Mar 31

FreeLinuxBox.Org Launches!

By linc BSD, F/OSS, FreeLinuxBox, Linux No Comments »

FreeLinuxBox.Org

FreeLinuxBox.Org


Free Linux Box is a website that tries to connect individuals who want to give away fully functional computers running open source software to individuals who need a computer, free of cost.

The website showcases computers that are in need of homes. In order to qualify for listing the computer must fit the following qualifications:

1. An open source operating system must be installed such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or FreeDOS.
2. No funds other than reasonable shipping costs may be paid by either the donor or the recipient. Free Linux Box does not fund the shipping. This detail will be worked out directly between the donor and the recipient. If the donor does not want to ship, the donor should state in the post that the computer is for pickup only.
3. The computer must be functional and complete. Computers without monitors, keyboards, mice, or power cables are acceptable if, and only if, they take standard monitors, keyboards, mice and power cables.
4. It is up to the donor as to who is the lucky recipient. Free Linux Box is not part of this decision.
5. The root password will be given to the recipient when the computer is received. It is up to the donor to make sure there is no personal data left on the system.
6. When the computer is no longer available, it is the donors responsibility to remove the listing.
7. If the computer is still homeless after 90 days the listing will be removed.

Go to FreeLinuxBox.Org today to register and list YOUR free Linux box and help others that are less fortunate than yourself.

Mar 24

Netbook Grrr..

By linc Linux 4 Comments »


Oh boy. So what have I been doing since last we talked? Let me tell you…

I have been doing multiple Linux installations on my Acer Aspire One. That being said, this post is going to be more a rant that anything else.

Now don’t get me wrong, I really dig that little AAO netbook. I like it especially after getting the opportunity to mess around and check out many of the other netbook offerings that are available. I like physical size, the screen size and I really like the keyboard when contrasted with others like the EeePC. I DO NOT like the placement of the trackpad buttons on the sides of the trackpad instead of the bottom, but hey, ya can’t have everything right?

The most unfortunate part of owning the AAO, though, is it seems all the world has the EeePC. Oh, how do I always end up being the oddball? I don’t know.

Now, I draw this conclusion based upon the fact that it seems like every netbook linux distribution is built to cater to the EeePC. That, to me, means that either the Xandros install on the EeePC is really crap and the Linpus on the AAO is really ok, or nobody besides Allan and I have the AAO, so nobody cares that Linpus is crap.

To be fair, I used the Linpus install on my AAO for a long time and it works great as is. But that’s the problem. I needed things I couldn’t get on there, or at least not easily. I need things such as vpnc, so I can vpn into work, etc.. Allan mentioned he had a hard time with a USB headset driver (I think). There really should be a little more flexibility for these things with the Linpus install. I also started to develop an irritation with the playschool interface of the AAO. A bit too limited for me and when you start to change things up and go to a default xfce desktop, you find that other things you used to like are bound mysteriously to that Fisher-Price “My first netbook” interface they have going on. There was just no good way to work with the default Linpus, so I decided to try something different.

The first distro I tried was the EeeBuntu Net Book Remix 2.0. This one was not too bad. You really have to pay attention to the installer or you miss the place to change your default filesystem prefs to ext2. All my gear was detected, however, it still seemed a bit slower than Linpus. Nice interface though.

Next was Kuki Linux which left me with no wireless network. Plonk.

After that I tried Fedora 10. Beautiful is the word for Fedora’s interface. Unfortunately the default font set is gigantic and you sacrifice all your wants of speed for the pleasure of looking pretty. My bet is that someone could make f10 into a kickbutt netbook remix if they had the time to thin things down quite a bit. I know I’d use it if it were quicker for certain.

Next was Linux4One, which is an Italian distro made like EeeBuntu only based on Ubuntu 8.04 instead of 8.10. This distro was good looking and fast, but no wireless.

This led me to start checking out the howto’s for installing Debian on there. Check out the docs and you’ll come to the same conclusion I did about not just Debian, but Arch, Slackware, Gentoo and a host of others.

In short, nobody has taken the time to actually make a replacemnt netbook distribution that runs and runs “out of the box” as it were. Most big namers like Debian have this arm long document on how to tweak the OS to get the sound/SD cards/Screen resolution/Ethernet/Wifi/etc. working after the base OS install. That simply is not good enough in an age where I can get a regular laptop, slap in an Ubuntu disk and 20 minutes later have a perfect install. Come on people, at least write a friggin script to do the post install config or something. Nobody wants to read through 8 pages of sometimes intentionally confusing documentation to get Linux running on this fairly standard hardware. The other thing that infuriates me is none of these distributions are really optimized for “real netbooks”. You know, the kind with NO HARD DRIVE. Quit trying to install JOURNALING filesystems and SWAP partitions BY DEFAULT on my 8gb flash drive. For crying out loud…

So, what happened to my adventure? Well, I got a hold of Allan, who was nice enough to shoot me a restore copy of the original Linpus AAO install, should I want to use it again (for some reason you can hardly find it on the net anymore – what the heck Acer???) and I went back to EeeBuntu NBR 2. I have been playing with that a bit and am mostly happy with it except the previously mentioned irritations. At least my wifi works :-) There are, of course, a lot of improvements I would love to see happen in this distro, perhaps I will post a few in the forums if I get a chance and perhaps things will even get better for the lonely Acer Aspire One.

Mar 17

Free Linux Boxes? Where?

By linc FreeLinuxBox No Comments »

There was some discussion about this a couple weeks ago with Beth Lynn Eicher in a TLLTS episode. That discussion was maybe the 4th or 5th time I heard the idea. After sitting on it a while I decided to register the domain http://freelinuxbox.org and I am hoping that some of you fine folks will contact me and offer your support. I still haven’t heard back from Beth Lynn either (although I only emailed her about it this morning), so if you’re reading Beth Lynn, give me a yell.

Mar 15

New Servers

By linc Home Life, Linux No Comments »


For a couple years now I have been running a headless (broken) IBM Thinkpad T23 laptop as my home server. It has served it’s new function admirably. Initially, I had thought that maybe there would be a heat issue so I stuck it on a fan plate, but it has been running 2 years with zero problems as the (almost) entirety of my home infrastructure.

Queue to today. I bought a couple new servers. It’s high time really. I wanted to get something that I could run some virtual infrastructure with. I do a lot of VM use at work and it’ll be nice to be able to do some testing at home as well, not to mention being able to reap the rewards of running my infrastructure on a vm (easy bare-bones box backups, snapshots, box creation and testing with no additional hardware laying around, etc.)

The servers I found are in geeks.com. They have 2 64 bit 2ghz opteron procs, 4gb of ram and 120gb hdd. All that for a measly $120. I just couldn’t beat it, so had to buy a couple. I can’t imagine they will be there long, so if you are in the need, you better hurry on over there. Look at the bottom of the desktop listings for the servers. My only hope is that they will not sound like jet-engines or hairdryers while they are running :-)

Mar 15

New Laptop

By linc Apple/Mac, F/OSS, Home Life, Linux, work 1 Comment »


Ahh, there heresy! Yup, I finally got off my butt and bought a new laptop and IT’S A MAC! A Macbook 5,2, dual core 2ghz, initially with 2gb of ram.

How can this be, you may ask. I thought you are a Linux guy! Well, rest assured, I still am.

Although I am no Apple fanboy, you know the kind that wears turtlenecks with their suit, I do admire the hardware and have for sometime. They make a nice looking machine. Their machines also retain their value more than any other manufacturer, which is a big bonus.

The other thing that helped me make this decision is I am trying hard to leverage myself into doing some Apple server support at work as well. You know the drill, the more I can offer my employer, the longer, easier and more lucrative my stay there will be. That’s how I stayed 13 years at my last job. I was the go-to-guy.

My first impressions after having this almost a week? It’s pretty fast. In fact there was some wow factor there the first time I loaded my intranet page. It popped up so fast it was as if it was a local document! I also think OS 10.5mumble is better than 10.2, 3, or 4. It just seems a little slicker – it’s hard to quantify, it just does.

Of course, the first thing I did was to install the apps on OS X that make it livable for me. The short list is Firefox (Safari? Ick, although it’s MUCH better now than under 10.4), Thunderbird (Mail App can’t hold a candle), OpenOffice (best office suit out there), Vlc (hey, guy has gotta be able to watch his vids and quicktime doesn’t cut the mustard), and Cisco VPN (gotta be able to work). After those, things started to get livable on the machine.

My future plans, of course, involve installing a dual boot of Linux on this machine, and this is where I can use your help. I am looking for opinions and up-to-date howtos on different Distributions to try on here. Everyone always jumps right on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but perhaps there might be some other fun ones out there to try as well :-) Just shoot me an email and let me know what you are using and how it works!

Mar 15

Ossec 2

By linc Ossec No Comments »


Yessiree Bob.
Ossec has released v2. Go and grab it now. One of the really exciting new features it’s supposed to have is clientless monitoring. I can’t wait to try that out!

Most of you know that I run Ossec on a *lot* of systems. Almost every box I run at home and at work has Ossec on it. What I can say about Ossec is it does the job as advertised. It’s simply put, the best intrusion detection system for opensource out there. Period. Any sysadmin worth his/her salt should be running this, if for nothing else, just so you can sleep at night :-)

Mar 13

4 Eyes

By linc Home Life No Comments »

I can’t believe it’s been so long since I have put anything in here, interesting or not. I Am sure now that I have noticed, there will be the usual deluge of posts catching you all up, so beware.

Over the past weekend, for some reason, I decided that it had been long enough in between visits to the optometrist, so I went. It was almost 5 years after all. Oddly enough, my prescription has changed…

I have always been slightly far sighted, which caused me to have some amount of problems with things like reading, etc.. Since 5th grade I have had a prescription for eye-strain that I could wear on an as-needed basis. Well, I didn’t need them very much, so I didn’t wear them very much. That prescription hasn’t changed a whole lot over the years until just this last time.

Now, I have heard from some of my friends that are right around my age that your eyes turn to crap right around 40. Well, I am new to 39 and had noticed a bit of a glare/ghosting issue with distant objects and that was what eventually spurred me to going to the eye doctor over the weekend. I am glad I did.

I ended up having basically 2 prescriptions. I have my normal eye-strain one, but a new one to help me with my old-timer vision problems with distant objects now. This culminated in me getting bifocals. The odd thing is even with bifocals, my prescription is *still* on an as needed basis. The Dr., however, did say that “as needed” should probably include me reading anything and driving, especially at night. So they packed me off with a brandy-new set of spectacles to wear for the weekend and get used to.

Well, it wasn’t 2 days before I had to bring them back in. I just could not stand to wear those things. It was like constantly looking through the end of a mason jar. Luckily I ended up with the supervisor there waiting on me. When I told her of my issues, she said she was almost certain what the problem was, and after looking through my file quickly she verified it. It seems that I was given polycarbonate ulraliite lenses and there are a lot of people who get progressive lenses of that type who have the same “fish-bowl” complaint. Her suggestion was to let them remake the lenses in plastic and all would be better. I am happy to say that she was right!

So, now I can see better. The glasses are still a bit odd to get used to, but they definately help and I notice the glare reduced quite a bit. In retrospect, I probably should have got those transitions (self tinting) lenses, but the extra hundred bucks just wasn’t in the budget. Perhaps someday :-) If you are a procrastinator like me and it’s been a few years since you have seen your eye-doctor, you should go – hey, we all get older. It was certainly worth it in my case.

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