Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

MaximumPC published a very detailed article that describes how to install Ubuntu on your favorite NetBook : How To: Become a Linux Netbook Power User . Also useful: Ars Technica's How to: Installing and running Ubuntu on the Eee PC .

I wrote last year about a great open source brainstorming and mind mapping tool, Freemind 0.8.0 - Java Mind Map software , but I was concerned that the program hadn’t seen a significant update in several years. Well, it’s just been updated this year to 0.8.1, and you can download it from SourceForge.net: FreeMind . Version 0.9.0 is still an unstable beta.

As the cost of Windows becomes a larger and larger portion of the cost of computer hardware, more vendors are going to look at Linux as a viable alternative. Acer is already selling Linux on its low cost ultra-portables, but will expand Linux options to notebooks this year.  Another interesting advantage of Linux for hardware manufacturers: because it's open, they can customize it for their specific hardware models and the differing requirements of laptops or Media PCs. According to the article, using Linux helps them "extend battery life from five to seven hours."  This means that hardware manufacturers could build special hardware features into their boxes and then not only write the drivers to support the hardware, but also modify any aspect of the operating system to better support the new features. That's an appealing option to companies that are currently competing primarily on price.

It looks like the best way to get my Creative X-Fi card to work in Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 is to install OSS4 .

When you decide it’s time to start writing bash scripts with some style, start at the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper. It’s available as a PDF, or a tarball download, too.

[UPDATED] Joomla 1.5 is acting flaky on one of our installations because the directories are set to ‘unwriteable’. To see the their current state, log in as Super Administrator and go to Help > System Info > Directory Permissions . Elsewhere, it's been suggested that the specified directories must be set to “world-writeable” (777). This works, but it is a very bad idea , since it means anyone can change your files! Not cool. Fixing Security with User and Group Settings To perform these changes, you need shell (command line) access to your server. If you don't have it, you can beg your host to make these changes for you, or switch to a Joomla-friendly host. I'm going to assume that you are using a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server because if you're not, then ... well, these instructions should work in principle, but the specifics for your server may be quite different. Here's the issue: you, the FTP user, need full access to your files. So does Joomla,...

At Cadent , we use Parallels Plesk Control Panel Software for Hosting on our servers (we’ve also used the open source Webmin and the commercial CPanel). Plesk has a great user interface, which our clients appreciate. It also imposes its own way of doing things, which can be a bit of a pain when tracking down subtle issues with server configuration. Because Plesk rewrites many configuration files automatically, it’s really critical to ensure that I make any manual changes to the server configuration in the right place, or Plesk will overwrite my efforts without remorse. The issue we needed to address was this: we installed Joomla! 1.0 on our development server, and Joomla reported the following configuration problems:         •        Safe mode was on, needs to be off.         •        The session directory was unwriteable. PHP: Safe Mode is a global setting allows only a file's owner or group to execute the script or read a file. Clearly, this is a good thing for security...

If you use a Mac at all, you know the value of a handy search interface like Spotlight or Quicksilver . The Gnome Deskbar delivers similar features to the Ubuntu desktop, or any other Gnome desktop, for that matter. See also: Dick Wall's Blog: Deskbar - Ubuntu's answer to spotlight Katapult - KDE's answer to Deskbar

A page of many sample uses of the tar command to illustrate the most useful options with real-world examples.

Version 5.0 of the free, open-source and cross-platform encryption program TrueCrypt is now available for download and installation for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. TrueCrypt: Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive. Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent . Further information regarding features of the software may be found in the documentation .

[There's been quite a bit of interest in this post and I've expanded on it quite a bit. Please post any comments or questions to help me improve this guide. - Neil] Keith and I have both run into situations where we want to recover a Windows computer by cleaning it up with a Linux Live (bootable) CD distro. This offers several advantages to cleaning up an infected or compromised computer by booting into Windows: It prevents the malware, if it exists, from jumping from the infected computer or partition we are trying to fix to the repair partition or boot medium. If we boot from a CD, there's actually no way to alter the boot medium, since it's read-only. Naturally, we started with Knoppix -- download it here . Installing and scanning with F-Prot is covered in this Knoppix.net discussion thread, Virus Scan from LiveCD , which describes how to install F-Prot from the command line using apt-get. Also, In Knoppix 5.1, you can boot from the Knoppix CD and install F-P...

Here is one interesting software development environment, especially for web applications. Squeak is an open source implementation of Smalltalk. Seaside is a Web Framework for developing web applications in Squeak. Pier is a CMS built on Seaside. DabbleDB is also built on Seaside -- an incredibly impressive web app. So far, I've installed it on my Mac iFive (OS X 10.4.10).

Great tips on how to install and customize Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), although a little slow to load with all the screen shots. It's a great way to get a sense of how to set up one of the best Linux desktops around these days. Some of my favorite tips include: powertop adding a new software repository adding the medibuntu repository

You can see the current version of Ubuntu by selecting System > About Ubuntu . It's in the second paragraph. The other method to find your version is a command line method. There are two commands you can use: cat /etc/issue or you can use cat /etc/lsb-release …and finally to find your kernel version and a few more details about your machine use the uname command which, per the man pages, shows system information. Examples: uname -a : print all information uname -r : print the kernel release uname -v : print the kernel version uname -o : print the operating system

I performed a clean install on a dedicated hard disk. No problems there. I really like the clean desktop: no icons! Although the boot up time seems unusually long, Sound card drivers: Creative X-fi XtremeGamer 64-bit driver for Linux Error: neil@area-51u:~/Desktop/XFiDrv_Linux_US-1.04$ sudo ./installer [sudo] password for neil: This product only support 64-bit Operating Systems Setup will now exit neil@area-51u:~/Desktop/XFiDrv_Linux_US-1.04$ Here's why: Requirements: Linux x86_64 OS Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi audio devices listed above. Still, this should work! neil@area-51u:~/Desktop/XFiDrv_Linux_US-1.04$ uname -a Linux area-51u 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Sun Oct 14 21:45:15 GMT 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux It's always something, on the bleeding edge...

Before I do a clean install of Ubuntu on my ShuttleX, I want to make a complete backup. This From The Linux Documentation Project, Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO : Total restore, sometimes called bare metal recovery, is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. In order to make a total restoration, you must have complete backups, not only of your file system, but of partition information and other data. This HOWTO is a step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make that bare metal recovery. It includes some related scripts.

Although I successfully upgraded my Feisty Fawn 7.04 installation to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), I'm having some problems with desktop effects. Basically, none of the window manager elements appear. I've decided to do a clean install, so I'm downloading the CD image, but it's taking forever... The torrent files are listed at the bottom of the Gutsy Gibbon download page , but it turns out the that the torrent files take some time to download, too. In fact, the HTTP download from Columbia's servers is coming through at 140 KB/sec, or higher, whereas Bittorrent has topped out at, well, just about 130 KB/sec. Hardly much of a difference, but then I get spikes on the HTTP download up to 320 KB/sec. It looks like the issue is the torrent file in question. When I downloaded the AMD 64 bit torrent, I'm getting speeds of over 1000 KB/sec.

Kompozer picks up where Nvu seems to have left off. Nvu was my favorite Open Source WYSIWIG editor, but has been stuck at version 1.0 for some time now I am pleased to say that I find Kompozer very useful on Windows & Linux, and even run it off my U3 USB drive. Since I haven't figured out how to trigger the "accelerator keys" (like Alt-F for "File," Alt-O for "Open," instead of Ctrl-O) on the Mac, it's not very keyboard friendly on OS X. Post a comment if you know how to pilot these programs with the keyboard on the Mac, or let me know if you like a different Open Source HTML editor.

I want to put a current time stamp on my prompt, so I can see when I run a job. From Custom Bash Prompt How-To This How-To is to change the display of your bash prompt permanently. It will give you a list of different strings you can include into your bash prompt such as, the time of day, the date, and many other options. My prompt is already customized in ~/.bash_prompt

I downloaded HandBrake to my Ubuntu box, Shubuntu, and converted VOB files to MP4: ~/bin/HandBrakeCLI -i /media/MyBook500-ext3_/neil/media/DVDs/ -o /media/MyBook500-ext3_/neil/media/ipod/movie.mp4 -B 160 -R 48 -E AAC -e x264b30 -f MP4 -m -b 1500 -x frameref=1:bframes=0:nofast_pskip:subq=6:partitions=p8x8,p8x4,p4x8,i4x4:qcomp=0:me=umh:nodct_decimate Unfortunately, iTunes refused to transfer the result to my iPod: wrong format.