware user's style to compile from source. The only hitch is satisfying dependencies (hmm, not unlike registering for classes). Unfortunately this can be much more than "a hitch" and consume entire days grabbing dependencies. There should be some sort of open project that maps the dependencies of projects upon one another, because as nice as the GTK is for building graphical

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-59906493610568209122008-11-18T20:46:00.000-08:002008-11-18T21:07:21.388-08:00

Well, folks, it's about time I posted again. This time I would like to cover the Dvorak Keyboard layout. This layout is a re-mapping of the keys on the keyboard that was designed to improve typing efficiency. It accomplishes this in several ways, the primary way being the strategic placement of letters of high occurrence in the home row and under the strongest fingers and furthermore increased

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-37204063771959998402008-10-16T19:23:00.000-07:002008-10-16T19:40:26.303-07:00

So the day we have been waiting for has finally come! OpenOffice.org 3.0 was just released this week, taking down their website with a staggering number of hits. Having jumped into the picture and downloaded the Linux, Mac, and Windows versions to deploy in my very diverse home lab, I can say that OpenOffice has provided the much-anticipated 3.0 release right on target. The most useful feature

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-34295706925266547712008-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:002008-10-15T12:06:14.115-07:00

Today is a day in which bloggers everywhere are invited to blog about poverty. Poverty is a global humanitarian issue, affecting over a billion people. In my recent coursework, I studied globalization and its effects on various components of society, including poverty. One problem with globalization, as practiced in many countries, is that the influx of money is not distributed evenly or fairly

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-27768970270763859022008-07-06T20:47:00.000-07:002008-07-06T21:16:18.068-07:00

I fell in love with Slackware as soon as I started to use it, frustrations with building from source aside, it is a very streamlined system. With the recent release of v12.1 I think I will give it another shot; I'm still running 11.0 with a (more) recent kernel, and many system library updates, as needed as dependencies for other programs... the funniest of all was upgrading flex, a text parser,

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-29285553010625260482008-06-02T11:52:00.001-07:002008-06-02T11:59:52.172-07:00

I have always appreciated the simplicity of Slax, and version 6 was long-awaited. I didn't try it out initially, for various reasons, but one of my friends had a hard drive-related problem and couldn't boot - a typical usage for a live CD with the simplicity and agility of Slax. So I downloaded and burned the 189MB ISO and fired it up in the broken machine.I chose the copy-to-ram method from the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-52838370583992365382008-03-12T21:42:00.000-07:002008-03-12T21:50:20.659-07:00

So, as usual, I have been keeping an eye out for a nice little distro. People ask about Linux more and more and I have just been recommending Ubuntu or the live disc for Fedora or OpenSUSE. Last week I found KateOS, a Slackware-based distro out of Poland. It combines the simplicity and stability of Slackware with a dependency-aware package manager (managing Slackware packages, of course). This

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-20451484909022243422008-03-12T21:36:00.000-07:002008-03-12T21:42:10.748-07:00

It's been awhile since I blogged, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been fixing things that aren't broken or using lame workarounds...Just today I was annoyed that when I clicked on a pdf in Firefox (latest stable - 2.0.0.12), it would behave as if the plugin were loading the file, but nothing would be displayed (blank window). I ascertained from the "about:plugins" output that two versions of

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-24889415772010935522008-02-02T11:30:00.000-08:002008-02-02T11:44:47.640-08:00

So I decided I wanted to run the latest version of GIMP, my favorite image editor. To do that, I needed a current version of GTK. I have had only bad experiences building the GTK and its myriad dependencies, so I was not thrilled about doing it again. Well, to make a long story short, I screwed it up bad enough that I needed to fix it so I could use other programs. I slowed down and read the docs

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-62457882247674285942007-11-15T13:27:00.000-08:002007-11-15T20:07:46.853-08:00

Have any of you ever tried to install one of these? I decided that my 6-year old Maxtor has had enough of a workout that I probably shouldn't try to rely on it as much as I have been. My old box, paul, has been through a lot and recently got a complete refresh - new, simplified partition scheme to suit its purpose as a backup file-server, a fresh install of the OS, and a new 320GB Maxtor SATA

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-71159522736360157162007-10-13T18:22:00.000-07:002007-10-13T18:25:13.758-07:00

Can you believe it? Al Gore! That'll release a bunch more CO2!Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-56747854868168385482007-09-18T21:51:00.000-07:002007-09-20T18:31:43.177-07:00

Figured it's been awhile since my last post...FreeBSD occupied a wee 45 minutes of my time this afternoon - I did a bit of brute force hacking to get X up and running - that required identifying my core pointer (/dev/ums0) and then killing the moused process that caused X to report my core pointer as "busy." Of course I got none other than the famous twm for a window manager, so I ran over to /

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-89789827786280747102007-09-09T15:24:00.000-07:002007-09-09T15:34:34.805-07:00

I was curious about this number that is given after an rsync operation completes. Looking online yielded no results, so I hope to be a result that people can refer to here. When rsync runs on a directory, it goes through and builds the file list, then transfers the difference. That's what makes it so brilliant. Because it built the file list of the entire directory, recursively, it knows the

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-13808389865559737042007-08-14T10:09:00.000-07:002007-08-14T10:11:05.807-07:00

In response to a post on linuxquestions.org, in which the writer expressed some concerns about the direction of Slackware based upon experiences with his particular hardware configuration and the new concepts introduced in version 12.0, I posted the following response. You probably have heard similar things before, but here we go again:I had a difficult time installing 12.0 myself - having to do

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-66734322292262657922007-07-09T13:01:00.000-07:002007-07-09T21:55:24.258-07:00

Try another distro, or a cousin for that matter!FreeBSD - I had the disks for 6.2 from a while back. That time, I had little anxious luck with post-install config and just decided to let it go for awhile. Last weekend I sat through the installation. The quirky things were mouse and NIC setup. Both worked out ok, but definitely different from Linux; they all have weird names, not tied to a

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-28704879174181760652007-07-05T16:10:00.000-07:002007-07-05T16:18:42.477-07:00

Many may say that one cannot login as root on Ubuntu. Maybe these have not used Slackware before. Simply run [user@ubuntu:~]$ sudo passwd to set a password for root, the super user. Then use that password to login as root: [user@ubuntu:~]$ su rootand then enter the password you created. It's as simple as that!Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-29247215949093618572007-07-01T12:44:00.000-07:002007-07-01T15:25:23.760-07:00

Same box, same disc, but different results!Last night I successfully installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Athlon 64 X2 4200+ system. The grub bootloader did not function, so I went in and found the kernel settings to load it and added those to the LILO entry that I loaded from my Slackware "home" distro. Ubuntu booted beautifully and has been functioning pretty; much as expected thus far. The

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-69478002481759841462007-06-30T17:09:00.000-07:002007-06-30T17:54:33.061-07:00

Can anyone follow this any more? It was Open Source software developers being attacked by the Redmond Giant on the grounds that they utilized conceptual design ideas that were proprietary intellectual property of Microsoft in Open Source software, in such a manner that those "borrowed" aspects were key aspects of the open software, which, as a result, became direct competition for Microsoft's

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-42138770544112215422007-06-07T21:08:00.000-07:002007-06-07T21:22:36.553-07:00

Well, I had a bad experience with two distros today: Arch Linux, and Ubuntu.Arch: tried the FTP-based install for 2007.05 "Duke" x86_64 - my home ADSL connection must have been a bit choppy or something; I'd have to kill the downloader, restart it, several times, to get that 100mb of base system down. Then it choked when I tried to go through post-install config; they have you edit /etc/rc.conf,

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-49481608014457094192007-06-01T09:47:00.000-07:002007-06-01T10:12:14.974-07:00

Rsync and FTP, here we come.Everybody knows FTP, but for the linux user, why not run a server? If you have more than one computer, or more than one user on your intranet, it makes sense to share files via ftp, at times. SCP, the encrypted secure copy program that uses ssh to authenticate, greatly reduces the allowable bandwidth, because of that encryption. With a large file, you could squeeze

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-3154785130806469942007-05-10T23:00:00.000-07:002007-05-10T23:25:16.546-07:00

Ubuntu Linux, everyone is talking about it. So why shouldn't I? Having struggled with hardware conflicts, I am not the best person to brag about it. And I of all people realize that operating systems must be compared without regard to the graphical interface. In addition to that, Linux distributions must be compared regardless of the underlying kernel, because that is consistent throughout

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-90567700146448240242007-05-09T23:21:00.000-07:002007-05-09T23:32:45.130-07:00

I stumbled across instructions to connect to the Microsoft Terminal Server at school from a linux terminal and decided to give it a try. Wow! It was amazing, using the standard software tools on the Windows machine from my Linux box - the epitome of geekdom and Linux advocates.The commandline went something like this: rdesktop -d cecs 127.0.0.1:999The -d option declares the domain for logon;

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-17191180140460259952007-05-06T19:52:00.000-07:002007-05-06T20:02:39.648-07:00

So, what's the scoop on Windows Vista? Fairly stable, strange admin, hardware compatibility issues, and minimum system requirements that seem like maxima. Sure it's pretty. The file manager is revolutionary for M$ but still stands in the shadows behind KDE's Konqueror. The Windows Sidebar is a nice addition that had been implemented by other companies like Yahoo and Google beforehand. (Apple

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1154432891515479992006-08-01T04:48:00.000-07:002007-05-06T19:51:42.939-07:00

so I was looking for an ssh server for WindowsXP on my laptop (P4 3 GHz; 512mb RAM; XP Pro SP2) and I ran across the cygwin suite (http://www.cygwin.com/) It is a basic environment to run certain linux applications; of course, they all need to be re-compiled for the cygwin environment, but it can run X and all of the popular server software (apache, openSSH, proftp, etc) NTFS "access rights" are

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1135652711606546882005-12-26T19:05:00.000-08:002006-10-13T13:32:35.891-07:00

Hey folks, I had to put myself into the same group as the cd device (/dev/hdc on my box) in order for the kioslave audiocd to work. If you didn't know about this, it breaks the cd down into various formats; if you try to copy them, it will digitally extract them and convert to that format directly - how convenient! Coincidentally the permissions are -rw-rw---- root:disk The cd does not get

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1135443909795131672005-12-24T09:01:00.000-08:002006-10-13T13:32:35.819-07:00

Hey everybody - when I login, the splash screen gets to the end, and then freezes midway into the "Restoring Session" phase. I've circumvented the problem by putting those programs that I want to load every time into $HOME/.kde/Autostart as symlinks; this seems to be working fine; I also specified in the KDECP that it should load an "empty" session at each logon. I'm running KDE3.4.2 on

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19960866.post-1134862228191647062005-12-17T15:13:00.000-08:002006-10-13T13:32:35.750-07:00

This blog is operated by a newbie who has experience of a few years with Mandrake and then Slackware, on a dual-boot i686 system. Feel free to comment; anyone may comment.

Paul Nguyenhttps://profiles.google.com/105942850161704375038noreply@blogger.com0